Hektor took the title of Wells Tower’s debut—Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned—a little too literally. I’m glad he hasn’t figured out how to use the matches and that he has such good taste in literature.
The Aforementioned Brief Description
[I could not figure out how to hack Tumblr chat post + markdown integration. See this passage from Infinite Jest here to get what I’m talking about.]
Wallace’s semi-pseudo-psychoanalytic babel rhetoric got much sharper between Broom of the System and Infinite Jest. Like, one of those plateaux-hopping level-ups he describes with such relish his characters undergoing or not undergoing at the tennis academy. This passage has to do with lots of things.
For one, it gets to the fact that Otho Stice’s bed moves around of its own volition, which is discussed a few hundred pages previously and culminates (there) with Lyle the guru telling Stice a story (a little Diotima-esquely?) about a man who could hop up on a chair and pull himself + chair up in the air, winning bets and causing existential crisis in his crowds’ presence. I can’t recall if the bed-moving-around situation gets explained any more.
The scene further characterizes Rusk—who was more well introduced a bit earlier in the context of the Eschaton fallout, which Eschaton fallout serves as one of the best narrative set-pieces in modern literature. The Eschaton match is hilarious and tragic and makes up one of the big narrative rocks—a nice, anchored, solid place to refer to/from—of the novel, and if you pay attention to the dates, is like most history both absolutely integral to the unfolding of the novel and also kind of humorously accidental in the scope of its causes/effects.
It gets Pemulis moving toward the resolution of his story, which has so far involved potentially disseminating the Entertainment, obtaining the DMZ, interfacing with the Ennet House (sic) residents, and discovering the John Wayne/Avril Incandenza affaire de coeur. (And more, I’m sure, which I’ve forgotten.)
The scene also serves as an exemplary meta-commentary (like Wallace telling himself to pump his breaks and drive slow homey) on the book itself, and its themes of emotional/social maturation versus struggling with omnipotence in variously related, yes to use Rusk’s word, cathected leitmotif of the book itself, viz. various method of control, all of which are outstripped by the actual act of imagination and will in creating the book itself and its polyphonous psychological argument for, well, a reasonable kind of zen plus empathy.

