Via the Infinite summer roundup, Infinite Detox has a post about the novel's treatment of my favorite supporting character, whose title I have shamelessly stolen:
The problem I have is that from a dramatic standpoint, the wave of Pemulis-bashing that gathers force on p. 774 and crests in endnote 332 isn't convincing to me. For the first 773 pages of the book Wallace presents Pemulis to us as a lovable rogue and prankster -- he has an acerbic wit, he's nobody's fool, he's the Jack Sparrow of differential calculus. He wears a yachting cap, for Christ's sake. What's not to like about this guy? The Infinite Summer Twitter board has been intermittently aflame with declarations of love for Michael P. all summer.
Sure, he does some fairly reprehensible things -- he nearly electrocutes a janitor and he conducts a drug experiment on his Port Washington opponent. But Wallace casts these episodes in an ironic, cartoonish light -- I read these as the japes and capers of a high-spirited young lad, not as indicators of brass-faced monstrosity. But then on p. 774 Wallace does an abrupt about-face and turns deadly serious about Pemulis and the consequences of his actions, and now we're supposed to be all "Michael P. is an asshole" along with Hal. I'm not buying it. Nearly everyone in this book is a liar of some type or another. What makes Pemulis any worse?
This is pretty similar to my reaction to that whole series of events. I think, though, that this is not a failing in the dramatic structure of the novel, but rather a reading of the character that is somewhat different than what Wallace was trying to set up. I suspect that the key difference may be the view you take of Substances.
If you take the view that Substances and Substance use are inherently problematic, then I don't think it's really the case that Pemulis has been positively portrayed up until page 774. He's got a certain rakish charm, true, but he employs it primarily in the service of pushing drugs. And given that I don't think we see any characters using any sort of drugs who aren't addicts, I think it might fairly be said that Pemulis was always supposed to be a problematic character-- charming and fun, but underneath it sort of evil, one of the "anti-Christs" of the book, as Infinite Detox quotes Wallace.
This view of Substances is not one that I share, and I think that's a large part of the reason why I tend to see the change that occurs around page 774 as dramatic and unpleasant. I have a lot of friends and relatives who have at one time or another been heavy drinkers or drug users, and have ended up just fine, so I don't see drug use or the encouraging of it as an anti-Christ level wrong. Pemulis's charm, humor, and love of math thus outweigh his drug use and dealing, for me, and I take a fairly positive view of him. Which makes his ultimate rejection kind of jarring-- he never seemed like somebody who belonged in the same class as Randy Lenz or Poor Tony.
Honestly, in a lot of ways, Pemulis seems like one of the two ETA students who have their shit most together (Schact, who has made his peace with mediocrity after numerous medical issues, is the other). There's a certain absurdity to the whole big-time-tennis thing, and Pemulis's refusal to take it seriously seems, to me, to be somewhat more healthy than the obsessiveness of many of the other ETA's. One of the things that makes endnote 334 so jarring is that his previous appearance on stage, giving a pep talk about math to a sobbing younger player (Posselthwaite, if I remember correctly) is one of the few useful and compassionate actions we see at ETA.
Part of the problem is that I've never been that convinced that drugs were Hal's problem. This is another of those different-view-of-Substances issues, I think: I've known enough people who were bigger potheads than Hal who ended up as productive members of society to really think that he was an addict who needed some variant of AA. Yes, intellectually I know that addiction is not a function of absolute amounts, and his described usage rituals parallel those of other addicts in the novel, but it never really clicked for me as a Drug Problem. And there are plenty of other indications in the book that his problems go beyond marijuana.
Hal's problems, then, read to me as more a matter of his own mental state than anything to do with drugs, which in turn tends to undercut the negative impact of Pemulis's temptation scene, in which he tries to convince Hal not to go cold turkey, but to switch to a different sort of recreational pharmaceutical. It's still a little creepy, but it also has an element of "Will you lighten the hell up, already?" to it, and I think that, in some ways, that's the advice Hal needs.
All of which is, I think, not what Wallace intended the novel to be doing, nor is it necessarily supportable within the text. But I'm coming at the whole subject of addiction from a different angle than the rest of the book, and that's my immediate reaction to it. And that's why I find the endnoting of Michael Pemulis to be so dramatically unsatisfying.
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I will brazenly copy my comment in the Infinite Detox thread, posted too late for anyone to read, with slight alterations and expurgations.
Awful things happen to people in this novel for no reason. Matty Pemulis, for example: heâs Mikeyâs brother (and I take it their fates are supposed to be commentaries on each other) and we learn that he was obsessed with the idea that he was raped because he was doing something to upset his father. Pemulis's fate is not Wallace repudiating Pemulis.
Nor are Pemulis's actions towards the end supposedly to be repudiation-worthy. I would say itâs at the beginning of the book that Pemulis seems like a (zany, comic) manipulative asshole and cruel to boot, and itâs as the book goes on that he seems to be genuinely loyal to Hal and a decent person.
People are taking the view of Pemulis which assumes that the novel is a simplistic pro-AA polemic, where the good characters are full-throated pro-AA. But number of characters present a number of different perspective, different bits of evidence, many of which are along the lines of what you suggest, Chad. (Not only Pemulis, but also especially Molly Notkin, various descriptions of the AA people, etc.)
Finally Pemulis is (i) obsessed with the possibility of getting caught in his misdeeds and punished, but (ii) never stops. (Which is hinted at by the âam I paranoid enough?â poster. Pemulis doesnât get the joke.) This connects to a number of themes of addiction, of secrecy, and of dealing with consequences. If his paranoia was never justified, he would just be a decorative flourish.
Pemulis's fate is not Wallace repudiating Pemulis.
I don't know about that. The people who come to bad ends in the book (C., Fackelmann, Lenz, Poor Tony) are mostly Bad People. Even Orin gets an ironic comeuppance at the end. Really, the only person who gets an out-of-nowhere bad ending is the student engineer snatched by the AFR.
And there is a definite shift in how Hal reacts to Pemulis, which I think carries over into the narrative voice (which is arguably Hal's). Put that together with the "anti-Christs" comment Infinite Detox mentioned, and I think it's fairly clear that Pemulis is not supposed to be as good a guy as some of us tend to think.
If you look back through older comments on Infinite Summer posts, too, you can see that there are a number of readers who have negative reactions to Pemulis from the beginning. Which is what made me think of the attitude-to-Substances thing in the first place-- if you look at his character in a different way, his ending is a sensible dramatic conclusion to the whole arc of the story, rather than an abrupt and unsatisfying shift.
Personally, I tend to agree that Pemulis comes across as a stand-up guy who is done wrong in the end. I can see the other reading of his character, but it doesn't resonate that strongly for me.
People are taking the view of Pemulis which assumes that the novel is a simplistic pro-AA polemic, where the good characters are full-throated pro-AA. But number of characters present a number of different perspective, different bits of evidence, many of which are along the lines of what you suggest, Chad. (Not only Pemulis, but also especially Molly Notkin, various descriptions of the AA people, etc.)
I'm not remembering any examples of people who used drugs who didn't end up either redeemed by AA or killed by the Disease. There are some slightly catty descriptions of some of the AA folks, but that stuck me as a Hal-voice class thing, not a negative comment on AA. The only really negative things said about AA come from characters like Lenz, who is a pet-killing asshole of the first order, or Day and Ewell, who mostly come around later on.
I agree that how Hal reacts to Pemulis shifts towards the end, but that doesn't mean that how Wallace portrays Pemulis shifts. Hal is drifting down, he quits drugs and spirals into anhedonia, and he starts acting weird in more ways than one.
I don't see the Manichean line that you see. Poor Tony goes through rough times, but in the end (as I read it) is subjected to the entertainment for reasons unrelated. His suggested end almost completely parallels Kate Gompert's suggested end, and Kate is the most purely sympathetic character in the book (and another one who decides that maybe alcohol will solve her problems). Likewise with Lenz... I very badly wanted the Canadians to catch him, but of course he gets off scot-free and it's the (mostly) innocent Canadians and the (almost completely) innocent Gately who suffer from his dog-killing spree. I just noticed that the same is almost true of C... he doesn't get killed because of any of the truly awful things that he has done, but because of something Poor Tony has done, when Tony uses him as bait. Notkin suggests the possibility that it wasn't drinking that killed JOI (read that aloud!), but stopping drinking.
(And further - is the Manichean line supposed to be between good and bad characters, or addicted and sober characters? Orin isn't good, but he isn't addicted to substances. Avril is also extremely bad, but isn't addicted to anything. Tony is both recovering as an addict, and also suffering serious qualms due to accidentally killing a woman... much like Gately, really. JOI is good but an addict. Tavis is fuzzy, I lean towards bad. And so on and so forth. I don't think Wallace was trying to draw these lines.)
All of the AA characters mix skeptical and accepting observations about AA. Likewise, Wallace's (Hal's?) description of what becomes of ex-addicts strikes me as very nuanced, and very true to Pemulis's description.
Characters who use drugs and neither do AA nor die would be: almost everyone at ETA, Mildred Bonk, Tommy Doocey, "Quo Vadis" (wasn't it implied that AFR killed Bob by mistake?), Orin, Bain (admittedly a borderline case), Matty Pemulis, and I'm sure many others whom I'm forgetting.
there comes a point in this thread where folks are simply arguing drugs are bad and while dfw is undoubtedly presenting events and situations that make this easily arguable it is also a byroad that if taken leads to very black and white argumentation of a most facile kind. backing up however to pemulis and hal, the likely source of suvh argumentation, does not necessarily have to take that route. pemulis is perhaps both the least cartoonish character of all the characters fleshed out in the narrative. simtaneously he is perhaps the least zympathetic as well. pemulis gets no breaks on anything, he pays full retail throughout. lets not forget that he is after all a 17 year old kid. for all of his antics and capers he is hals math tutor plain and simple; when the eschaton debacle goes down hal is incapable of taking action; pemulis has no support after the events of november 10 and is in fact actively targeted by administration for dismissal with absolutely the harshest of terms notwithstanding the fact that he is/was hals best friend. pemulis is human or to steal a phrase from nietzsche, in translation: human all-too-human. hals rebuff of mp is simply hals lack of empathy, a lack of social graces, indeed hal is being a punk ass bitch at a time when we empathize with hal coming off pot. dfw takes great pains to elucidate the "onlypot" addiction not as a cousin or second order disease but the real deal. in fact "only pot" contributes a male and female addict in the narrative: kate gompert and ken edredy. i disagree with the poster who belives gompert
to be sympathetic. i view gompert as a big perhaps beautiful young lady capable of so much more that i want to slap her upside the head but i digress... pemulis is adhd and takes speex to calm himself down, that he doesnt before matches leads yo horrible nervous system dysfunction; pemulis is so faithful to hal that even after taking the drubbing from delint watson nwangi he holds his tongue concerning avril and john wayne so he can explain to hal his situation; hal is to anhedonic to be co-operative.