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.