But now I can unleash my biggest problem with IJ overall which is the Marathe and Steeply sections. The voluminous endnotes — for all their ridiculousness — exist outside of the flow of the narrative. I love the JOI filmography because it’s so hilarious and yes, it has some clues about what happens in the book, but it’s also sort of a sui generis work you could see as a standalone parody of an artistic filmmaker’s filmography.

M+S on the ledge in the desert, though, is just deathly slow and goes nowhere. It includes important information, but I’ve completely skipped these sections the last two times I’ve read the book and haven’t missed them, now that I have a firm grip on what we need to know about the two characters. It’s just narratively awkward and the scene never builds to anything — it just evaporates after the info dumping is done. Of course, if you’ve gone in on Wallace’s writing, it’s going to carry you through those sections, but that’s the stuff in the book that I think could have been cut to get it to something more like 800 or 900 pages.