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I remarked to him that I wanted to find someone to review books for Esquire; I would suggest that writer to the boss and hope for the best. It was damn hard to get too excited about most book reviewers, or reviews—so many were cribbed from press releases or plagiarized from other reviews. I had a d…

Mailer’s talk, a stop in the publicity campaign for his latest novel, The Gospel According to the Son, was at a school on the Upper East Side. The typical Mailer loyalist out in the audience looked as if he’d died about ten years before. The novel: the “autobiography” of Jesus. Mailer as God. The j…

We’d sit at Mexican restaurants with our machine-dispensed margaritas and fulminate about the representation of women in the pages

What else was I doing with my life? Not enough. There were more readings; there were movie screenings (the best: Sergei Eisenstein’s restored Alexander Nevsky, with a new recording of the Prokofiev score; the prescreening party, with its mounds of caviar and fountains of vodka, has now in memory ex…

But maybe I wasn’t exactly the ideal reader for Infinite Jest then. Maybe I never was. I became peculiarly fixated on my loathing for the loathsome character Orin Incandenza, the anti–Sydney Carton and a serial seducer of young mothers whom I wanted to drag out onto the balustrade and slap across t…