Circle of Desire

Look, I kind of get what Dave was trying to do here, and it's very clever but this book just TRIES SO HARD. I don't think it helped that the humour totally went over my head, I think as someone who suffers from anxiety the scenes where Mae is frantically trying to get her ratings up just didn't resonate.l and I just despaired at the deliberately awful sex scenes. The characters veer from Mae being impossibly naive and totally gaslit by the company to her former boyfriend who is annoyingly preachy. I think because we see things so much from Mae's point of view, the other characters are not really developed, and it can be quite easy to become wearied of her constant navel gazing and selfishness, which is hammered home at every opportunity. Instead of allowing the reader to come to their own conclusions, the author puts huge red lights around everything, signs pointing to where to laugh, where to feel shocked and where to marvel at his brilliance. It didn't have to be written in such a simplistic way, give the reader some credit. Honestly, though Infinite Jest is a complex behemoth and DFW is ‘problematic' to put it mildly, it's far more memorable in comparison.