Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

In 1987, I was a small, yet sizeable, group of young men that were drawn to David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System .  I'd devoured Pynchon's V. and The Crying of Lot 49 , and really was drawn to frenetic, post modernism but still didn't have the requisite skill to tackle Gravity's Rainbow .   So when a friend of mine recommended Wallace's Broom I read it, loved it, added him to a short list of author's I'd keep track of.   What that meant was that I'd buy Girl With Curious Hair , read a bit of it; buy Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and give up on the first and devour the second.   And then I sort of lost track.  As usual with books I love, I loaned out Broom and never got it back (along with Jonathan Franzen's TheTwenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion:  A Novel ) and just moved on. So it was on getting ready for a road trip and having some sort of "Free Download" that I downloaded the audio...