Infinite Jest and an infestation of apostrophes - Asides (XII)

I'm two hundred and fifty pages into Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace's 'big baggy monster' of a novel and it's time to take stock. Am I enjoying it? Definitely. Is it a difficult read? Not particularly, and certainly not in the manner of, say, Joyce's Ulysses or Nabokov's Ada or Ardor. Nor is it the length that's a problem: I'm a veteran of a season with Proust and never has a summer been better spent. 

What's been bothering me then? The following paragraph is a description of an indoor tennis complex (tennis, inter alia, dominates Infinite Jest, which makes me wonder as to whether or not the English tennis player Tim Henman, who once declared that books were boring, would enjoy Wallace's novel? Probably not!):     

'White halogen off the green of the composite surface, the light out on the indoor courts at the Port Washington Tennis Academy is the color of sour apples. To the spectators at the gallery’s glass, the duos of players arrayed and moving down below have a reptilian tinge to their skin, a kind of seasick-type pallor. This annual meet is mammoth: both academies’ A and B teams for both Boys and Girls, both singles and doubles, in 14 and Unders, 16 and Unders, 18 and Unders. Thirty-six courts stretch out down away from one end’s gallery under a fancy tri-domed system of permanent all-weather Lung.' 

The description of that halogen-infused light mingling with the surface of the tennis courts and thus creating the 'color of sour apples' is deliciously good. The 'reptilian tinge' and 'seasick pallor' that it adds to the faces of the young contestants are not bad either. Infinite Jest contains observations like this on almost every page. And as with all the best writing, you'll often find yourself lifting your head from the page, agog and gazing out into the middle-distance. With sentences like these, it's a wonder how we spend our lives doing anything other than reading.  

But that paragraph also contains something that irritates me about the novel. Over the past week or so I've grown to loathe the apostrophe, particularly when one its attached to a plural noun as in academies' A and B teams. It's not because Wallace uses them incorrectly - indeed, he uses them precisely - but rather that he uses so many of them. The rhythm of reading is rendered jerky by them. Is it just me - it might be - or is there a nanosecond of processing involved in any encounter with an apostrophe, particularly when it is attached, like a carbuncle to the end of a plural? (Incidentally, of punctuation and typography, Susie Dent's Twitter account has just informed me that the idiom of high praise 'the dog's bollocks' began as typographers' slang for the colon dash ' :- ' because of its appearance. Don't thank me, thank Susie!)  

Anyway, that Wallace often employs apostrophes in the service of interconnected generations of relatives or bureaucratic lists of information - although, perversely, some of my favourite moments in the book so far have involved the latter's inconsequential asides - makes for a sometimes ugly reading experience. Odd then, that I've opened this piece with an allusion to Henry James and his criticism of the novels of Tolstoy, Dickens and Trollope, and his infamous and rather churlish phrase 'big baggy monsters': he thought them inelegant and uncontrolled and overfull with details that could have been left out. It's all rather ironic that the act of reading Infinite Jest actually puts me in mind of reading Henry James. Again, I love an impossibly long sentence - that summer with Marcel again when sentences could last a Bank Holiday weekend - but sometimes, as with Wallace and his overabundance of apostrophes, and James and his matryoshka-claused sentences, something pleasurable and sensual ends up being sacrificed. No matter, only eight-hundred or so pages (and endnotes) to go. Hopefully I'll be done in time for Wimbledon.