where to even start? A group of randomly drawn together graduate students who are mostly gay men, who won't eat meat at parties, who use fake personas to approximate intimate relationships with each other, who allow blatant racism to be unchallenged, who can identify their own hurts and insecurities but cannot fathom this is a universal experience, spend an excruciatingly long weekend together gazing at their navels, violating each others' privacy, getting hurt, causing hurt and gossiping. in other words: friends?

first off, the grad student aspect had lots of potential - it IS an isolated, privileged life where the money comes from grants, adolescence gets extended, and it's natural you might ponder the point of life as you watch your old cohort moving on to the next stages of their career. but the author only addresses that through a sidebar discussion with Vincent, a longterm boyfriend of one of the grad students. when the main character toys with the idea of leaving grad school it's framed as a calamity, as if an education is only of value if you finish with a PhD, as if he'd slide right back to Alabama with no prospects for his future
and there is no context as to why Wallace's faculty advisor has turned on him, no scenes of their interactions before the combative rival grad student, the one who accuses him of misogyny, arrives in his second year. this rival grad student has an oversized dislike for Wallace that the reader has to assume is based on racism (or she's batsh*t crazy, switching a protein prep kit rather than admit a setback) and yet Wallace can walk past a couple with children and remark to himself: "their parents bring up the rear, an attractive middle-aged man - Wallace has seen him on the app, he thinks - and a woman with a tight, mean face, dark hair, green eyes, lots of freckles, skin like an aging banana peel"

but ultimately it was the sex descriptions that left me cold: especially the (let's face it) rape scene near the end that was bewildering, disturbing, and somehow part of the plot's climax. the sex starts as a brutal assault which mimics Wallace's childhood sexual abuse, switches to a passive assault where Wallace essentially pretend to be a willing partner, and then moves to an actual fight with biting and punching. and then there isn't a resolution. nothing. which is also part of the plot's climax: as opposed to Miller, Wallace sees no point in talking about terrible things that happen to him because it doesn't change the fact that they happened.

and that encapsulates the novel. horrible things happen. and there's no point in going further than that. who wants to spend 300+ pages in that?