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Last person on earth to discover these and yet I'm still recommending them prematurely 

Odd for this to happen twice in one weekend. For years now, I've been told how much I'd like "High Fidelity"--either the movie or the book--and "A Supposedly Fun Think I'll Never Do Again." Told not just that these were great works, but that I, specifically, would enjoy them. And this from people who knew me, knew my tastes and were pretty good at calling them.

To top it off--for the movie--Stephen Frears is one of my all-time favorite directors, and I've never disliked a film John Cusak has appeared in (that I've seen).

But . . . something. You know how you get a bad impression of a thing and you can't articulate or even remember why, but you just don't want to go near it?

I think Hi Fidelity screamed out shallow or something. Or maybe it's because only true love can break your heart, and I've been in love with certain pop music my whole life, and a really lameass movie that tries to be good about teen angst and music but fails miserably would be infinitely more painful to endure than a bubblegum flick that never intended more than to titillate.

And the "Supposed" book? I don't know, David Foster Wallace's third name put me off? Or maybe the association with Dave Eggars. I still haven't gotten three pages into A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, because something keeps thrusting me back, and part of it is that I didn't care for much of anything on the first three pages. I didn't hate anything so much, just totally failed to grab me.

Supposed, on the other hand, had me at page two. Any book I'm destined to fall in love with, usually does. And that's why I'm going out on a limb here, having read just six pages of the title essay of "A Supposedly Fun Think I'll Never Do Again" and watched a mere nine minutes of High Fidelity, and announce that I'm madly in love with them both.

So far. I could still turn against them. I occasionally do. Sometimes they turn out to be terrifically funny, poignant and insightful for six to nine minutes or pages, and then run out of steam and fail to realize they are great anecdotes rather than awful books or movies. The Saturday Night Live curse. (Though on that show they tend to mistake a great five-second situation for a four-minute skit, then repeat it relentlessly show after show for six months with with stale variations on the same milked joke, and then stretch the whole thing 90 minutes longer and label it a movie.) And occasionally they show exceptional promise right up to the start of the third act, and then commit bloody ritual suicide right before our eyes like Pleasantville.

But not usually. Usually when I fall in love in the first five minutes or pages, I remain blissfully awed straight to the ending, and usually it's much sooner than that. The first sentence test nearly always holds on a book, though. (A fact I discovered after the fact: A thought struck me one day and I suddenly rummaged through all my favorite books, reading just the first line of each and discovered I loved nearly every one of them, and recalled loving each at first sight.

"Supposed" actually took uncharacteristically long. There were moments in the second paragraph that lit me up, but I was midway through the second page before I found myself in a swoon. I have underlined 87 passages in those first six pages, which I know begins to get ridiculous, because at some point it ceases to help you find anything: you've just produced a book printed in black ink on white pages with blue underlines.

Twenty years later, I still shudder at the memory of a thick-skulled college roommate who I swear I spotted literally highlighting nearly every passage in her marketing textbook, and when I suggested she just contact the publisher to see if she could get it printed on yellow paper to spare her the labor and highlighter expense, she staunchly defended the practice and I swore an oath never to become her. I did eventually adopt her passion for hot latin guys, but I heckle myself with the image of her every time I pour back into a Nabokov and begin turning entire pages blue. But that explains where there are merely 87 underlined passages. It would have been perhaps 123 or mabye even 172 if I had not restrained myself.

Want to hear some of the good ones?:

I have seen a toupee on a thirteen-year-old boy.

They are sort of diingenuous, I beleive, these magazine people.

menstrual-pink sportscoats

the full clothy weight of a subtropical sky.

the shattering, flatulence-of-the-gods sound of a cruise ship's horn.

Temperatures were uterine.

The ship was so clean and so white it looked boiled.

All the [cruise ship] Megalines offer the same basic product. . . . It's more like a feeling. But it's also still a bone fide prouct -- it's supposed to be produced in you, this feeling: a blend of relaxation and stimulation, stressless indulgence and frantic tourism, that special mix of servility and condescenion that's marketed under configurations of the verb "to pamper." ... The fact that contempoarary adult Americans also tend to associate the word "pamper" with a certain other consuer product is not an accident, I don't think ...

[Emphasis his, in both prior and all future cases.]

Are these working out of context?

Good, then let me attempt one in [But first I have to explain that he's on a ship called the m. v. Zenith but, "No wag could possibly resist mentally rechristening the ship the m.v. Nadir the instant he saw the Zenith's silly name in the Celebrity brochure]:

This one incident made the Chiago news. Some weeks before I underwent my own Luxury Cruise, a sixteen-year-old male did a Brody off the upper deck of a Megahip--I think a Carnival or Crystal ship--a suicide. The news version was that it had been an unhappy adolescent love thing, a shipboard romance gone bad, etc. I think part of it was something else, something there's no way a real news story could cover.

There is something about a mass-market Luxury Crise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems increibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir--especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased--I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'[m using it seriously. For me it denotes a sipmle admixture--a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming awared that i'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard. 

After that passage, I would listen to anything this man cared to comment upon. Perhaps Jonathan Alter can get a direct line and consult DFW before he publishes anything else so infantile in Newsweek.

I do, however, should I ever have the good fortune to meet him, want to know how long it took him to perfect those two paragraphs. I'm guessing two days. No!--six hours! It better be no fewer than four. Or I'm going to dream of hurtling myself off a ship.