Why does the ending make me so uncontrollably angry? I won't tell you. Read the book. 
 I was struck by the almost never-ending parade of helplessness and hopelessness riding undercurrent through an endless procession of inutile but heroic strivings. In reading this, I was a hamster running his wheel forever. 
 Putting aside all of the literary arguments, the thousands of mild references to just about anything that DWF thought might be fun to include in the book, or amazingly deep characterizations, I was, in the end, a man who hit the sidewalk. 
 I kept expecting the plot to go somewhere, but as we all know, literary fiction eschews plot and spits it out without swallowing. Which is a shame, in this case, because there were some rather interesting threads in threes that came within a micrometer of satisfying me. 
 Am I repeating myself? 
 I enjoyed the AA meetings the most, with the sequence of 1.5 million words devoted to tennis trailing last. I wanted to see what sparked 1995 and 1996 as the years of literary treatments of self-help groups. I wanted to know if Chuck Palahniuk and DFW compared notes, since Fight Club came out the same year as IJ. The omnipresent feel and the overwhelming need for absolute acceptance permeated both novels, ignoring plot treatment, of course. 
 The tennis sequence read like the ultimate dystopian literature, all form and serve signifying nothing, a deep 'orchasm' of constant movement representing the ultimate stalemate, a reversible nihilism. It cumulated in Mario shaking a single hand, which either justified the whole thematic battle being waged, or disproved it. 
 Madam Psychosis probably got to me the most. I don't even have words to describe how I feel, although I wouldn't bother mentioning how being a PGOAT or an ex-PGOAT is like being a woman blown large and absurd, or how those thousands of subtle nuances in her character made her as beautiful as it made Avril so subtly monstrous. 
 Even the Mad Stork got my sympathy near the end, and he was a really hard sell, pushing me through 60 hours of a novel before I can get close enough to him to even see him through his technical brilliance. 
 The novel deserves thinking about. I dare say it deserves thinking about, after the fact, a lot more time than it takes to read the MFer. And I might. 
 But heaven forbid I ever read this book ever again. 
 I read Atlas Shrugged. Twice. There was a Simpsons episode that had a character saying, "I read Atlas Shrugged, and I'll never read again." 
 This became my sentiment right after reading IJ, and I LOVE books. 
 Of course, I've already started a new novel. And it's going to be light. And fun. And it doesn't have an author who hung himself by the neck till he was dead, dead, dead. 
 Brad K Horner's Blog