I want my reading regimen for 2010 to be at least more robust than last year’s, which isn’t saying much—I’d have to read more than five books to beat last year’s total (hey—these YouTube videos aren’t going to watch themselves).

The first one is Mary Karr’s Lit, which I was looking forward to for a while, and which I received for Christmas. Her first two memoirs are among my favorite models of the form, and I was eager to see Karr’s singular voice brought to bear on her adult struggles with alcoholism and spirituality.

So maybe my high expectations were part of the reason I was a little disappointed that Karr’s account of her salvation seems almost too tidy, when in fact motherhood, divorce, addiction, and the writer’s life are extremely messy things. It’s a truism in literature that happy lives don’t make for narratives nearly as compelling as tragic ones, so maybe after watching Karr navigate such a spectacularly fucked-up life across three books, we don’t quite buy it when she actually finds peace.

Nevertheless, I can’t imagine I’d be able to do a much better job, nor am I about to tell her how, so I’m more than willing to set aside a few qualms when the bulk of the book is so satisfying.

But I, like Christa at Minnesota Reads, had ulterior, perhaps more sordid, motives for grabbing at Lit so eagerly: I wanted a glimpse at those disappointingly few pages where she addresses her short, tumultuous relationship with David Foster Wallace, whom she met during a smoke break outside a 12-step meeting. The ugly details of their brief courtship are admittedly quite lurid, though nothing you wouldn’t already know from reading DT Max’s profile last year.

But what I didn’t know was the extent to which Ennet House, from Infinite Jest, was modeled after the house where Wallace lived, and where Karr visited him. Here’s poor Burt F. Smith—whose fate is so grisly I just assumed it was one of Wallace’s dark imaginings—in the form of “a disbarred lawyer who’d once passed out in a snow bank and woke in a hospital with neither hand nor foot—the blackened appendages having been amputated.” And Ennet’s crippled matriarch, Pat Montesian, is a hyperbole of the Mustang convertible-driving, shaggy dog-owning, house director Deb, partially paralyzed by a cocaine-induced stroke.

Lit bears other, more shadowy echoes of Infinite Jest—Karr overhears Wallace, after a meeting, bemoaning the logical fallacies of the 12-step model in much the same way that the too-smart-for-his-own-good Geoffrey Day does. And Boston isn’t rendered quite as vividly by Karr as it was by Wallace, but you see her scrabbling through the same dirty, cold city that the residents of Enfield and Ennet do.

So there we go. A slightly deeper glance into the world that DFW mapped. And that, my friends, is how to hijack an already half-assed review of a pretty great book.