Infinite Jest

It is the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment. By the beginning of the 21st century time ceased to be designated chronologically, but began being named for well-known products on the market, e.g. Trial Size Dove Bar, etc. The setting is the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N. [ha, ha, ha]), no longer the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The big annual holiday celebration is Interdependence Day. From time to time the book is populated by wheelchair bound, legless Quebecois terrorists who want Quebec to break away from O.N.A.N. Their story, told in some detail, is extremely odd and mind boggling to say the least.

The cornerstone of the novel concerns the characters associated with Enfield Tennis Academy, a training school for young tennis prodigies. The head was formerly the late James O. Incandenza (called "Himself" and "The Stork" by his sons), who also dabbled in experimental film making, his wife Avril (called "The Moms" by her sons), and their three sons, Orin (football star), Mario (a gentle dwarf and like his father, a film maker), and Hal (the youngest, but extraordinarily brilliant and drug addicted). Some of Hal's descriptions of his late father's story are bizarre but incredibly funny!

In my opinion the hero of _Infinite Jest_ is Don Gately. He is a formerly heavily drug addicted, but currently seriously sober staff counselor at Ennet House, a residential home, near Boston, for individuals suffering from drug and alcohol problems. Here is a man who formerly financed his habit through robbery, burglary, and other illegal money making schemes, who is justly beloved by Ennet House occupants. Gately is the "Christ figure" of the book who suffers for the various transgressions of others. Toward the end of the book a "victim" of one of Gately's past shennanigans pays tribute to him.

_Infinite Jest_ can be a slow read (it took me several months to complete the book) because in addition to its length it is rarely told in a conventional narrative form. I also found myself at times zipping through all the strange, but delightfully recited situations and characterizations. To be enjoyed one must be patient with it and allow oneself to go with its relentless flow. If it is not already, _Infinite Jest_ is destined to become one of the world's great classics.


Genius rewards the patient   December 12, 2001
Stephen R. Laniel (Cambridge, MA USA)
21 out of 23 found this review helpful

David Foster Wallace is a genius, and he knows it. But unlike other geniuses that you might know, he never tries to make you feel dumb. He just wants you to understand the same things that he does, so occasionally you'll feel out of your depth. But he's also a gifted writer, so odds are that you *will* come out understanding him. And what he's saying is brilliant, so you'll feel like a better person for it.

Wallace has been described as ``postmodern", a word that seems to get smacked onto anything written after World War II. I don't see it. To me, postmodernism involves a few things: 1) irony, in liberal doses (e.g., DeLillo's _White Noise_); 2) a continuous awareness that we're *reading a book* and that there's an author talking to us, and that the characters are under his control (e.g., anything by Kurt Vonnegut); 3) self-reference, sometimes to the point of disorienting involution (e.g., Wallace's story ``Westward The Course Of Empire Makes Its Way" from his book _Girl With Curious Hair_ - and that story is, notably, a spoof of postmodernism). This may be an overly conservative definition of postmodernism, but the word's overapplication justifies some conservatism.

_Infinite Jest_ is not postmodern; it's just a great story with beautifully constructed characters. It is a book about a movie that is so addictive that anyone who starts watching it has no choice but to keep watching it forever - foregoing food, water, and sleep, and suffering as much pain as is necessary to keep watching. The movie itself is, to paraphrase a friend, an uber-McGuffin (I'm never sure whether I've spelled that right) - an object that never gets clearly explained, but around which the plot coheres.

The movie itself is not the main point of the book. _Infinite Jest_ is a novel about American addictions: television, drugs, sex, fame, and indeed the American need to be addicted to something. An addiction to addictions. Wallace summarizes the book's mood well when he says,

``There's something particularly sad about it, something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whether it's unique to our generation I really don't know."

(...)

The main sign of Wallace's genius - and yes, I mean that word with all it entails, content in the knowledge that it is overused but that it fits here - is that he can make us feel this gut-level sadness without even appearing to work at it. Heavy use of irony can make you feel that there's some deeper, unseen, lurking gloominess about the world, and for that reason it's the easy way out. Ditto self-reference, which after a while is dizzying and confusing. Wallace is too brilliant a writer to take any of the easy postmodern routes. He's just written a great story with an unpleasant underlying mood. It's been a long time since I've read a book of such masterful subtlety.

It has all the classic aspects of a great novel: characters whom the reader *understands*, a compelling story that edges inexorably toward an uncertain ending, a gut-level mood, and a habit of dispensing brilliant toss-offs so suddenly that the reader can't help but gasp. For instance, see the attached text file containing Wallace's future-retrospective explanation of why videophones failed.

My first inclination was that this book - weighing in at over a thousand pages, including hundreds of footnotes (some of which have their own footnotes) - needed an editor. And it may, at points. But there's very little chaff amongst the wheat: the book's heft serves at least three purposes:

1) To build characters, slowly and methodically. One of Wallace's flaws is that his characters' dialogue - particularly that of his youthful protagonist and tennis prodigy, Hal Incandenza - doesn't sound genuine. It sounds like Wallace talking through 17-year-olds, not 17-year-olds who've been transcribed. I think Wallace realizes this, which is why most of his character development comes through narration.

2) To dump out the contents of Wallace's swirling brain. He has so much to say, and he seems to want to get it all down on paper in this one book. Less profound thoughts from a less talented author might have left me screaming for an editor, but they didn't do so here.

3) To structure the book as a conversation. Reading this book, one feels as though one is talking directly with Wallace. More often than not, his sentences will contain heavy Latinate words like ``epicanthic" just a short distance from the conversational stammerings ``like" and ``and so but". Again, had a lesser writer written these words, I would have edited the book myself, filling the margins with red pen.

The book's length will discourage all but a few readers, but it handsomely rewards the patient.


two pounds of hilarity and pain   November 19, 1997
John C. Rowland (jrowland@muc.muohio.edu) (Oxford, OH)
17 out of 18 found this review helpful

Living in an nation where we all share the "inalienable" right and bear the legal burden of an unending "pursuit of happiness," I feel people have a responsibility to themselves (and others) to set aside 30-50 hours and give David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest a serious read. Despite the book's imposing girth, a vocabulary that sends the well-read scuttling for a dictionary, several hundred endnotes, a seemlingly endless disjointed catalog of outlandishly crippled and damaged characters, and the reader's final unsatisfying realizations of dissolution, I haven't felt this strongly about a book for years.

Infinite Jest's characters and plots at first seem foreign and hard to understand, but as the pages turn, they become friends whose dilemmas become more accessible than your own problems. Characters such as Hal Incandenza, the pot-addicted tennis player who memorizes dictionaries and trapped between the exploded legacy of a father and a terrifyingly pleasant mother; and Don Gately, a heroic square-headed Demerol addict, start out disjointed and at the periphery of the text become the two counterpoints in a story about something larger than their problems. The Quebecois terrorists in wheelchairs, numerous drug addictions and occasional perversions, feral hamsters, childhood flashbacks, apocalyptic tennis games, and cinema theory all start to come together clearly around page 200 to form a pattern of ideas much greater than the sum of the parts.

With a firm grasp of the innate absurdity of humanity, a ton of pomo irony, a sweeping dystopic vision of a future, and a keen understanding of psychological disorder, Wallace offers an insightful indictment of a society, our society. It is a place totally disconnected from itself, intrinsically damaged, forcing the inhabitants of this culture to escape into self-feeding forces of further disconnection. Wallace manages to make his point without actually saying it-nowhere in the book does he saddle a high horse and beat the reader over the head with his 1000+ pages of prose. Instead, he presents the complex perspectives of impossibly comedic and hurt characters vaguely intertwined in a struggle which is never fully explained and his point is made.

I found the messages of Infinite Jest reminiscent of Aldous Huxley's dystopic observations in his Brave New World. That future of scientific predetermined mindless pleasure, addresses one of today's pressing problems of the role of meaning, truth, and pleasure, in a society continually engaging in acts of diversionary mental masturbation. It is about freedom gone awry as individuals have lost control. In writing about the point of Brave New World, Huxley notes:

"The early advocates of [...] a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened [...] the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main with neither the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." [Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 28-29.]

Both Infinite Jest and Brave New World lack the convenient and centralized evil of Orwell's 1984, only the undefined evil of individual consumers who lose themselves and others as they blindly attempt a futile escape from their culture. Wallace's vision is much more terrifying, insightful, less preachy, and more believable than Huxley's; delivered as a form of hilarious entertainment; and is worth a serious read.

The other dimension of my life.   March 6, 2000
C. Shanafelt (Brooklyn, NY)
212 out of 265 found this review helpful

How is it that one novel can cause half its readers to put ZERO STARS - I HATE THIS BOOK and the other half to write I WISH I HAD 100 STARS TO GIVE? I am, obviously, in the second category. I found a copy in an outlet bookstore for 6 bucks and thought, "What the hell?" Since I am a literature student and already have to read 3-4 novels a week, it took me months to finish, but now that it's over, I am genuinely sad. The entire time I was reading it, I felt like my life had another dimension that was going on while I attended my university classes, saw friends, etc. Everyone I spoke to knows a couple of the plotlines of Infinite Jest because that's all I could talk about.

So many of the readers who did not love this book from deep in their hearts (as I do) want to compare and categorize and throw off Wallace as being pretentious. How sad! Unlike pretentious referential authors like Joyce, everything you need to understand Infinite Jest is there on the page. Sure, maybe it helps if you have some basic knowledge of theoretical physics and mathematics, but any reading on any topic requires a different level of previous experience, and that experience is not even necessary to enjoy the beautiful, sensitive, funny, HUMAN stories in IJ. This is not a cold scientific something -- this is pure human compassion and frustration and reminds me of what it means to be an American at the turn of the new century. (This is, of course, to say nothing of Wallace's prose, which sends me, as a writer, into alternating fits of jealousy and lust.)

I'm not trying to sell this book to all people everywhere -- it is a fact that most people over a certain age will find this book philosophically and structurally incomprehensible. I am 20 years old, and this kind of writing and the themes it deals with are closer and more real to me than hundreds of years of historical fiction. Having grown up in an age when entertainment is fast and hard and omnipresent (a fact which, like Wallace, I am slow to comdemn harshly), a novel like this reaffirms my belief in the medium. We haven't outgrown our literary past, and, much as films are becoming less linear (making less sense to the old and so much more to the young -- see "Magnolia"), the novel itself is learning, through authors like Wallace, to become the new animal that the upcoming generation needs to allow the medium to survive. The old avant-garde is tired now and needs to be put to bed.

Thank God for David Foster Wallace. Its because of him that I haven't quit writing yet.