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Infinite Jest (2009)

by David Foster Wallace(Favorite Author)

4.34 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

Humor

publisher

Back Bay Books

review 1: Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Infinite Jest If you, like me, have found yourself compulsively reading about David Foster Wallace's little novel of 1996 via Goodreads, Infinite Summer, The Howling Fantods, etc., this is probably the hundredth or so online post you've come across. Put all these blog outspeaks together and bind them and you've got a volume roughly the length of Infinite Jest--though probably a lot clearer than the novel, with easier-to-follow sentences and shorter paragraphs.Hardly would this tome equal the majesty of the mind-bending mess called Infinite Jest. If you, like me, find yourself compulsively reading about it, I recommend you power down the computer screen and get on with reading the book itself.The novel's "central" concern--which, amidst descri... moreptions of fantasy tennis matches, theses on why distance video communication was a failure in the fictional near future, subplots of M.A.S.H.-obsessed, clinically insane relatives, minutes from AA meetings and detailed story lines from self-reflexive art films never made--is so scarcely referenced page-by-page percentage-wise as to be peripheral. Nevertheless, this concern is as relevant as it is compelling. Dr. James Orin Incandenza, founder of the Enfield Tennis Academy and independent filmmaker, has captured on tape the Prettiest Girl of All Time expressing contrition for an unknown transgression. This cartridge, posthumously labelled "The Entertainment" or "samizdat" by various agencies, stimulates so many pleasure synapses in the brain of the viewer that she becomes addicted to watching, to the point where she can do nothing but view until death, not eating, not sleeping, defecating in place. While this primary narrative thread is bolstered by the conflicts of anarchist video store owners, gender bending secret agents of the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.) and guerrillas (wheelchair assassins, specifically) of separatist Quebec as they attempt to quash or control the brain destroying Entertainment as a weapon, all the extra stuff, the stuff that truly comprises Infinite Jest centers around the Enfield Tennis Academy, where the family of the deceased James Incandenza lives, and the halfway house down the hill, the Ennet Drug and Alcohol Recovery House.With exception of Don Gately, a giant of a former drug addict, petty/not-so petty thief, man-slaughterer and firm yet flexible live-in attendant at the Ennet House, none of the main characters of Infinite Jest are what unpublished fiction workshop students and narrow-minded literary journal editors call "well-rounded." The precocious Hal Incandenza, though a sobering cipher for examining chemical and media influenced sociopathy, compels the same amount of "sympathy" in the reader as Emma Bovary--an ability to be bored and above it all is a trait that most of us understand, though there is a patience threshold for that kind of mindset and behavior. Hal's brother Orin, who finds TV more soul-fulfilling than the sexual conquests he is repeatedly compelled to make, is a lech. Their mother, Avril, is a brittle administrator carrying on a romantic relationship with a student of the Enfield Academy. Those personages who do bend the blues notes of our heartstrings--Mario Incandenza, Hugh Steeply, Remy Marathe, Joelle Van Dyne--the author has drawn them so boldly as to make caricatures out of each of them. With his graphic descriptions, DFW constantly stretches our frames of reference and likelihood, until these latter characters are more like vessels for complex ideas or sociological statements or grim jokes, bearing little resemblance to anything human. To be fair, each of the characters is composed from black words on white paper--but in the lingua franca of book reviews, you know what I'm saying. With his overlarge head, short arms, and stringy hair, Mario is more like a runaway Peanuts character transplanted onto a dystopian reality. Hugh Steeply is a serious patriot in perpetual, unattractive drag. Marathe is married to a woman born without a skull. Joelle Van Dyne is so pretty as to be absolutely hideous. When the author does notate human-like interactions--the conversations between Joelle and Don Gately are particularly touching and smart, and Marios's perspective on everything is sweet and sad in the best possible ways--the level of discourse, the phrasing, the pauses, the challenges, and the furtive questions transcend anything any major novelist has accomplished in the past thirty years. But these moments are only peppered, and not liberally so, between fake histories, M.A.S.H. jokes, and interminable tennis or tennis-based contests.But.Like any other sprawling work of American literature, there's nothing this humble reviewer can pin on Infinite Jest. It is, and not simply so--difficultly so. To push the comparison, Infinite Jest is less an approximation of the hunt for an elusive and terrifying meaning--it is the elusive and terrifying meaning itself, a monster of a book with an infinite range of scary questions. I have a few of my own: why is Ortho (The Darkness) Stice's face ripped off against a cold piece of glass? Why is Don Gately's back story shoved all the way at the end of the novel, when the whole story seems to be building up to something greater? Whatever happens to the master copy of the Entertainment? It's cliche to say, but there are no ready answers, or the answers are the questions themselves. Infinite Jest, despite the gripes I've just attributed to it, allows for a feeling in the reader that few novels in this drab contemporary period allow for: wonder.How the hell did he put it all together?
review 2: I award this book zero stars, if only because the concept of trying to rate "Infinite Jest" - 1100 pages long and involving hundreds of major and minor characters - on a five-point scale is clearly absurd.This book is an insane and rambling mess. It is frequently terrible, frequently impressive, frequently tragic, frequently boring, frequently hilarious - at 1100 pages there's plenty of time to be frequent.I can't think of any book I have been more conflicted in reading. I very often hated this book. Immense stretches are so staggeringly self-indulgent as to defy belief. No book needs 5,000 words describing an inflatable plastic shelter over a tennis court or the schematics of a maintenance tunnel. No book needs 5,000 words on specific tennis conditioning drills. There were times while reading "Infinite Jest" that I thought it could have been one of the greatest 600-page books ever written. It's the small problem of the extra 500 pages that constitutes an editorial crime against humanity.There are serious craft issues as well. The Point-of-View, usually in tight 3rd person, will swerve suddenly into omniscient 3rd person in the same sentence (single sentences run for pages at a time, so there is much opportunity for this), before swerving back into tight 3rd person - but on a different character now, and still in the same sentence, before ultimately winding up in 1st person. Fine - it's postmodern! it's experimental! I get it - but it's pointless. Nothing is served by these wild POV shifts beyond David Foster Wallace's own masturbatory urges. Or maybe I really don't "get it". Maybe, like, it's a subtle commentary on Point-of-View ITSELF, like, what IS POV anyway, man? - other than just a CONSTRUCT, you know?The other tragedy is voice, which, through hundreds of characters, is always so clearly DFW, even when trying to mimic another dialect, patois, whatever. These attempts at mimesis are also occasionally horrifying, with DFW's blackface routine being particularly cringe-worthy.Yet whenever I was about to reach a point of hate-saturation, I would come across something wonderful. The book is often very funny, something I did not expect. I found myself constantly caught off-guard - amidst some heady philosophical consideration of "agency" - by a perfectly-timed joke, some beautiful absurdity or piece of goofy slapstick that leavened the seriousness just so. And I think the book's strongest feature is its intense empathy toward the struggles of substance abusers & people with severe mental illness. The scenes at Ennet House (a halfway house) are so photo-realistic as to be stomach-churning, their depressing accuracy only tempered by the extreme care and fellow-feeling that DFW clearly had for this world. As someone who spent several years working with addicted and mentally ill people, I found the scenes at Ennet House, and the scenes of people in recovery, to be incredibly moving.The dominant theme of the book - Addiction, to drugs, to routine, to sports, to pleasure, to power, to celebrity, to order, to being in recovery - is a fascinating one, and one that DFW explores so well throughout his nonfiction. It is a strange situation then that I find myself in: a reader in love with DFW's nonfiction and in hate with his fiction. (I had a similarly neg reaction to his short story collection "Girl with Curious Hair".)For me, the most damning thing about "Infinite Jest" is this: I never once re-read a passage. This is something I do constantly while reading. There is maybe nothing I love more than being caught by a specific passage, combing over the wording and structure, trying to pinpoint the exact moment where a writer pulls off some fantastic trick - some beautiful or devastating turn of language. Yet I never had even the briefest urge to re-read a sentence in "Infinite Jest". For the better part of 1100 pages, DFW's massive intellect overwhelms his heart. less

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