The Great and Terrible Infinite Jest
Or maybe the joke's on me; I can't tell anymore
Beginning note: The Way It’s Supposed to Be, my debut novel, launches July 10th! You can preorder the e-book here. Hint: You don’t need a Kindle device to read the e-book. You can download the free Kindle app to read on whatever digital device you like.
Taking on Infinite Jest
I finally decided to wrestle Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, to see what all the vaguely remembered fuss was about when it came out in 1996. Back then, I was too busy reading dry college texts for tests and, um, drinking. I am approximately halfway through this book, and there are times…
I WANT TO RIP PAGES, NAY WHOLE CHAPTERS, FROM THE SPINE GLUE, MASH THEM INTO A TIGHT BALL AND THROW THEM INTO A BLAZING FIRE THAT SPRINGS FORTH FROM THE FLOOR SOLELY FOR THIS PURPOSE.
I’ll start wading through yet another description of how junior tennis tournaments are scheduled; I’ll sigh, flip ahead to see how long the section is and mutter under my breath, “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”
There are paragraphs that take up multiple pages and sentences that take up half a page. I tried to find a synonym for the second “page” in that last sentence because I don’t like to be repetitive, but fuck it; David Foster Wallace wouldn’t bother. Why should I?
He repeats whole ideas ad nauseam and still manages to be obscure about the order of events in his story and which characters in different chapters are actually the same people. I find myself thinking: I can’t believe this, as a manuscript, got past both a developmental and a copy editor. It’s like Kurt Vonnegut’s obtuse approach had an inept demon child with Charles Dickens’ protracted, detailed sentence structure. And then David Foster Wallace wrote about it in one fell swoop, one fevered morning as he awoke from a fucked-up dream.
(Which is kinda evidence of genius, btw, making it seem effortless. But not effortless as in, “This is so easy to read,” but effortless as in, “You didn’t try very hard, did you?” But maybe he DID try hard, so…never mind)
Yet I am still reading it daily, afraid to take too much of a break because I might lose the extremely loose grasp I have on what the hell is going on with the “plot.” I am still reading even though the off-the-cuff joke my sister made about Infinite Jest, I’m beginning to suspect is true: The joke implied in the title is you’re actually fucking reading 1,000 pages of a rambling shitty first draft and calling it “ART.”
The feeling I was being duped increased with the plot’s introduction of the amateur filmmaker who created a movie called “The Joke.” For the showings of this fictitious movie, the art-minded audience sits down all ready for the film and, when it begins, finds the show is simply live camera footage of themselves sitting there. Many leave in disgust; some critics remained to insist it is revolutionary art-making. But the filmmaker’s motive wasn’t nearly as high-minded as they imagined. He just wanted to see how many people he could trick into watching this bullshit.
It begs the question, who decides what is art?
The maker or the consumer? Even if the maker thinks it’s all a big joke, if someone finds value in it, IS it art?? Or is it simply snobbish people wanting to make art out of anything off-putting and weird so they can maintain their sense of superiority over the unwashed masses. (That period/not question mark there is a tribute to D.F. Wallace, whose style seems to be currently infiltrating my own, damn him.)
But I digress, which you should get used to if you ever want to read Infinite Jest because there are whole chapter digressions. There are endnotes that are chapters unto themselves with their own endnotes. I’m serious.
I don’t hate it. Or maybe I kinda do.
Any book that can get me this riled and prompt a whole post is worth something. It describes a closely distant era from 1996 — one that didn’t come to pass, which is okay because this is fiction not a prediction — that tells us something about the ennui of the 90s. That feigned apathy that hid feelings of impotence — an inability to do anything about capitalism and over-commercialization.
In Infinite Jest’s version of the future we are now living, years are sponsored by the likes of Depend Adult Undergarments and renamed after their products, despite how practically nonsensical it is. US waste piles up in the Great Concavity. A lot of it doesn’t feel too far-fetched from where we are. We have not, since the 90s, solved the problem of what to do with all of our trash, and there is still a marked resistance to the idea of a global community. D. Foster Wallace does not so much condemn these aspects as describe them in achingly bland detail.
His characters are addicted, selfish and short-sighted, yet you feel for them.
Some are also racist and misogynistic to the point that I began to wonder about DFW’s own perspective on Black people in the US and women beyond their hot-or-not status. Ironically, my raised eyebrow comes not from certain characters’ use of the n-word or the tennis boys ogling their female counterparts, but from the lack of substance given to Black people or women in the story.
One can make the argument that David Foster Wallace is a white man, so perhaps he chose not to presume to know personal experience outside of his own. Then, one can make the point that perhaps he should’ve made the effort, done some research, or at least highlighted that lack of perspective in his own writing more obviously. I can go back and forth and justify, then refute my justification of his limited point of view all day. We cannot know his intention in leaving his few female and Black characters one-dimensional. And so on.
Somehow, impressively, we still empathize with Wallace’s characters, even though (or because) he describes them in such a detached fashion. That’s the point I intended to make, but instead, I wandered off down a racist/not-racist side path. Let’s leave it at this: if you are hoping for a racially or sexually diverse perspective, this isn’t it. There are diverse characters; they’re just not painted with much depth.
I am still reading Infinite Jest. I am going to finish it. Because I don’t so much like it as appreciate it. It’s not a book you consume, it’s one you study. And as annoying as I find the rambly sentences, missing commas, misused words and wild changes from third person limited to third person omniscient to first person (without cueing the reader as to who that first person is), there’s also something I value about it, as a writer.
There is something freeing about not getting bogged down in editing to make everything I write completely accessible to everyone. There is something satisfying about indulging my penchant for side topics. There is something embracing about not worrying too much if I’ve used just the right word or if that sentence has too many dependent clauses to be totally clear.
Ultimately, I’d like to thank David Foster Wallace for helping me free myself a little bit and for giving me a challenge. Like David Eggers says in the foreword of the version I have (paraphrasing):
Not every book has to be easy. Some are hard to read, and people argue all the time about whether or not it is worthwhile if it’s easy fiction or if it’s even art if it’s not accessible. The truth is, the same reader can appreciate both the tight, “well-written,” easy-to-ingest story and the one she has to work at.
(I can’t find his actual quote in this boat anchor of a book, so you’ll have to make do with my impression of it.)
As I read, I keep wanting to interview Wallace. What was your process on this? Did you write it stream-of-consciousness style, start to finish? Did you write the chapters separately, then reorder them? What was your motivation for the story, what angst or ennui or boredom or sense of a joke motivated you?
But really, if I could ask him just one question, it would be…
How the fuck did you get this thing published?
Several months later…
I finished it. I read the whole goddamned thing. And my first impulse was to TURN TO CHAPTER ONE AND START READING THE ENTIRE FUCKER AGAIN.
What kind of book is this, that it is so much work, and yet I am driven to put it under the microscope and examine it? The ending wasn’t satisfying. It just sort of ended, which, by the time I got past page 900, was pretty much what I expected. (I suppressed the urge to turn back to page one because I have real-world shit that demands my attention, often to my chagrin.)
Infinite Jest is not a book or a novel or dystopian fiction so much as it is Literature with a capital “L.” I recommend reading it if you are up for a challenge, if you are in a place in your reading or writing career where you want to experience something that will remind you of seven other authors, sort of, but is also like nothing you have ever read before. You cannot read it with the tv on or while you’re standing over the stove, stirring dinner with one hand, the paperback in the other.
This tome’s weight requires both hands and all of your brain cell’s attention.
After I finished it, I set out to satisfy my curiosity about David Foster Wallace. I was sad to discover I was late to the party. He died in 2008 — hanged himself on his porch after leaving a note for his wife and arranging the pages of his unfinished manuscript, The Pale King.
In a weird way, I miss him. Though he’d been sober for decades before he died, he grappled with depression and addiction for a lot of his life. The authenticity with which he constructs the worlds of addicts and people suffering from mental illness makes his first-hand experience obvious and uniquely compelling. I miss his presence in our world today. Minds like his don’t come along very often, and ones that get published and known even less often.
If you’ve ever delved the depths of characters of your own creation and been lucky enough to endow them with believable, authentic, relatable souls, you know the psychic toll it can take on you. Thanks, David Foster Wallace, DFW, for going there, for doing that painful and necessary work for us.
