I read this, like it was homework, over the course of six days.
I know that a lot has been said about this book, often by some very, very intelligent people. I have read none of it. I didn’t even read the introduction (because it’s by Dave Eggers, ugh).
(This is going to be filled with spoilers – Infinite Jest is over 20 years old, so anyone who wanted to be unspoiled has probably read it once or twice by now – but consider yourself warned.)
This book was presented to me right before I started annual leave, by a colleague who described it as the best book, the BEST book of all time, in the world, ever (most of those words are a direct quote). I was dubious, because it was also presented with immediate caveats – that it was a very tough start, that the A plot is soon abandoned for spending time with the characters, etc.
Now that I’m finished, at rapid pace (this is important later), I can see why my colleague thinks it’s an amazing book. I can also see why my friend Kelly loathed DFW’s work. I am not at all sorry to have spent the time reading this, but at the same time, I cannot recommend it to a single person I know. It’s both a cracking read, and a book with an editor who clearly got tired of constantly fighting the author.
For me, Infinite Jest is, at its heart, a slice of life book in the same way that A Little Life is. The A plot doesn’t matter (and also, was told in a much more succinct and equally hilarious manner by Wil Ferguson in the excellent Happiness TM, which I can recommend without hesitation), and in fact never bothers to resolve. What matters are the characters, and their travails. And the telling of it is, honestly, really something else. The book is split into three distinct storylines: Hal and his friends at a tennis academy; Don Gates and his fellows in a substance abuse treatment/recovery centre; and the A plot. A film – referred to as an Entertainment or the samizdat – has been created that will render all watchers completely enthralled, unto death. It’s being used as a weapon of vengeance against the US by Quebecois separatists (don’t worry. It’s a lot, but it doesn’t matter, really).
The command of language, the vocab, and the wordplay is seriously impressive. I kind of wish I’d been reading it with a highlighter, because it is filled with little gems like “My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it” – a turn of phrase that I wish I’d thought of. There’s a breadth to the scope which rivals your classic fantasy or sci fi novel (I thought often of Neal Stephenson). America, Canada and Mexico have redrawn borders, in the entertainingly named Organisation of North American Nations – O.N.A.N. for short. This immediately pinged my radar – onanism being my euphemism of choice in short stories – as a fun piece of wordplay suggesting that the whole Organisation was, in fact, a bit of a wank. No sooner had I texted this to my sister than I found myself one-upped by DFW, discussing “the tumescence of ONAN.” I mean.
Structurally, the novel relies heavily on footnotes for world building, and so, so much would have been missed had I skipped them. I’m not the skipping type – but I was warned by both my colleague and a friend that they were essential. And here we come to the first piece of a seriously off-putting nature for any of my loved ones when it comes to recommending IJ. It’s impossible to read as an e-book, because flicking back and forth through the footnotes is painful in that format (yes, I tried, and returned it). The physical book is a total brick, weighing in at around 1000 pages, in 8pt type, with wafer-thin pages. And the footnotes are in 6pt type. Reading it is a feat of endurance and determination.
I found myself asking, what is the purpose of fiction? Not in the world, in general, as a massive existential question, but for me, specifically. What am I looking for, when I read fiction, and how and why do I want it to differ from non-fiction, biography, and reality? I read widely, and voracious doesn’t cover it (maybe rapacious is closer?). In general, I’m looking for engaging characters, a plot that can meander but will eventually become clear/coherent, and a resolution – happy or otherwise, but part of my enjoyment of fiction is that it does resolve, in a way life does not. (The quality of the writing is something of a factor, and I might be a little vicious if it is poor, but I own 30 books in a series that is not fantastically written, and I can’t give up on those characters.)
Infinite Jest was a slog. It was an effort. I never managed to read more than about 220 pages in a day, which is unheard of for me – and trust me, I dedicated myself to this book for between 9 and 12 hours a day. I am not kidding when I say I read this like homework. What I noticed from smashing through it really, really rapidly was that sometimes, the deliberate verbal tics meant to distinguish narrative voices drifted towards unintended sameness (or an overarching authorial voice that someone, somewhere, has argued is deliberate). At the same time, I was able to better appreciate the way even the sentence structures reinforced the novel’s preoccupation with life’s elliptical, repetitive nature. I can’t stress enough how beautifully overwhelming the writing is in Infinite Jest. Or how pretentiously “look at me, look at me” the vocabulary is.
I can see the appeal of discussing this for days and days – wheelchair assassins! the eight page footnotes! tennis court games of risk that devolve into chaos! the Incandenza filmography! – and I could spend hours and hours writing about what worked and what didn’t. In the end, my thoughts all boil down to some pretty basic things. But I’ve made my peace with being a bit basic. I like Sauv Blanc and football, romance novels and for all of the dogs to stay safe.
I appreciated Infinite Jest, and I was utterly consumed by it while reading. I could not have stopped reading early without dreaming of the characters and projected endings for a month. Reading it is an experience I am glad to have had. The substance abuse vignettes are staggeringly well-rendered, in their miserable banality as much as their almost-magical depictions of how 12 Step programs work. Hilarious and so very (smugly) clever, Infinite Jest is utterly unlike anything else I have read.
However, it is also like everything else I have read, in that parts of it pissed me off. Reading fiction should not, for me, feel like homework. Be as smug as you like about your vocab, big fella (I only looked up one word, so nerr), it’s impressive. But an otherwise immersive experience should not be broken up – again, I stress, this is for me, your mileage may vary – by repeated attempts to parse out the meaning of the sentence. It is always a narrative shortcut to have your characters harm animals as part of their development. Show me that Lenz is evil in a different way. Show me that Orin is as corrupted as everyone else in his family in a more inventive way. I would have stopped reading entirely after a 6 and a half page footnote diversion, but I was on page 665, and felt pot committed.
I’m not sorry to have spent time in DFW’s world. I loved it. I will laugh about some of this stuff on and off as it occurs to me for years. I totally agree that it’s a phenomenal achievement, by a writer in complete command of his milieu. But I cannot recommend it, and I won’t be rereading it.