“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy…” Who was David Foster Wallace? Was he Yorick?
The tissue of Infinite Jest is the stuff paranoia is made of… No contents are left in the entire world anymore… Everything is just a hollow form…

Tuesday, 3 November, Enfield Tennis Academy: A.M. drills, shower, eat, class, lab, class, class, eat, prescriptive-grammar exam, lab/class, conditioning run, P.M. drills, play challenge match, play challenge match, upper-body circuits in weight room, sauna, shower, slump to locker-room floor w/ other players.

That’s what now stands for education.
There is no authenticity – just substitutes and surrogates, ersatz and fraud…

He’d let her give him one of her smaller paintings, which covered half the wall over his bed and was of a famous film actress whose name he always had a hard time recalling and a less famous film actor, the two of them entwined in a scene from a well-known old film, a romantic scene, an embrace, copied from a film history textbook and much enlarged and made stilted, and with obscenities scrawled all over it in bright red letters.

That’s what now stands for art.
Everyone is chemically dependent and alchemically oriented… This is a modern life style…

…I have a cold super station about Poor Tony not wining while he makes like he has to cusually piss and takes a piss and the piss steams up around the lower ares of the bush with his back turned away and isnt’ looking around with interst or anything like that you never turn your back on the skeet when its’ partly your skeet which is wicked unusal which C is so eggerly dopesick he doesnt’ notice any thing past keeping the lighter lit.

And this is an ultimate purpose in life…

If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: be no one.

There’s no need to be afraid of dystopia, dystopia is already here...

There is something we all seek in life, which, despite its importance to us has no commonly understood term to accurately describe it. It’s the thing we usually call Happiness - though this is a misleading word which has undoubtedly led to widespread misunderstanding. When one is happy, it is because something has pleased us. At such times our bodies, which have been tuned by evolution and social conditioning, release chemical compounds whose shapes correspond exactly with receptors in our nervous system, generating an emotional state which is designed simply to reinforce the behaviour that triggered it. When we are happy, we do not feel discomfort. When we are happy, we smile.

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And so when we talk about the Pursuit of Happiness, we understand the objective to be somehow related to this shallow emotional state, this transient lack of emotional pain. Likewise, Happiness therefore must to be something received more or less passively from the external world. In the pursuit of Happiness we seek to repeat and amplify the triggers that make us momentarily happy, with the expectation that their repeated occurrence will generate this emotion in a more or less permanent state. The reality of course is that such a condition is not possible given our physiology, nor is it necessarily desirable, given the repercussions of existence in such emotional homogeneity. What we really mean by Happiness is something more complicated.

The conflation of pleasure and Happiness is a major theme of Infinite Jest. The use and abuse of drugs is direct example, but more surprising is the way that socially accepted and seemingly innocuous activities, such as personal achievement, aspiration towards parental and social expectations (and other forms of mimetic desire), sexual fulfillment, even love of another person - these can also result in empty and abusive experiences and non-attainment of what is sincerely desired. The reader is forced to rethink the Happiness paradigm and consider the multidimensional and ever shifting relationship between pleasure/pain, emotion/apathy, and happiness/sadness. Wallace explores the gamut of these relationships in oblique ways through his characters: for the unfeeling Hal, the Pursuit of Happiness means finding a way to feel anything, whereas for the tormented Kate Gompert, simply feeling itself is intolerable. Human experience is highly variable, and one person's pleasure can be another's poison.

The use of entertainment as a proxy for personal fulfillment is of particular concern to Wallace. Infinite Jest predicts a future in which the seductiveness of entertainment has the ability to completely consume a person's life. While the power of the particular entertainment cartridge described in the novel is exaggerated, the parallels with our own culture are unavoidable. We live in a world where corporations compete for our attention through methods which can be quite insidious (I highly recommend this episode of the Sam Harris podcast which looks at the way companies like Facebook and Google manipulate psychology to gain an increasing share of our time and attention), and it is seen as mundane and unremarkable for people to expend vast expanses of their free time passively ingesting season after season of TV on Netflix, or scrolling though page after page of vapid non-information on social media. What Infinite Jest exposes is an inherent lack of agency and perhaps culpability for the individual whose life has been corrupted by media and entertainment. These subvert our desire to increase personal Happiness by appropriating our pleasure/reward processes. When our own brains work against us, who can resist? The system seems setup for failure.

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Wallace treats the topic of drugs and addiction seriously. He does not use them simply as devices to make a wider point, but seeks to honestly explore their personal and social effects. His portrayal of drug-induced states are realistic and balanced, and are in contrast with the simplistic depictions generally found in entertainment. There is a memorable chapter very early in the book which sees Ken Erdedy waiting for a delivery of marijuana. The description of Erdedy's thoughts and actions perfectly captures the experience of being dependent on this drug specifically. It is rare to see marijuana acknowledged as a drug which can have serious consequences, especially at a time where these aspects are being downplayed as the legalisation movement continues to gather momentum. I personally support legalisation of most substances for reasons of personal freedom, and a conviction that addiction should be treated as a health issue, not a crime. However I’ve known more than one person who has developed dependence on marijuana, and have seen the effects that it can have on people's lives. In terms of direct mortality it rates very low, but it should not be considered a substance without consequences.

Wallace acknowledges that the relationship between drugs and users is complex and unpredictable. Drugs are not depicted solely as having a negative influence. One some level marijuana does offer Hal a sense of purpose, and alcohol might possibly have saved poor Kate Gompert’s life. As with life, one's response to drugs is determined by the convergence of arbitrary conditions. Factors such as physiology, environment and simple luck play the major role in dictating the course of our lives. When it comes to drugs, Don Gately cannot fathom how someone like Erdedy can be addicted to marijuana, a substance that for him holds no more sway than coffee. Some people are just lucky enough never to fall into the trap.

Wallace describes the inner lives of his characters with intense clarity and detail. He writes with sensitivity and understanding of a diverse range of emotional states. His characters constantly demonstrate and reinforce their humanity. Even when they seem not at all like us, they are easy to identify with. Their thoughts and actions reflect patterns we have all experienced, and their experiences often reveal something we had not previously noticed about ourselves. Wallace writes with irony and humour, but also with incredible poignancy and sadness. There is an earnest intention to portray life as it really is, both beautiful and flawed, without the need to be overly dramatic of or make excuses for human failings.

But it's not until one reads the final chapter that Infinite Jest truly reveals itself and what it asks of the reader. In its completion the novel undergoes a profound change, revealing a hidden dimension; pointing to a unseen layer of relevance in previously unnoticed details. Both these intra- as well as meta-literary references become critical for the reader to interpret and understand the work. The temptation upon finishing the novel is to immediately return to the first chapter and read again. What Wallace achieves in the structure of Infinite Jest is extremely bold in the expectation it places on the reader, but it is incredibly innovative, and incredibly powerful. I’ve never before felt such a profound experience upon completing a novel.

The novel is unique and innovative in other ways. It uses shifting styles, perspectives and viewpoints, as well as playing with narrative and time. The language mixes literary prose with more casual styles, employing shorthand and abbreviations, as well as colloquial patterns (the frequent interjection of the world, “like”) not just in dialogue, but throughout the narration. He uses end notes not only for references and digressions, but for revealing key plot points, and even for entire passages, some of which contain some the best prose in the novel. At times he seems to be employing these techniques just for effect, sometimes to push beyond the confines of the novel form, but often he seems to be doing it just for fun – to mess with the reader and draw them out of the reading experience; to break the spell; and to mitigate the book’s perceived pretentiousness.

Though surprisingly, Infinite Jest is not an overly pretentious novel. The writing is direct, personal and honest. It does not seek to confound the reader through obfuscation, or impose its author’s intellectual superiority. Though it is long, if read with patience it is not at all difficult.

The least compelling parts of the book are its politics and science-fiction elements. Infinite Jest was set in the near future, though twenty years after its publishing, this has effectively become the present or recent past. Wallace’s technological predictions seem seem quaint and anachronistic, and generally miss the mark by a wide margin. The North American political situation and the various groups and agencies who act in the world of the novel are by and large ridiculous. These elements are in stark contrast with the general emotional realism of the novel. Though they are important to the novel’s plot, and perhaps eventually come to develop an odd charm, it is undeniable that they are incongruous with the rest of the novel. Their inclusion is a bit of a mystery to me - I expect it's partially due to a sense of playfulness on Wallace’s part, though I think there's also some anti-pretentiousness at work here as well, and on some level he is actively working to downplay the novel's seriousness.

I absolutely loved this book. I enjoyed both the overall execution of vision, and the daily experience of reading it. I don’t know if I’ll ever enjoy a book as much as Infinite Jest. For me, It never felt too long, because I never wanted it to end.

Know what they say about novels such as Infinite Jest: Don’t seek Perfection or Pleasure but rather seek the Infinite Possibilities.

I have a lot to say about this book but before that there’s a little I don’t want to say about it. Here it is:

☽This book is never ending.

☽It bored me at times too.

☽Some of the end notes were annoying.

☽I read many other books when I was supposed to read this book.

☽Whenever somebody asked me what IJ was all about, I was unable to come up with a clear-cut answer.

☽I skipped few lines here and there.

☽I think those who haven’t read this book or won’t read it, would have more or less incomplete existence as a reader.

☽I think those who have read the whole book and still think it’s no good are..well…just normal I guess.

☽No reason is good enough for not reading this book.

☽In spite of best of my efforts my mind diverted to DFW’s suicide.

☽I had thoughts of trying marijuana (it’s not really a big deal in India).

☽After reading few reviews here, I got panic attacks due to their awesomeness.

☽This review went out of hand and got a ‘bit’ long, so oops.

☽I don’t want to say cheesy lines like:
-If IJ was a country, I’d applied for a permanent residency; or
-If IJ was a drug, I’d get high forever; or
-If IJ was a guy, I’d marry him; or
-I’m already missing reading it.

☽I laughed when I said to myself after finishing it, “let me get my thoughts in order.”

☽The good news is you can read IJ again and again. The bad news is, you Have to read it again.

Here’s what I want to say

An Unexamined Life

E.M. Forster said, “One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.”

Though I’m sure he didn’t have a book like IJ in mind, but I agree with him to some extent. Reading a long book means devoting a substantial time of your life, a time which you value and there’s no way one would like to declare that he/she/it spent that time on something unworthy. But when the book is Infinite Jest, then it deserves every iota of praise bestowed upon it. Its reading experience is something like the author takes your hand, makes you sit in front of a mirror and whisper in your ear, “now see the magic” and lo, you’re sucked in by the mirror and the next moment you find yourself in a strange yet surprisingly familiar land and slowly the images, the scenery, the words starts unfolding themselves and you need to look out at each direction, else you’ll be lost. You need to examine a life, which was left unexamined for a long time.

Day of finishing Infinite Jest

Jan 25, 2013 at around 2200hrs, I finished reading this book, closed it and put it aside. I stared at it for a while, then logged on to goodreads, gave it 5 stars, put it under my favorites shelf and asked myself, “Well what was that all about?” There was no answer in response but just an echo of words:

to write something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you're going to die.

Day of starting reading Infinite jest

There was a sudden knock on the door. I woke up with a start and reluctantly went to open the door. An adolescent boy promptly asked, "Do you want to get entertained?" "Huh.. what the .. ?" I slammed the door shut and went back to sleep. Few hours passed but again my sleep broke on hearing some loud cheering. I went out and much to my surprise there was a whole tennis court in front of me and two players were busy playing. There was a group of boys snorting coke sitting round the corner and on the opposite stands, some kind of class was going on. I recognized that it was Arthur Ashe stadium, but couldn’t place the players. I looked at the score board: Wal and Fed. Wal was apparently leading with 6-3, 7-6, 5-3. Somebody tapped on my shoulder. He was the same boy. This time he handed me a book. I took it and immediately lost my balance. The alarm of my cell phone went off at that precise moment and welcomed me back to reality. Once the feeling of vertigo subsided, I checked the date. December 1, 2012. I said to myself, Of course!

The days in between

Over the period of almost two months, I read IJ every day. Having read Girl with curious hair and A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again I experienced both fiction and non-fiction writing by Wallace and loved it. It proved to be a boon because if nothing else, the disjointed stories in IJ were something like short stories from Girl... (although a lot more developed and maturely handled) and the long ramblings on different topics reminded me of essays in a Supposedly fun…so Yes! Reading Wallace’s other works before attempting this book did help a lot more than I expected. There was something that made him work for me, which not only provided enjoyment but became a great source of knowledge and it won't be an exaggeration to say that I have found a book that shall remain with me both physically and emotionally throughout this modest and unexciting life of mine.

Infinite Jest is not a work of a genius. It’s the work of someone who was all set to change the definition of word genius as we know it. He created a world that was consistently dark, desolate and most of the times demented but also witty, ingenious and oh so funny. This magnum opus is incredibly challenging but at the same time surprisingly accessible. It won’t let the reader sit back, relax and enjoy it. It’s no beach read but want its readers to sit up and take notice about what is going on. You can’t afford to lose focus and track but the probability is that you’ll lose both anyway. It’s that kind of book, a literary equivalent of mobiusism, a never ending quest, a once in a lifetime experience. By expressing all this, I’m in no way glorifying its completion by me, but simply stating the facts. It’s not possible to overestimate this book.

Wallace took the most wretched situations and characters and created such amazing backdrops, that in spite of everything so seemingly hopeless, he would still be able to present you with a glimpse of hope. In face of lot of desperate moves, he would teach you a lesson or two in patience. With so many impossibilities going on one after the other, he would tell what all is possible if one try to do just one thing: Realize.

His prose is exuberant with less scope of comfort. He won’t surround you with the sea of beautiful flowing writing to make you feel that he has stated something profound but rather something relentless and contemporary that you’re in a position to relate in both subjective and objective way, no matter how insane that way is. You’ll lose count of neologism, solecism, colloquialism, malapropism, and many other –isms DFW employed within IJ, which not only proves fascinating but gives you an idea about the extent to which he allowed himself to experiment in order to say whatever he wanted to and you’ll see how effortless it all looks as if DFW was telling something that’s always been there and getting our attention by a simple psst-look-here expression. Dave Eggers in his wonderful foreword rightly stated: A Wallace reader gets the impression of being in a room with a very talkative and brilliant uncle or cousin, who, just when he’s about to push it too far, to try our patience with too much detail, has the good sense to throw in a good low-brow joke.He has employed an allegorical structure to this novel and develops it to an extraordinary proportion taking cues from many of his influences namely Joyce, Pynchon, Shakespeare and Dante to name a few.

I don’t want to indulge much into plot(s), but just a brief and my practice in brevity, if I’m allowed. IJ primarily takes place in futuristic USA circa 2009-10 in Boston city. The setting for majority of the narration is based at Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA) and Ennet House, a drug and alcohol recovery house, where majority of the interesting characters reside, situating nearby ETA. ETA was founded by James. O. Incandenza, an avant-garde film maker, whose wife, Avril Incandenza heads the academy with their 2 sons, Mario and Hal being the current attendees of the ETA while their eldest brother, Orin being a previous attendee, now a punter in the NFL. Orin is a jerk, Mario is great and Hal is lonely. Avril is beautiful, very tall and delusional about her kids; James was taller, committed suicide and knew his kids just too well. He created a film known as The Entertainment, titled "Infinite Jest", which rumored to have ’qualities’ such that whoever saw it wanted nothing else ever in life but to see it again, then again and so on, rendering its audience fatally addicted to it. The quest of finding the master copy of this entertainment marks the entry of a group of Quebecois separatists in the book, known as Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents a.k.a Wheelchair Assassins or simply A.F.R, who wants to obtain a copy, which they called Samizdat , because of its lethal qualities that would make them dangerously powerful to meet their extremist goals. This group gave me creeps.

The book is mostly covered with Wallace commentary about drug addiction through myriad eccentric and bizarre characters at the Ennet House. Wallace presents the intake of drugs, its effects and substance withdrawal i.e. cold turkey in such merciless detail that one can’t help to actually empathize with those involved in substance abuse. Apart from drugs, there’s some wonderful description about depression, clinical depression to be precise. Here’s one of my favorite passage which I’ve tagged as spoiler  "The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.". At this point one can’t help feeling for David’s own struggle with depression and the justification of the eventual step he took.

With drugs and depression, there are AA meetings and telling of stories, some of which are so despicably ugly and dismal that it would make you think that you were better off without reading them. Then of course there is tennis and the pressure this competitive game induces on young minds but also tells how a thin line exists that separates Tennis with real life: Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win.

At ETA, through characters like Hal and Michael Pemulis, one gets the picture of how youngsters so easily resort to wrong paths, which could adversely affect their coming lives a sample of which could be witnessed through Ennet House residents. So in my opinion it won’t be wrong to say that Wallace, in a masterful way presented a connection between past, present and future of different promising lives, which got destroyed because of the few choices wrongly made. At Ennet House, characters like Don Gately convey that despite being wrongdoers, they are good human beings at heart and are just a product of godforsaken circumstances amidst which they were born and at the same house there are people like Randy Lenz who are nothing less than a personification of devil.

From IJ, one gets a fitting impression of David's capability and scope as a writer. There could be nothing more challenging in picking the most undesired and ugly elements of the universe and weave them together and creating characters and situations of such unbelievable contrast that the end product dwelling them makes even a stone heart to wail in sympathy or reach a point of such profound epiphany that brings a huge turn around in your life. He won’t present you with anything normal but something lovable nevertheless. What’s the most important thing that can happen after reading IJ? The world around you changes for better or for worse. One tends to acquire a whole new point of view of looking at people and can’t help thinking, Well, what could be their story?

The most incredible example of David’s talent can be seen through James O. Incandenza’s filmography that is dripping with excruciatingly weird but magnificently witty ideas. I admit that there was not much I could relate with in great depth but there was a benign captivation about the whole text. My love for tennis and movies (especially Lynchian) wasn’t the biggest support system and well, I’m not even American or Québécois, so all the more less relief nevertheless my motivation mainly rest with David’s writing and the thought of reading a work of literature which is unique in a daunting yet immensely fulfilling manner. It’s true that this novel is full of extraneous ramblings but they are not invasive to the main text. If you learn to like his writing, you will love everything written by him, well almost everything. I had my small issues with few things but I’m ready to overlook them. Moreover a clever move by Wallace can be identifiable in the manner of his use of so many ‘errors’ in different context. I know they were mainly attributed to various characters, but again, in a book so huge, the margin of error automatically increases, which could easily be neglect during editing too. So instead of sifting such errors out, Wallace made them the part of his work. If I’ll give it a metaphoric angle as a result of some cogitation on my part, then it could also be seen as life, which can’t be led without its due share of some big errors. After all that’s what being human is all about.

One thing I can confidently say about his writing is that in this book, his prose though seemingly reckless at times, is an intentional move on his part. You’ll see the range and depth of his skills throughout. Agreed that most of the topics covered had some deep connection with David personal life but that's exactly it makes it all the more brilliant as we get to read someone who had a lucid and precise view of what he had to say. Though I have read that this thing doesn’t sit well with many, but that’s what reading DFW means. A blogger rightly commented: So many of his critics never realized the writer's relentless and extravagant prose was a deliberate and incredibly risky attempt to present reality as he experienced it, which was so vast and multi-layered as to make sharing it with another person who was experiencing a similar influx, an astonishing feat.

Infinite Jest, among many things is homage to sobriety, happiness, loneliness, sadness and truth. For some, staying sober is happiness and for some feeling is happiness. Some will be happy in knowing the truth and some, in telling of the truth.

The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.

He brilliantly captured the fatuous nature of residents of a country in this era of pop culture in a flamboyant yet amazingly restrained manner that one can’t help but feel the pain of the injury the text inflict upon the minds of its readers. It's like watching a reality sit-com over a surveillance camera, is one concise description I particularly like. A work of literature that was born to become immortal and shall teach you what all can be done with words and what power lies within the realm of writing.

My reading experience was more or less steady and enriching. Gradually through the main contents, I noticed the book weight shifting from my right hand to the left (though it happened a lot many times considering the endnotes) and reaching the last page and with that last page I realized, there’s plenty to come yet. Denouement and IJ doesn’t go together in the most conventional sense. There was a lot more left to ‘figure out’. Before referring to external sources, I wanted to put together as many pieces of this bizarre puzzle at their right places. It was getting unbearable somehow. I was getting afraid what if I would fail or what if after ‘getting the jest’ I won’t laugh. And it was then it dawned upon me that every reader of this book becomes a part of it in such a way, that it won’t let you fail. ‘A Failed Entertainment’ was the working title for David Foster Wallace's “Infinite Jest”; and I’m glad he didn’t go for that, because I think he produced an entertainment so painfully addictive that It won’t be easy to withdraw from it and consequently can't be regarded as a failure. One would carry one thing or the other out of it. There are many loose ends that are not being tied, may be because they are meant to be honored in isolation. The whole thing would turn up as fogged mirror, which only you can clean to see an image, either unbearably beautiful or unbearably ugly. Till that time, live accordingly to the image you want to see at the end. And here’s me hoping that one day I’ll ‘get the jest’ in toto. I'm so glad that this book exists.

“bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!”-James Joyce, Finnegans Wake*



*The joke was going to be that this was my entire review of Infinite Jest, and that I was just going to trust that you guys would know that behind my subhuman howl I was actually in here, that if you could just hear the words and sounds I was attempting to make I would be clearly explicating all these deep and academic observations about Infinite Jest, but then I thought yeah anybody who hasn’t read IJ would really not get that joke or why it is relevant and beyond that it isn’t a very good or funny joke and also IJ really earned a lot more afterthought than just that middling attempt at literary humor.

Okay, so a few (disorganized) thoughts after finishing the novel:

- This was a wonderful reading experience. The writing was just electric, intense, and the parts that were purposefully written dully were still really engaging on a vocabulary level, on a pure writing-as-aesthetic-dazzle level. The voice got inside me, I found myself thinking in DFW-speak, be it Hal’s or JO’s voice. (I was sure all along it’s Hal’s because of the first-person deal but then who’s narrating watching Hal get prepped for the match at the end? and saying “we”?) And you know as annoying as it is to have your thought-patterns be derivative of another human being’s for the what, better part of two months it took me to read this thing, it’s actually quite pleasant to have that second Hal/JO/DFW voice whirring away kind of manically behind all my normal Geoffrey Wilt-style cognition; it made me use more than an average amount of polysyllables and I began to make acronyms out of basic referential things in emails.

- Infinite Jest certainly is not perfect (nothing this big, with this many component parts, possibly can be), but it is all it’s cracked up to be. It is a generation-defining kind of work. I came into full-fledged adulthood in the decade Wallace was writing and publishing this, I am a child of the eighties but a teen and young adult of the nineties, and this is what it would have sounded like should someone have set up a telekinetic loudspeaker that sucked up the content of all the thought-language bubbles of America in the nineties and sent it caroming out into subspace. It felt (as it felt Joyce did in Ulysses) that Wallace pretty much drained the lexical tank of modern English. I mean, I’m sure there are tons of English words that are not in IJ, but it sure didn’t seem so.

- The book is essentially about “Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising.” (pg. 651). Addiction, desperation, sadness, failure, self-denial, self-transcendence, self-abuse, abuse from others, terror, loneliness, abiding, perfection, hideousness vs. beauty (the Medusa vs. the Odelisk), different forms of sex, different forms of love, what parents do to children and vice versa, what friends are, what you choose to give yourself away to, what you choose to pursue, what your ambitions say about you, the limits of achievement, the limits of language (esp. this, it seems like the overriding concern is the loss of voice vs. the flourishing of communication), despair, hope, things lost, things recovered. IJ is about the fundamental stuff, the stuff of what it is to be human- esp. a human of our specific day and age. Which that alone I think Wallace would have been proud to have communicated.

- It is also a really successful dystopian novel. The world Wallace creates is huge, rich, teeming, all those synonyms, it deserves them all. And weird, and ridiculous, yet somehow plausible.

- I heard someone say either in an interview with Wallace or someplace else that the structure of the book was like Wallace took the original chronology of the novel, say it was made of glass, and just tossed it off a building, and it shattered and was thus handed to us readers. Wrong. The structure is tight, not scattered, not loose or arbitrary. Tight, and essential to the understanding of the plot, which while maybe it’s the secondary heart of the novel (second to the stuff about being a human), is a heart nonetheless. It’s too complex for me to claim I get it after the first reading, but the repetitions, the words and objects and actions, even colors and shapes, that recur from scene to scene, the placement and re-emergence of characters and plot points is in no way accidental. This behemoth is planned down to the millimeter, and the evidence of that is in the fact that all you need to know about what happens post-last page of the book is initiated in the first chapter, the very beginning, which of course is the end, and that the parabola, or circle that the narrative describes shoots many things off into many directions, but leads the reader right back to those first pages, loops them around and says “look, all you need to know was handed to you: investigate”.

- Those who are frustrated by the end see the note above. There is ambiguity, but there are no missing pieces. The Year of Glad’s negative space is all full. The blackout can be reconstructed. (I take this last term from Adam’s review. He made a really brilliant observation that the end of the book is the reader’s blackout, and that what preceded was basically an attempt to recall the lost events in the time that could be retrieved. Like Gately and Hal supine in the last hundred pages, remembering, reaching back to submerged things, we now take on the reader’s eternal role for the second time- the mute being entertaining visions, the vessel for a wraith’s ghostwords- we become again the Lemmy Cautions of this particular Alphaville).

Past year and half I hadn't been able to get past the 350 pg mark, and this being my third trial, it took me three months to get back to that mark again and just another five days for the remaining 750-ish pages. It has around hundred pages of end-notes which could have been reduced by simple usage of parenthesis or normal chapters, but instead you've to go through chapters masqueraded as end-notes with small fonts and Wallace deliberately slows down the pace at times, mostly around pages 700-800. It never goes to the place where you assume it would; sometimes a sentence spans for pages and finding a full stop seems difficult, but after actually finishing the book, all this seems like necessary evil. Infinite Jest demands a re-read (it's built that way) with more attention now that I've read it once and have understood the triangles, timelines and separate threads (to a small extent) converging at points, but confusion is also a theme of this mammoth of a book, so we never know. Litcharts and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide's appendix-chronology helped me keep up with timeline and characters. Raving might just be cringe in hindsight, but this was text based transcendence.

Tras diez intensos días, he acabado 'La broma infinita'. Ha habido momentos duros, en los que pensaba que el libro me iba a vencer, pero afortunadamente lograba salvarlos para encontrarme con momentos más agradecidos. Reconozco que le tenía mucho respeto, casi miedo, a esta novela. Y no es para menos: papel finísimo, más de 1200 páginas, 200 de ellas de notas (no a pie de página sino en un apéndice final), párrafos en páginas en tramas interminables, casi como atravesar un pantano con arenas movedizas, y digresiones constantes. Las notas del libro, característica muy de David Foster Wallace, al fin y al cabo tampoco han sido tan imprescindibles. Sí hay partes en las que se hacen necesarias para conocer más sobre ciertos personajes y situaciones, pero hacia el final se convierten en notas comunes. El final de la novela no me ha sorprendido, porque si se ha leído un poco a DFW, ya conoces su inclinación por este tipo de desenlaces. Uno podría pensar que la recompensa tras tantos días y páginas leídas es insuficiente, pero ya digo que es marca de la casa. La manera de narrar también es una característica muy de DFW, ese afán casi obsesivo por la sintaxis perfecta, una prosa analítica hasta la extenuación. A veces es como si tuviese un bisturí mental con el que disecciona la realidad que le rodea, con sus acertadas y afiladas reflexiones sobre las personas, dando explicaciones a situaciones y actitudes que sabías que estaban ahí pero que nadie hasta ahora había definido tan bien. No sé si se trata exactamente de una prosa hermosa, pero puedo afirmar que es una prosa perfecta.

En cuanto a la historia, qué puedo decir. Si en una novela de tamaño medio, digamos 300 páginas, no se deben contar hechos que sucedan pasada digamos la página 50, en un libro de 1200 páginas, ¿dónde se encuentra este límite? ¿En la página 300? No me gusta contar demasiado sobre las tramas de las novelas, y no me parece de recibo desvelar hechos a esa altura del libro. Además, cómo realizar un resumen de 'La broma infinita'. Es una locura. Pero de todos modos, hay que contar algo sobre la historia, aunque sea por encima.

Nos encontramos con tres claras líneas argumentales, aunque hay algunas más. La primera y más importante es la relacionada con la familia Incandenza y la Academia de Tenis Enfield. Si hay un protagonista, este seguramente es Hal Incandenza, un joven de diecisiete años, capaz de memorizar diccionarios enteros, que estudia en esta academia, regentada por su madre, Avril, y por su tío, C.T., hermanastro de Avril. Dicen que Hal es un trasunto de DFW, que hay mucho del escritor en este personaje, pero no puedo afirmarlo porque mi conocimiento sobre la vida de DFW es insuficiente. En la AET también vive Mario, el hermano mediano de Hal, que sufre graves deformidades. Existe un tercer hermano mayor, Orin, que juega al fútbol en otra ciudad, y que jugaba también al tenis pero acabó huyendo de su madre, a la que ni siquiera nombra. Y sobre todos ellos planea la presencia de James O. Incandenza, el padre, que se suicidó hace pocos años, una figura muy controvertida, que ha marcado, para bien o para mal, la vida de todos ellos. La segunda línea argumental tiene como protagonistas a los miembros de la Ennet House, un centro de desintoxicación de sustancias varias. En esta parte de la historia asistimos a todo tipo de confesiones y miserias, por parte de todo tipo de individuos de baja estofa. Y la tercera línea está protagonizada por dos extraños tipos, Marathe y Steeply, y sus respectivas organizaciones, los Asesinos de las Sillas de Ruedas, terroristas separatistas canadienses, y la Oficina de Asuntos No Especificados, una especie de CIA. Parece que Marathe es un agencia doble o triple, y al principio de sus conversaciones no se sabe muy bien que hay detrás de ellos, algo que se irá desvelando poco a poco.

La novela está enmarcada en un futuro cercano, donde los Estados Unidos están adscritos a la ONAN, la Organización de Naciones Norteamericanas, de la que también forman parte Canadá y México. Esta es la época del Tiempo Subsidiado, donde cada año anuncia un producto (por ejemplo: Año de la Ropa Interior para Adultos Depend, Año de la Hamburguesa Whopper). Es una época de adicciones, al teleordenador y sus cartuchos, a las drogas y al alcohol. Parece que todo gira en torno a la consecución del Entretenimiento. En la frontera con Canadá está la Gran Concavidad, fuente de conflicto con los separatistas quebequeses, ya que se trata de una zona altamente contaminada, donde se deposita basura constantemente por parte de Estados Unidos, y donde viven horripilantes criaturas. Y parece ser que ha salido a la luz una extraña película, la última que rodó el difunto James Incandenza, que mata a todo aquel que la ve. Estos son argumentos claramente pertenecientes a la ciencia ficción, pero de ahí a decir que 'La broma infinita' es una novela de ciencia ficción, va mucho trecho.

Después de leer 'La broma infinita', encuentro una cierta similitud con la obra de Thomas Pynchon, sobre todo en lo que a conspiraciones y personajes delirantes se trata. La novela está llena de momentos brillantes. Me viene a la mente ahora la parte en la que se cuenta el final de las grandes cadenas de televisión y de la publicidad. O la parte donde se diserta sobre la serie M.A.S.H. Pero también es una novela de personajes: Mario y su lucidez y felicidad, pese a los obstáculos evidentes; las conversaciones de Hal y Orin, tan reveladoras; Gately y su lucha por la abstinencia a toda costa.

'La broma infinita' parece una larga introducción de 1200 páginas, donde lo importante son el planteamiento y el nudo de la historia, siendo el final lo de menos. Si la novela habla mucho de consumismo y entretenimiento, también es verdad que la abstinencia e insatisfacción existen. De ahí la paradoja final, toda una broma.

No puedo recomendar este libro (al menos a cualquiera; el que se atreva a leer este libro, lo ha de hacer sabiendo a lo que se enfrenta). 'La broma infinita' es un libro de cierto peso, con esquinas muy agudas. Se trata de un "arma" que según en qué manos, y lanzado desde cierta distancia o dejado caer desde cierta altura, puede hacer mucho daño. Recomendando este libro puedes hacer algún amigo, pero lo más seguro, sobre todo, es que hagas muchos más enemigos. Y lo fácil sería recomendarlo, porque si no te ha gustado, por su grosor el libro tiene más de una utilidad. Ni pensar en usarlo para un mueble que cojea, porque si necesitas un libro de este tamaño, es que la chapuza no tiene solución y mejor que tires el mueble. Más utilidad le veo para esas ocasiones en que tu madre te requiere para coger el arroz u otro producto que se encuentra fuera de su alcance (¿por qué las madres dejarán estas cosas en el armario más alto?), porque el libro podría servirle de escalón, y si tienes a mano un par de Pynchons, aún mejor. Como veis, el libro, si no gusta, es multiusos.

Fuera de bromas, la lectura de 'La broma infinita' es muy exigente, y requiere de una cierta dedicación. Pero también es satisfactoria y obtienes tu recompensa. El viaje vale la pena.

He said: hey babe, take a walk on the wild side

Finito, ieri sera.
Ma la risacca di IJ non ha ancora finito con me.
Sbando ancora in modo evidente compressa tra correnti e riflussi contrari, un’energia liberata da tutti i rivoli del testo che ancora mi girano e rigirano in testa a urtare e scomporre le parti più nascoste dei miei pensieri.
Letta l’ultima riga e chiusa la quarta di copertina, le impronte dei personaggi si profilavano ancora, opache, a disegnare sul muro i loro gesti difettosi.
Ho subito riaperto la prima pagina e riletto i primi capitoli. Non riuscivo a lasciarli andare.
Come fare a lasciar andare un libro come questo, che non ha solo riempito tante settimane, giorni su giorni, notti su notti, ma che ha silenziosamente intossicato, espropriato spazi alle mie visioni?
Foster Wallace tracciatore di rotte nei nebbiosi continenti del sottosuolo, sussurratore di canzoni, trovatore oscuro, giudice e complice della tenebra umana, dell'irresolutezza, della mancanza, della solitudine.
Arriva a stremarti tambureggiandoti in faccia neologismi, espressioni dotte, tecniche, arcaiche o sfidandoti con stoccate di matematica transfinita (nel mio caso vincendo sempre a mani basse).
Senza dimenticare il maniacale apparato di note, le note di quattro/cinque pagine, le note delle note, scritte sempre più in piccolo che solo con la lente d'ingrandimento, frattali di note, che solo una volontà ferrea ed esemplare ti permette di non ignorare, perchè sai che sarebbe un tradimento.
Oppure ti incanta, danzando con la grazia di un acrobata sulla fune ritorta della disperazione, con un bilanciere di feroce ironia per contrappeso, mentre proietta ombre di sublime vertigine sugli spettatori.
Oppure ridi, mentre il sale ti pizzica la guancia.
E la miscela di emozioni è un fiammifero acceso nella polveriera buia della nostra testa.
E continui a tornarci, perché un libro come questo non ti si sfilaccia dentro per consunzione, non si diluisce tra le anse molli del sistema limbico, è come la resina di pino, appiccicosa e fragrante, intensa, resistente e duratura.
IJ si prende gioco del tempo e non ti molla più.
E' un invito alla Infinite Quest, a resistere all'esperienza estrema che è la vita, a provare a comprendere what is to be a fucking human being.

2019: bought a hardback (the one with clouds). 8)

=

Perfume: Carven - 'Ma Griffe' (what I smelled at one point while reading)

Four to 4.5 stars.Nevermind, I'll make it 5 stars... that's how it feels after a while of thinking.

I really thought this would be a challenging book, hard to understand, something I'd give up and take to the library or something. Too confusing or 'this is so pretentious'.
It wasn't. At all. Guess I should've known from enjoying Joyce's "Ulysses" or finding Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" easy to follow.

You do have to read more than, say, 300 pages, because the first half is setting the base. But somewhere around the middle you get to a 'clicking point', where the story really gets going. And stops being confusing, or 'pretentious' and gets interesting.

*cough* Anyway this is a story of addiction (and feeling lost), family relationships, tennis (Wallace does know his bit about this) and a very, very dangerous films that different political sides are hunting....
--- digression: you really, really benefit from having Stephen Burn's 'Reader's Guide' book with you; that way, you can follow the timeline while still leaving yourself unspoiled about all other things in that book if you want to read it afterwards. Trust me, the chronology, timeline, really helps ;)
---It starts at the present, Year Of Glad (2010). The years after 2001 are named after certain products, starting with Whopper in 2002. The year where most stuff is happening is The Year Of Depend Adult Undergarment. Each year shows in how the Statue Of Liberty is dressed. USA, Canada and Mexico have joined into one nation (Mexico isn't much involved in the story). The new Independence Day is 11/8 (!!!)
The story concentrates mainly around Boston and its surrounding area, in Enfeld Tennis Academy, the addiction-recovery Ennet House, the Antitoi brothers' shop, and so on.

You should have some kind of bookmark for the end notes and errata (388 entries) - following the numbers there every time helps a lot while reading, stuff like James Incandenza's filmography, some interviews, history of of the AFR terrorist organisation's start, and whole chapters that could be in the main text appear also here.
Some knowledge of French is also handy. Didn't understand all of explanation about the Eschaton game in the notes, but I guess some knowledge of math or somesuch would be handy also there *lol*

Now I go random:

All the gadgets in this story... technology has moved differently, so this is not our world, but makes things interesting. There's also plenty of shitty parents, mostly clearly so (and mostly the fathers), but like for example in the case of Avril Incandenza, more subtle and feeling also cruel. AFR terrorist group is interesting - terrorists that are legless people in wheelchairs. Also gruesomeness: Lenz's killings, and many deaths are rather sick :P But not making this a horror story.
Two NASA objects: Hal's cup, and blanket one person uses while sunning himself.

Liked the use of '(howling) fantods' ('gives you the creeps'). The two games, Eschaton (playing nuclear threats and war with tennis objects) and the sad/dangerous 'train game' that brought AFR people together in childhood/teenage days (which is found in the notes section). A lot of cheating (sexual, educational, drug testing, moneywise).

On page 891ish is the "fish asking 'what's water'?" that appears on "This Is Water" book. "Infinite Jest" is mentioned as words on pages 228ish (directly) and 1041ish (sort of). On page 927ish we find mention of Doctor Robert (like that Beatles song) who supplies the DMZ that Hal and a few others want to try, which results in mention from Hal later that he ended up in hospital, and which might've contributed to his decline we see at the start the result of..

Back from random:
I found some new points to consider, etc. at the guide book, so some more of them are there. And I really think one should get it. But whatever, the thing is that this book is easier than it seems, after you get over the thickness, and if you just keep swimming, you reach the point where it makes sense and turns really to greatness.
About the ending: if you don't like endings where things are not bunched up and solved neatly, it may frustrate you. The story loops back to the start, like a disc. But the final scene does end beautifully and rather peacefully.

So worth reading? If from a good angle, very much so. It was so for me :)

I have written a more substantial but no more real review than the little blurb that used to sit here. The original blurb written on the day I heard DFW died follows this lengthy and self-indulgent exercise.

Within a year of each other two works of entertainment were released that have been pretty darn influential to me. One is this book, and the other was Jawbreaker's album Dear You. Both are relatively polarizing works, people either seem to love it or hate it*.

Jawbreaker's album was a momentous failure. It alienated just about everyone who had any expectations for the band. Their penultimate album, 24 Hour Revenge Therapy had been vehemently anti-corporate. For a time, Jawbreaker were seen as the poster-children for DIY punk second only to Fugazi. They were producing great music and doing it on their own terms. After the release of 24 Hour Revenge Therapy Jawbreaker would open for Nirvana on the In Utero tour. Accusations of sell-out flew, and people began looking at the band with the beady little suspicious eyes that the punk world loves peering at the world through. Rumors started flying that in no time the band would be signed to DGC the label that Nirvana was on, that this was the first step to their own rockstardom, and of course the chorus of sell-out grew louder. One defender of the band, Ben Weasel who still hasn't been excommunicated from Maximum RocknRoll for the heretical charges of allowing a song of his to appear on a major label produced soundtrack stood by the band and wrote in his column that he'd eat his hat if Jawbreaker signed to a major label. He ended up eating the hat. The band signed to DGC and released their most polished album. The album was a spectacular flop. The punk world turned their collective back on the band and the mainstream world didn't give a shit. It didn't help that the video and single the band released was for one of the two weakest songs on the album. The band ended up succumbing lackluster sales, criticism and infighting. Eventually one member of the band spat gum at another in the middle of an argument and that spat gum ended the band (I'm only adding this fact to show the evils of gum. Bad Blake!).

I'm slowly going somewhere with all of this. If Jawbreaker had released  this  song instead of "Fireman" I think they would have been huge. It would have been the anthem that songs like "Smells like Teen Spirit" and "Cherub Rock" were. The reason for all of this preamble is to share these couple of lines that come towards the end of "Save Your Generation":

You have to learn
to learn from your mistakes.
You can afford
to lose a little face.
The things you break,
some can't be replaced.
A simple rule:
every day be sure you wake.

One of the things DFW liked to point out in interviews is that we are bombarded with a massive amount of information and part of our goal is to make sense of all that information. The problem isn't how to absorb all of the information, because that is an impossible feat, it's how to choose what information we choose to filter in and out of our consciousness and what we choose to do with that information. I'm not talking about what kind of use value we can take from the information bombarding us, what the pragmatic value of the information is. That is an easy way to solve the problem, but it's not necessarily an option for everyone. It also leads to an alienation and objectification of the entire world. Everything is turned into a tool. This is a fine way to live, many people do it. Some people can't do this though, people who see the world in this way would never like this book, but that's ok because they probably will one day own really nice things. Another way out of the problem is to bombard oneself with something so endlessly diverting that no other information is necessary. Both solutions are putting tremendous limits on the uptake of information, and either deliberately or unconsciously limiting the world around us into super-easily manageable nuggets. At the other extreme is to be affected by everything and be so overwhelmed by the world that everything becomes white noise. Unfiltered receptions. Instead there has to be some kind of middle ground. And one could add, the middle ground needs to be made with awareness. One needs to remind oneself to wake up everyday.

I'd suggest that the structure of the book is designed to make the reader conscious of not necessarily the fact that s/he is reading a book, but to think about what the reader is reading. An easier book could be read in the way that the boys at the tennis academy squeeze the tennis balls constantly. There is no thought to the exercise. They are developing exaggerated muscles but it is through a mindlessness and it is a very localized improvement. One of my favorite passages (of which there are many) is the second person (ok, I could be wrong about this, maybe it's not in the second person, my memory of it is, but my memory is also very fallible) description of what it takes to succeed at tennis. The pain and repetition involved. The filtering out of everything aside from the focus at succeeding. Someone in this position reduces the world to a very manageable number of bytes a day, the success at tennis bytes. Just like the obsessive pothead reduces the world to a very manageable, things I need to do to smoke a shit ton of pot this weekend bytes. Just like the person watching The Entertainment reduces everything to the this is fucking entertaining (whatever It is) bytes.

This book is massive and overwhelming. It's a total onslaught of information. And the information is presented in a jarring manner. There is the non-sequential order of the narrative, there is the long sentences, the difficult language and of course the endnotes. A lot is put in front of the reader, there are a lot of characters to keep track of, thinking about when a scene is taking place in relation to other scenes in the books and this is made even more difficult by the use of corporate names to designate years. It's information overload.

And then the information the reader is presented with is hammered with the details DFW chooses to give. As expansive as the novel is it is also incredibly claustrophobic at times in it's interiority.

This novel isn't for everyone. I'd never recommend it to someone. I'm fairly certain I've never recommended it to anyone**. I think it takes a particular type of person to enjoy this book, and I think that this type of person is defined by how they experience the world and by what goes on in their head. Most importantly by what happens inside a person's head. I'm probably just projecting here, and I know that there are other types of people than myself that love this book too, but I don't think it's necessarily a happy and healthy person who is the type that this book is written for. I don't think happy and healthy people experience or want to slog through a barrage of reflexiveness. I'm not putting into words really what I'm thinking here. I'm missing the words right now. But this comes back to my ongoing repetition of the question why does one read?

For me, reading is work. Rarely, do I read for pure enjoyment, or to just kill some time or to escape. I don't find reading a sort of punishment and I enjoy it more than I enjoy anything else in this stupid world. I think of reading as an active activity, it's not something to narcotize to, and maybe that is a reason why I am baffled whenever I hear that someone reads when they are drunk or fucked up in someway. For me, being in a state like that would be to be too unaware. It might be really pathetic but my real experience with the world I live in is through books, they are frankly more interesting than most people, and the inner conversations and thoughts I have with the books I read are much more interesting than the ones I have with other flesh and blood people. This is my own failing, I'm a generally uninteresting person to talk to, I don't hold up my own weight in conversations, I stammer and I mispronounce words that I can hear correctly in my head but which my tongue wants nothing to do with, I pull verbal punches, my shitty hearing does a shitty job at making sense of everything other people say, my sentences stop abruptly mid-way through a thought as if I expect that whomever is talking to me will be able to fill in the gaps, I fail to say what I'm thinking and end up feeling like an idiot when I speak***. In a way of thinking reading is escapism for me, but it's an escape from the difficulties of dealing with real live people and having the kinds of dialogs I'll rarely have in real life (with maybe the exception of some of these reviews, but those aren't dialogs, those are rants and one-sided diatribes, but where the idea of votes are important not because I want to be popular but because they are the only way to know if some other person (possibly, it's always a possibility that all the votes are just clicked on without anyone having read a word of the review)) has read them, that the thoughts have been heard by another.

To leave my self-deprecating blabbering aside, or to use it for uses of good instead of just wallowing, it's partially because of the reasons I read that I find Infinite Jest to be so fucking good. It's a thousand plus pages of small details, of forcing myself to be even more aware than I usually am when reading, it's unanswered questions and openness in the text and clues. It's a self-contained world that can be read without having to bring any of the outside world necessarily into it (yes it helps to have say Hamlet in the back of your mind when reading certain scenes, but I was a shitty student in my English classes in High School so I totally missed the glaring Shakespeare reference in the title, or in Hal's name or in the graveyard scene. Facts like this just add some more richness to the book, but it's not necessary knowledge to enjoying the book), everything you need for the book is inside it. Unlike say Ulysses you don't need to have a firm background in Irish History to know what the hell is even going some of the time, everything and more is constructed and presented to the reader. Presented might be the wrong word. Presented makes it sound like everything is handed to the reader on a silver platter, which it's not, everything needed for the book is given to the reader but the reader has to meet the book at least half-way in putting it all together.

We, as a society, don't generally like things that put a demand on us to do that much of the work. There is no reason that anyone should feel they have to do that kind of work just to read a book. Even for the literary minded there is no reason that one should feel like they have to do that kind of work. It's a matter of wanting to read books that demand something of the reader of wanting to read something that demands our attention. There are plenty of excellent books out there that don't put these kinds of demand on us. Even personally I don't always want to be put through the rigmarole that a writer like DFW is asking for. Probably, almost every book of literature can be read with the demands that DFW is asking of the reader, but not every book is explicitly asking the reader to do so. Like, I'm sure The Corrections can be read really actively and a bunch of things can be pulled out of the text that a casual perusal of the book would miss, but it's also a book that can be read relatively passively. It's not a book asking much from us.

As a society, we like things to be given to us already in their manageably sized bytes.

In my parents downstairs, 'guest', bathroom there is a framed advertisement from the early 1960's for some Volvo (ignore the fact that there is a picture of a car in the bathroom for a moment). This ad isn't necessarily remarkable in anyway, but it is standing in for any advertisement from that era. The thing about the advertisement that stands out is the wordiness, there are paragraphs!!! of text to get the point across about the high level of safety concerns about Sweden and how those carry over into their automobiles. Paragraphs!!!. The advertisement takes a little bit of time to read. This is unheard of now. This advertisement is demanding a very low level of work from the viewer but still much more work to get to the message it's trying to convey than a modern ad in a magazine.

As a society, we like things to be given to us in very manageably sized bytes. Just think of the theory behind Twitter marketing where information is given to us in tiny little tweets****. When there is so much already half-digested bits of information already floating around just waiting for our retinas to pass over them and absorb the message without even having to break our stride why would someone stop to tackle something difficult and that demands we help out in the conveying of the information?


Infinite Jest is not a pragmatic book. It's not going to make you a better person for reading it. It won't answer life's questions, and it will possibly leave you with more questions coming out of it than going in. It's not an easy and light fun read. It probably wouldn't be the book you want to bring on the beach. It's tough to read on the subway and it's heavy so traveling with it can be a problem. You can't even easily say what the book is about when a curious person asks you "Whatcha reading?"

I'm going to wrap up this failure of a review. I wanted to write a positive review of Infinite Jest, I had actually been challenged to write a review of why I loved the book but I don't think I did that. I don't know exactly what this review is, maybe a long rambling something or other about the importance of paying attention to the world around you, to look at the details, to try to remember to wake up everyday even though it is easier to sleep off five year chunks at a time, and that there are loads of ways to do this seemingly simple task and in a way this book is a giant exercise in telling us to be more aware, to engage, to see the details even if sometimes the details just are the what the chemical compounds are in some commonly taken drug, it's the act of having to see there is something more than the commonly known, easily overlooked and empty-ish words to the world around us. And sometimes what we find there isn't that important but it's the act that is, not the guaranteed pragmatic results.

*In the case of Jawbreaker the love/hate relationship is generally only seen in the bands fans. In the case of DFW his fans generally love Infinite Jest and it is other works that are held in different opinions. While I acknowledge someone can be a big DFW fan and only like his non-fiction I personally think an enjoyment of Infinite Jest is essential to saying you like DFW.

**I could easily be wrong about this fact though.

*** FYI, I'm not fishing for compliments or for someone to say, no you aren't like that at all.

**** I was under the idea that a tweet was 256 characters of less, but I'm sure everyone knows that it is actually 140 characters or less. I was going to make a point about this being the reduction of manageable bytes down to one byte, where a byte is made up of 8 bits, and in the binary system this leads to there being 256 permutations of ones and zeros in a byte. Based on this metaphor though the manageable number of bytes in a tweet is less than a byte.


-------------------------------------
This is my original 'review'
I just read a comment on the LA Times story about his suicide, and it said, "the world's a shittier place now." I couldn't agree more. One of our true geniuses kills himself and some asshole douche bag like James Patterson or Nora Roberts will continue pumping out three or four novels a year. Fuck. The world is a shittier place.

Reading a book this complex and full of ideas in just two weeks is not an ideal basis for a review that adds anything to the wealth of opinion already available, so I'll get my apology out of the way and say that this is not a formal review, just a few personal impressions. Firstly on the challenges involved in reading it - it does require concentration and attention to detail, but at least for me I felt that attempting to look up everything I didn't fully understand would disrupt the flow too much, so my approach was a little impressionistic. I found it easier to follow than Ulysses, and about the same as Gravity's Rainbow.
I found it entertaining and infuriating and occasionally both - there are some brilliant comic set pieces, notably the eschaton game and its descent into violent anarchy, but there are also some passages that I found tedious and/or depressing, particularly the many horror stories about different forms of addiction. On the one hand Wallace has created a surprisingly consistent imaginary near future, but on the other he does seem to get details wrong from time to time, and his ideas of how technology would develop now seem a little quaint. Sometimes words get mangled deliberately to reflect the state of mind of a character, and the language is full of repeated leitmotif phrases (for example people don't die but they have their personal maps eliminated). Another repeated theme is fathers finding strange ways to die.
Overall I would say that I enjoyed it, it was an interesting and rewarding read, but I don't think it is quite as perfect as some of its advocates would have you believe, which is why I won't give it 5 stars.

It's now been more than two years since I began Infinite Jest and about 10 months since I finished it. In all that time, the scene that has stuck with me the most is one where a character, attempting to go to a 12-step meeting for a drug addiction, goes astray and ends up at what is actually a "men's movement" meeting. A relic of the 1990s, the men's movement was a chance for men to get together and show their sensitive sides to one another, or allow their inner warriors or their inner children to commune with each other, or some such thing—it was short-lived and I can't quite remember what its exact aim was. The joke is that it takes a while for the main character to figure out where he's ended up, but as the men take turns speaking, eventually the horror of the situation slowly dawns on him. Why this scene has stuck with me, I don't know—it's dated, it's trying way too hard to be funny, and it's got nothing to do with much of anything.

On the other hand, perhaps it's a perfect encapsulation of Infinite Jest itself, which, by and large, is dated, trying way too hard to be funny, and has nothing to do with much of anything.

As you may know, Infinite Jest has three storylines. One concerns a videotape (or "cartridge") that so addicts viewers that they can't stop watching it and, unable to do any of the things people normally do to stay alive, eventually perish. The master of this videotape is being sought by both U.S. government agencies and terrorist organizations. The second storyline concerns some kids at a tennis academy; the father of two of these kids, a famous filmmaker, is the creator of the aforementioned addictive cartridge. The third concerns a residential drug-rehab center near the tennis academy, one resident of which, Don Gately, could be considered the heart and soul of the book.

These three storylines do connect in some ways, and all of them have the potential to be interesting. But unfortunately, very little of the book lives up to this potential. Most of the scenes concerning the cartridge are tedious and repetitive. Most of the scenes concerning the tennis academy are tedious, although not quite as repetitive. Generally the only interesting scenes are the ones that involve Don Gately and the rehab center. Interspersed among all of these storylines are many, many tangents involving other minor characters; some of these scenes are interesting, most aren't, and all of them slow down the main stories. Also slowing down the main stories are the copious endnotes, which frequently force the narrative to come to a screeching halt, often for no good reason. In a way, it's a perfect book for people with no attention span, so perhaps DFW actually foresaw how the internet would lead to most of our reading being done in interruptive fragments. Unfortunately, this particular insight, if accurate, absolutely did not make the book any less exasperating to read.

The odd structure of Infinite Jest made me very curious about its editing process, so after I was finally done I picked up the DFW biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, where I learned that there was essentially no editing process for this book. DFW seemed to throw in every idea and bit of writing he'd ever had, adding up to hundreds and hundreds of pages, and his editor simply did his best to keep the book to a manageable length. Given that Infinite Jest is nearly 1100 pages including endnotes, I'd say the editor barely succeeded at that goal. What's more, the storylines don't really cohere and eventually—again, after many, many pages—just kind of fizzle out. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story attempted to explain the book's structure, such as it is, and I'm going to try to paraphrase as well as I can: Picture a map of a state with all the counties marked. One county is a particular scene in the book. The book next travels to an adjacent county/scene, which has some connection to the first but is its own separate thing. Then the book travels to another adjacent county/scene, and so on. So all the counties/scenes are connected to at least one additional county/scene, but obviously there's not only no linearity here; there's no cohesive narrative in any way. Most themes, characters, and situations don't go back and make any of the connections you might hope for. Which might be OK if every county was a worthwhile place to be in, but that's not the case. Out of nearly 1100 pages, I would say maybe 300 or 400 are worth reading. Do the math and figure out if you've got that kind of time.

As I mentioned, the best parts of the book, for me and, it seems, for many other readers, are the scenes with Don Gately in the rehab center. There is a lot of wisdom about addictions dispensed here, and it's mostly riveting stuff. I assumed this was DFW sharing what he'd learned when he himself was in a similar rehab, but I turned out to be wrong—per Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, Don Gately was actually based on someone DFW knew in rehab, and Gately's wisdom comes courtesy of this real person, who was none too pleased to learn that DFW had used him in this way. So some of the best parts of the book didn't really come from its author's own imagination or thought process, but rather from a powerless, disenfranchised, working-class person DFW cribbed off of. As you might imagine, learning this did little to increase my esteem for Infinite Jest.

This book is ambitious, for sure, but not ambitious enough. As other reviewers have noted, all of the characters, regardless of age, education, or background, sound pretty much the same. They sometimes use the same language, even when they've never met each other before—for a while everyone was saying "diddled," for example, and then later on everyone was saying "dickied," then, if I recall correctly, "kertwang." I have no idea if this was intentional or just lazy, but it certainly read as the latter to me. The language is also often exceedingly juvenile (the acronym "ONAN," for example, or a Japanese manufacturer called "Yushitu"). DFW also has a fondness for tweaking well-known expressions, so, for instance, "under the table" becomes "sub-table" and "upwardly mobile" becomes "mobilely upward." It's entirely possible this sort of thing seemed more clever back in the 1990s.

The upshot is that instead of a really good 400-page book that the author had worked hard on revising and improving, we have a behemoth that can't stay focused on anything long enough to make a true impact. Oddly, DFW seems to realize this: Several times he includes a telling line or two. When considering the famous filmmaker's oeuvre, one character muses, "Technically gorgeous.... But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness—no narrative movement toward a real story.... like a very smart person conversing with himself." Or this line, regarding a random character who appears for a moment: "the girl had a terrible time ever separating details from what was really important to a story." Or this one, about the filmmaker's work again: "is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film's audience... aroused for some theoretical aesthetic end, or is Himself [the filmmaker] simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff?"

Indeed. That DFW seems to recognize these shortcomings in his own work, and actually include them in the narrative, is kind of cute and clever, I guess. But what would have been really great is if he'd actually addressed those shortcomings and come up with a book that was worthy of both his own obvious talents AND the reader's time and investment. Instead what we have is a novelist who insists on getting in his own way over and over again, and a missed opportunity as gargantuan as is the novel itself.

Reading Infinte Jest reminded me of some very dysfunctional world-wind romances I survived. Don't mistake the word survive as analogous to almost killing me. It's more that those relationships were like roller coaster rides. I'm going to take some dramatic license, combine a few relationships, and make some things up in order to get my point across.

Imagine a six-to-twelve month relationship with a beautiful, smart, articulate and athletic woman or man depending upon what your chosen, in this case, sickly poison may be. You date this woman. You fall in love fast. She is all the things I mentioned above. The relationship goes from 0-100mph in no time. Never trust love that comes that fast; it usually comes from a place of desperate need, a place of deep dysfunction. Dinners get spoiled due to drunken rages, family gatherings ruined due to her parents having some serious substance abuse issues as well. You try and end it, but you can't. You have your own issues that work quite nicely with hers. And she won't let you. The makeup sex is just about the best thing you've ever experienced. Hours run by as you talk to her about everything: world politics, family relationships, suicide, drugs and alcohol, sports.

But all that is good goes bad again. You're mesmerized by her beauty, but she can't stay sober. That ruins everything. What's a guy to do? The love of your life is also your nemesis.

N.B. You can experience this relationship, should you choose, vicariously and at your own pace by reading Infinite Jest.

But that's what the novel is: a roller coaster of beautiful, exciting, frustrating and loving dysfunction. Apparently, David Foster Wallace wanted to write books that made people feel less alone. He succeeded. I felt like he was in the room with me. His dysfunctions interlaced with mine. This was perhaps the most intimate relationship, good and bad, I've ever had with a writer. I recommend it, if you are willing to go on the journey I mentioned above. Why not? Are you prepared to spend some months with a highly gifted and deeply flawed individual. You won't forget it, but there are times when you may regret it. In hindsight, you may say, "wow that was fun, but I'm not doing it again." I doubt you will say, " I wish I never did that."