n  

And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void.
And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep.
And We said:
Look at that fucker Dance

nReal life is a pain. Real life is a bitch. Real life slumps you together from a squiggly mess and shoots you out to a cold and unfeeling world, empty in mind and soul. So you scrounge around for meaning, whatever fulfills your personal definition of said meaning, eyes gaping for that next slice of indomitable thrills and chills, mouth pincering over a statue in repose, your next served up fresh and toasty piece of Entertainment ready and waiting to fulfill your infinitesimal spout of pure pleasure.

And always you forget the trap, that whatever may keep your brain in thrall doesn't necessarily do anything for your heart, and you fill that deceivingly compact skull of yours with a weave of disappointed memories of the past and existential dread concerning the future. You don't even need to know what 'existential' means, it'll latch on to your cranium and enjoy itself in your spent neurons just as well. Knowing the word just makes your coping mechanisms developed in response to living seem a little more validated.

DFW knew this. Not only did he know this, he was courageous enough to proclaim that he knew this from the highest rooftop, spilling out a novel that scoffs, declaims, and drowns the old conventions of making life this easy whore that only requires adherence to paper to make itself completely tangible and understandable in every way. Newsflash: That is Entertainment, Entertainment with a capital E, followed by the Infinite Jest, long lines of seconds bleeding themselves dry with gags, jokes, puns, witty remarks, comedic outbursts, impressive logistical maneuverings of physical feats, "I got that reference!", grasping in the dark after a fleeting feeling of actually being able to feel. It is not Life.

We live in a country in continuous denial, this United States of ours, where the words "depression" and "suicide" are met with brief uneasy titters and a quick skittering to the nearest source of short stem happiness. I mean, really. Who could possibly be unsatisfied in this First World conglomerate of ours, where the water is cheap and the food cheaper, everything clean and crisp and catered and tailored and custom built for even the most persnickety of personalities? Oh, you say you're not feeling well? Well, your temperature's drawn up at the right line, your lungs are clear of fluid, no physical aches to be registered on any limb or crevice. No need for a tox screen, it's obvious that since you are athletic and intelligent and your family is well adjusted, it's impossible that you would even consider recreational drugs. It just wouldn't make sense.

And when these people are forced up close to those with intimate knowledge of the difference between hip-ennui and 'It'; the obvious mismatch of an unsatisfactory sex life and a rabid Spider masquerading as your own Personal Nightmare that has somehow escaped the sewers and lodged itself in your frontal lobe. A hawk in the sky and a handsaw on the nightstand. These people, they shame the "psychotically depressed", they box the sufferers up in a cynical outlook that doesn't allow them to treat their condition seriously, and the barest glimpse of a true outburst of "feeling" is quickly carted away and shut up in the walls of their own imagined loony bin. You call attempted suicides "Cries for Attention", after refusing to listen to anything else. And don't blame this on the availability of therapy. That's another bucket of worms entirely.

So what does the average, normal, not "psychotically depressed" individual do? Well, they have been blessed with a stable brain chemistry that is sufficiently satisfied with their addictions, enough to never entertain any ideas of going off the deep end, physically or otherwise. Course, they may feel the niggle of something not being right in their daily scheme, one that is vaguely persistent but easily squashed with another movie, another book, another morning run, another sandwich, another drink, another shot, another shooting up, another beating, another brown out, another black out, another spree of giving linear time the finger. It's hardly fair to complain about nonlinear narratives when you seem so desperate to avoid the concept yourself.

Life is a mess of half remembered instances and disjointed narratives, stream of conscious not being very concerned for its very few spectators. What good is a writing a novel portraying Life, if its main goal is to make sense?

Give me a ride compromised by emotion, drugs, unreliable narrators spilling their guts to a psychedelic riddle that crosses consciousness and space-time continuum. Give me unrelenting displays of cruelty and abuse and subsequent coping mechanisms whose effects are just as vicious as their causes, and sprinkle them with laugh out loud moments clouded by the memories of the aforementioned atrocities. Give me recognition that the brain is an organ just as unwieldy and unreliable as the heart or the kidney, and thinking your way out of something is sometimes the worst possible decision you could ever make. Give me the paragon of masculinity breaking down into snotty sobs in front of an openly weeping crowd of fellow human beings, in a system that cannot possibly work until it does. Give me the revival of hope in mankind, embodied in the briefest touch between one masquerading as the dregs of society, and one unaware of their hopeless plight to a heartrending degree. Give me miscommunication on a truly horrendous scale, conversers following their own narratives with minuscule attention paid to their conversees, many pairs of these circling in a room with no clear and singular "plot". Give me an apocalyptic attempt at righting this miscommunication. Give me a Truth that will have its way with me that I didn't realize I desperately craved until I am lying on the floor, breathless and aching with tears flowing freely down my cheeks, stunned in the realization that I am not the only one.

Keep your "Hipster Lit Flow Chart". It has no place here.

Infinite Jest is the only book I've read that has negative stars, a physical anomaly in which adjacent books on the bookshelf would have their star rating lowered just by being in the general vicinity of this supposed masterpiece by David Foster Wallace.

Seriously though, I have never been so let down by a book that came so highly recommended and with so much hype.

This book is claimed to be Important and Profound, and perhaps also Entertaining in a Waiting for Godot kind of way.

Unfortunately, this book has none of these qualities. It is an incredibly long, tedious exercise in absurdity. Its tedium is matched only by its pretentiousness.

If ever there were a book that needed a good editor, this is it. Unfortunately, after editing out the pretentious nonsense, there would be nothing left to publish.

The only jest here is on the reading public, who were apparently duped by DFW into believing there is anything worthwhile in this volume.

Negative five stars. Other books in the vicinity, beware, and hold onto your stars tightly!

«Vivere nel Presente tra due battiti», a volte.

[2 ottobre 2012]
Un mese dalla fine, e cosa mi è rimasto di Infinite Jest?
Un gran peso tra cuore e stomaco, un senso generale di inadeguatezza, a trecentossessanta gradi: inadeguata per questa lettura, inadeguata per questo mondo, inadeguata persino per me stessa, a volte.
Un senso di solitudine, come quella di Kate Gompert, un dolore lancinante che non si può raccontare, descrivere né vincere, ma solo vivere e condividere, a volte.
Un senso di speranza, come quella di Don Gately, che non smette mai di lottare, perché nessuna dipendenza può essere per sempre, basta avere la forza e il coraggio per riuscire a trovare «lo spazio tra due battiti dl cuore», e andare avanti, ancora, a volte.
Un senso di vuoto, ancora una volta, perché accidenti a te David Foster Wallace, sei una droga, fai male ma non riesco a smettere di leggerti, e vorrei che tu fossi ancora qui per continuare a intrattenermi; ma solo a volte perché so già che sempre non ce la farei mai.
Che sia questo lo scherzo infinito?

29 Agosto 2012 h 16.25 Roma 27° - (in)Finito!

Non ci penso proprio a scrivere un commento, proprio no.
Almeno non un commento finito, non ora, sarà infinito anche questo.

«La paura del dolore è molte volte peggiore del dolore del dolore, n'est ce-?»
«Certe volte mi chiedo come fa uno con la tua costituzione Panglossiana a capire quando ti dicono una bugia, Booboo. Tipo quale criterio usi. Intuizione, induzione, riduzione, quale?»
«Diventi sempre difficile da capire quando stai su un fianco e ti appoggi sul gomito in questo modo.»
«Forse non ti viene neanche in mente. Neanche la possibilità. Forse non ti è mai passato per la testa che qualcosa possa essere inventato. Nascosto.»
«Cosa Hal?»
«E forse questa è la chiave. Forse allora tu credi così completamente a tutto quello che ti viene detto che, in pratica, diventa vero in transito. Vola nell'aria verso di te, inverte il suo spin e quando arriva a te è vero, per quanto fosse mendace quando era uscito dall'altra persona…»
«…»
«Sai Boo, ho scoperto che la gente mente in vari modi, ma sempre in modi ben precisi. Forse non riesco a cambiare lo spin come ci riesci tu, ma cerco di crearmi una specie di guida per riconoscere tutti i modi»
«Non fidarti ma di un uomo quando parla dei suoi genitori.
Per quanto alto e grande possa essere da uomo, continuerà comunque a vedere i suoi genitori dalla prospettiva di un bambino piccolo, e sarà sempre così. E quanto meno felice sarà stata la sua infanzia, tanto più bloccata sarà la sua prospettiva su di essa. Lei questo l'ha imparato con l'esperienza. [...] Comunque non ci si può neanche fidare dei genitori quando si ricordano dei loro figli.»
«Ma non è la stessa cosa. La scelta, capisci. In un certo senso rovina tutto. Con la televisione eri obbligato alla ripetizione. La familiarità ti veniva inflitta. Ora è diverso.»
«Usa meno parole»

Bellissimo dialogo tra Don Gately e Joelle VD, apparentemente sconnesso ma pieno di tutto quel dolore, spesso inspiegabile, che molte persone si portano dentro.

Potrebbe essere così,




O così




O anche così.



[Inizio lettura 29 giugno 2011]
Verso l'infinite e oltre!
Ci si riprova, ma questa volta con il sostegno di un gruppo di lettura ben collaudato.
Ci faremo compagnia almeno fino a Natale :-)
Qui  i commenti dopo la lettura della prima parte (100 pagine in una settimana o quindici giorni a seconda del ritmo di lettura scelto da ogni partecipante).

[2 novembre 2007]
Non ce l'ho fatta, ma giuro che lo ricomincerò, prima o poi :-)

That's it, I'm demoting this one back to the TO-READ shelf - my pal Nick recently said he's changed the status of some intended time-consuming jobs from "when I retire" to "when I'm reincarnated" - maybe I'll read IJ in the next life, although as I intend to be a mighty elm tree in my next life that may prove difficult, but maybe you don't get to choose what you are, you just line up like at the bank or the post office and you go to a middle aged woman behind a wire mesh and she says "Okay honey here's the Form 27B, fill it all in, front AND back, and take it to the Next Life section over there - you've been assigned to CRUSTACEA - how do you like that! Enjoy! Wiggle wiggle!"

Anyway, I wasn't really reading this, I was just picking it up and sighing and putting it down. So it was slightly useful because otherwise I do very little physical exercise.

By the way, what's with the Beatle quote on page 32? (Hah, see how far I got?)

"I want to tell you" the voice on the phone said, "my head is filled with things to say"

"I don't mind," Hal said softly, "I could wait forever."

I hope you all spotted that one!


********

There's a whole essay on the literature of endurance to be written, maybe someone has considered this somewhere, all about those famously-difficult-but-brilliant books and their readers. How we love and loathe them. Or maybe just loathe them because we have this obligation laid on us by ... who? ... the Illuminati of Deliberate Unpunctuation? the Knights Templar of the Ten-Page Paragraph? Which are these books, aside from IJ?

- all of Samuel Beckett
- Finnegans Wake (some would say Ulysses too)
- Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage sequence (does anyone anywhere EVER read that one?)
- the three late great brainkilling Henry James novels (Wings of the Dove, Ambassadors & Golden Bowl)
- Marcel Proust and his 40 page sentences (although some on this site clearly find him easy peasy lemon squeezy and they present their arguments with vim and panache)
- all of Thomas Bernhard, that's a personal choice
- Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom

And this is also very true of movies too - there's a whole raft of films which I'd class as the Cinema of Endurance too such as

- Irreversible
- Funny Games
- Passion of Christ
- Cannibal Holocaust
- Texas Chainsaw Massacre (at the time anyway)
- Exorcist (I'd say still up there)
- Antichrist
- Pasolini's Salo (film version of 120 days of Sodom)
- Martyrs
- I Spit on your Grave
- Fellini Satyricon and others because of the extreme boredom levels

and you could extend the idea into the Music of Endurance with stuff like

- Metal Machine Music, Lou Reed
- Trout Mask Replica, Captain Beefheart (personally I like it, but I can see some wouldn't)
- The Ring Cycle
- anything by Big Black
- anything by Celine Dion - no, seriously, I think the Music of Endurance is a much harder concept because very clearly one woman's wild salmon over young leeks softened in oil, garlic and basil with grilled zuccini garnished with fresh pear, pickled daikon and cucumber broth is another man's turkey twizzler.

What say you? Do you resent being obliged to endure?

Infinite Jest is about suicide, which gets mentioned 56 times, or about once every 20 pages. So it's tempting, given that - spoiler - Wallace totally demapped himself, to see it as a suicide note. But it's about all this other shit too, right? Addiction, and mothers, and the weight of potential, and assassins in wheelchairs, and tennis. If Wallace had suddenly become a tennis star instead of dead we would look back on this book and be like man...we should have seen that coming. That shit was all about tennis.

Nobody really wants to like Infinite Jest, because it's a fixation of all the most annoying dudes you know. But it is a super good book, unfortunately. Here's how to like it.

DFW was super good at actually writing
Check out two similar scenes. In one, Hal & Orin have a long phone call where they tackle a bunch of important family history, and during most of it Pemulis is standing around getting impatient because Hal is supposed to go do something with his friends, and it adds this weird indirect tension that makes the scene pop. In another scene, Pemulis goes into this long-ass description of annulation, which is some kind of expository "this happens in the future" shit, and it would be boring but the kid he's talking to is blindfolded and has to pee wicked bad (don't ask) and again there's this palpable tension from the weirdest source. What this is is a magic trick. It's a pretty good one.

Wallace doesn't avoid his pop influences. Dude likes Stephen King. The fight scene featuring Gately - as far as pure plot goes, the climax of the book - is straight up thrilling. Riveting. If Wallace wanted to (and had like a million fewer demons), he could have just been a potboiler writer and sold a million books.

He's a virtuoso and he gets virtuosic sometimes, okay. There's a lengthy scene in the cafeteria, describing things like the way muscles look when they chew, that's just..."Okay bitches, here is some motherfucking writing." He describes basically the entire cafeteria, its social structure, everyone in it, the history of the things on the walls, down to the way chewing works muscularly...look, I love Eruption, which happened solely because Eddie Van Halen was capable of doing it. Go on with one's bad self, right? You can't do it, so shut up. You're watching something happen here.

He was very smart and everything
The math in IJ is generally accurate; here's a rundown of the few mathematical errors in it. Wallace wrote a nonfiction book about infinity and I guess reviewed a couple of math books; he knew his stuff. And there's the dizzying display of medical expertise on display, which made me suspect he was pre-med at some point. (He was not.) A real old-school polymath here, huh?

And of course he was pretty good at English...here's a Slate piece on his apparently famous syllabi (links to actual PDFs included in article). And here's a list of all the words someone learned from the book, including the note that "my spellchecker is telling me that 129 of these words aren’t real words." Not sure if that number is accurate - spellcheck often misses difficult words - but we can all confirm that he did make words up with impunity.

It's pretty much fun to read
Ending spoilers: It ends fine, shut up. You know as much as you need to. What, you've never read a book that didn't end with that freeze-frame shit from Animal House?

Okay, I was a little disappointed at Chekhov's Giant Mutant Toddler's failure to appear. Although I guess that was just Gately anyway? Whatever: I wanted a literal Giant Mutant Toddler.

It's as good as it's supposed to be, and with the weight of its reputation that's really good. It's funny and terrifying and hysterically realistic and Wallace lays himself right open: it's an absolute refusal to be coy or ironic or guarded. It's a rock-you-on-your-heels book. It's the shit.

This is my point:
Infinite Jest took me two full weeks longer to read than fucking Bleak House did, and Bleak House has many more slow parts. This isn't a minor commitment; it's a whole relationship. Infinite Jest wants to meet your parents, and it's gonna be awkward because it's got this weird shit about mothers. But it is worth it, honest.

PS if you want to see what Eschaton looks like, here's a Decemberists video. Thanks Nicole for pointing me to it.

* Read this book on Kindle. Don't worry about the footnotes. I mean, read them, but don't worry about it being hard on Kindle; it'll be fine. More importantly, Kindle will let you look up all the words you don't know, and if you think you know all the words you are an asshole. And the point is, "opi" is probably not a word but if Wallace can make shit up so can I, which isn't true.

n  

n    Sí, soy paranoico, pero ¿soy lo bastante paranoico?n  

n

New video coming soon!

Previous video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOcMm...

Anybody who completes THE "Infinite Jest" automatically receives a medal! Really. Just read every single (fuh-cking!) word from beginning til the end, you get an award. & that's what THIS IS, basically. A badge of honor. Bragging rights. A Privilege. The experience which is so much like ogling the Mona Lisa live at the Louvre for the first time: you can already envision her in your mind. & you know what it is, even before you get to stand before it.

The literary equivalent of chasing the magic dragon. Just keeping at something--this being a very complex and cranial novel--like some zombie to get you absolutely nowhere. This is like a more insufferable Beckett in that at least Beckett's implaus-o-ramas have an ending. But here, get ready to get nowhere. Nowhere, not fast, but slowwwly. (Moments of "Eureka! I've found something concrete at last... Finally, a location upon which to hang"--it's all very brief [ha!] and ethereal to grasp. Like some interesting but fleeting aroma.) The main driving force for the reader is to traverse the plot like some intrepid trekker--here, that motivation is eradicated & what we are left with is one fat big juicy "?".

The premise? That we live in a systematic place where components are controlled (by family, substances, life). The back and forth between the school and the rehab embody a game of tennis (emblematic "system" used to symbolize coming-of-age as well as the myriad needlepoint philosophies that go with it). No patterns arise! Yet the reader has (always) his wants. That you don't matter in the enterprise is what ultimately spoils this experience for me. The writer has very consciously tried to build a sturdy monolithic castle from individual grains of dry sand. An impossible endeavor, but it must be witnessed. The things that stick out are the sordid details: the head in the microwave, the shot in the face; the molestation of little boys, of invalids; a hanging fetus.

If you say I.J. is the future of the novel, you definitely haven't read 1936's "Gone with the Wind." Almost a full century old, that tome really justifies its girth (like "Lonesome Dove" & "The Stand" do, like "Don Quixote" & "Les Miserables" eons ago). I understand the allure of this, really, I do, but HOW MANY DIFFERENT WAYS CAN YOU SAY THE EXACT SAME THING? Definitely not in 1088 pages! But maybe eighty-eight.

Bottom line: this novel really gave me a serious case of the "howling fantods."

I'll admit, I only made it about 1/3 of the way through before my arms gave out and I dropped it in the tub.

آپدیت (ژانویه‌ی ۲۰۲۴):
می‌خواستم نسخه‌ی فارسی رو اضافه کنم به خونده‌های خودم؛ هر کاری کردم نشد. راستش نسخه‌ی چاپی رو که ورق زدم، هر جا رو نگاه می‌کردم می‌دیدم می‌دونم کجاست و موقع ترجمه و ویرایشش کجا بوده‌ام. تاریخچه‌ی شخصیه برام. گذاشتمش توی قفسه و دیگه نرفته‌م سراغش. به نظرم می‌آد بالأخره می‌تونم نقطه بذارم برای این کتاب و نگاه کنم ببینم حیاتش به فارسی چطور پیش می‌ره.
عزیزترینِ کتاب‌هاست برای من، و غریب‌ترین تجربه‌ای که با یه کتاب داشته‌ام ــ که احتمالاً دیگه تکرار نمی‌شه.

***
Update (April 2021): now that I’ve translated it, I’m much more positive I’ll never move on from this affair.

***
(May 2016):
It was an on-and-off thing, my relationship with Infinite Jest. 26 months of excitement, joy, boredom, misunderstanding, anger, laughter, sadness, confusion, shock, frustration, ecstasy, fuck-you-i-am-not-playing-this-game-anymore, OK-lets-have-another-try, etc. And now that it's over, I feel this urge to start it all over again.
I guess I'll never move on from this Infinite thing of Mr. Wallace.

Six stars minus one because I feel like DFW wanted it that way, that he (who can clearly do anything) consciously engineered its lackluster end -- "a failed entertainment" was the original subtitle.

Sometimes thought it was as good as it gets, sometimes better than the best it gets. Other times I was lost but cruising ahead to get to the good as it gets parts. Disappointed in the last 100 pages or so. Wasn't into the footnotes. I think it's intentionally constructed to "fail," to let the reader down as an "entertainment," to create in the reader the sort of sadness that comes with unfulfilled expectations, a sadness felt by all the characters, a fundamentally American sadness that's the jester's gist?

The book is structured (DFW says it's structured like a Sierpinski Gasket -- google it) like the Eschaton game played at the tennis academy, a game based on a NORAD nuclear wargame simulation. No winners, impossibly complicated, massive (fictional) destruction everywhere.

Loved the characters. Loved the more conventional scenes. Loved the discursive parts re: depression, suicide, marijuana addiction. Loved the endlessly creative digressions, even when endlessly horrific. Loved the play on the oft-parodied Bergman playing-chess-with-Death thing: here it's Hal playing chess on the run (ie, tennis) with Ortho "The Darkness" Stice in all-black Fila gear. Loved that "Madame Psychosis" suggests that significant word in Ulysses ("metempsychosis"). Loved, most of all, the simple writerly descriptions, the kick-ass similes, the good ol' artistic amplification of perception. Loved that Mario isn't fully described til about page 610. Could go on endlessly about awesome qualities, and could definitely go on for a bit about its drawbacks (beyond the ebonics section) . . .

In 1997, I almost bought a signed first edition hard cover in a Barnes and Noble in downtown Boston. Should've. Alas. Hmmm. Ultimately: lots and lots of love for this but also feel let down a little. And whether it's intentional or not, it's still left me saddened, the way the story sort of falls off toward the end, sort of like what's happened to everyone's expectations of a lifetime of reading new essays and novels and stories by the man, which I guess is also what happens to everyone's expectations for everything as they age and inevitably die?

Also, it needs to be said that while walking home from work reading IJ, while waiting for a light to change, some mid-20s nerd-chic bicyclist (surely a recent liberal arts school english major grad) passed me then doublebacked and accompanied me as I crossed the street, asking what section I was on, saying it was his favorite book, he'd read it a bunch of times -- it almost seemed like he wanted to hug me for reading it while walking across Washington Avenue (a very uncommon demonstration of bookish brotherly love in Philadelphia -- and a really good indication of this book's greatness).

It's definitely a book that fills the world, enhances perception, introduces into one's e-mails extraneous conversational mimetic tics like sort of and kind of and and so but then. Addictive prose styling. Funny that "funny" isn't really among the top 10 adjectives I'd use to describe this, though there are some serious LOLs.

Anyway, really excellently awesome and over- and underwhelming in a (I think intentionally) heartbreaking way: after 981 pages plus footnotes you're left on the beach with the tide way out (DFW apparently loved Larkin and Larkin's most famous lines are probably: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad . . . Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself": http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar...)

Easily one of my favorite contemporary writers before I read this, which only advanced his standing in the LK canon.

Required listening: http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/b...

Definitely must re-read one day . . .

While I don't actually have A Favorite Book (or Song, or Album, or Band, or Film, or Painting, or Sexual Position, or any other category of things that contain more than one equally great contender) Infinite Jest is the first book that immediately comes to mind when the idea of My Favorite Book arises.

As I've already alluded to and partially instantiated in a few scattered places around GoodReads, I feel that I read this book at the right time. The contingent particulars which culminated as the temporal whole that was My Life converged with my reading of this book rather beautifully.

First of all, I had zero knowledge of the book and author before and throughout my reading. I came upon it as a babe in the woods in these regards. I was completely unaware of its popular and largely positive critical reception seven years prior in 1996. For this I am grateful. It's all too easy to hop on the backlash bandwagon when "critical darlings" and "it-people" of the moment emerge on your radar. I take great pains to try to avoid this kind of thing, but it's not easy.

I also was juggling a variety of ongoing, confused trains of thought about the basic subjects that the book focuses on—to boil them down as far as relevantly and reasonably possible: Addiction, Entertainment, and Western Culture, specifically that of the modern US of A. I was also deep in the trenches of "stomach-level sadness."{1}
____________________________________________

{1} What were you intending to do when you started this book?

I wanted to do something sad. I'd done some funny stuff and some heavy, intellectual stuff, but I'd never done anything sad. And I wanted it not to have a single main character. The other banality would be: I wanted to do something real American, about what it's like to live in America around the millennium.

And what is that like?

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

I had borrowed the copy that I read the first time around from my best friend at the time, who I'd been close with since early childhood. I'd been confiding some existential angst to him about depression and the exacerbation of said depression with miscellaneous self-medicating behavioral patterns. He responded by solemnly handing me a thick book wrapped in the image of white cumulus clouds imposed upon a bright blue sky.

Cut to the summer of 2004: I'd just finished my first year of real (not community) college and was working on the buildings and grounds crew around the campus in exchange for eight dollars an hour and a free room. I spent the days doing all manner of maintenance and grunt work and my nights poring over this book and dramatically rediscovered the joys of falling head first into a fictional world and the redemptive value of communing with the consciousness of another person through reading and writing. I also found another artist to feel a deep kinship with and solely through the type of communion that is mediated by pulped trees and ink. Wallace was rather quickly inducted into the ever-expanding (and occasionally contracting) roster that is my pantheon of personal heroes, and as such also rapidly ascended through the ranks to sit somewhere vaguely near the zenith point (again, the trouble with ranking).

I was hooked in a big way by the time I hit upon the scene describing the torturously self-conscious, self-doubting thoughts of a cannabis addict named Ken Erdedy. This was well before the hundredth page mark. It perfectly captured the mind of a hyper-analytic depressive and compulsive THC ingestor. From the sorrowfully resigned glee (that all minutely self-aware addicts feel at various points along the path of Addiction) of planning a two week long "marijuana vacation"{2} to the descriptions of how depressing having sex with someone would be in such an excessively stoned and self-loathing state.{3}
____________________________________________

{2} Consisting mainly of drawing the blinds, shutting off the phone, being perpetually intoxicated with pot smoke, watching films, vigorously masturbating, and loads of fractally expanding and contracting shame and despair lurking beneath it all and frequently bursting through the surface for greedy gulps of oxygen and one-on-one time with the vacationer’s psyche. This planning is all being done in the context of desperately attempting to find a way to finally pluck the compulsive behavior (getting high) from his life—excessive use of the demonized substance is rationalized as the savior, the one thing that will finally make him disgusted enough to quit forever.

{3} "He had never once had actual intercourse on marijuana. Frankly, the idea repelled him. Two dry mouths bumping at each other, trying to kiss, his self-conscious thoughts twisting around on themselves like a snake on a stick while he bucked and snorted dryly above her, his swollen eyes red and his face sagging so that its slack folds maybe touch, limply, the folds of her own loose sagging face as it sloshed back and forth on his pillow, its mouth working dryly." (pp. 22-23)
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There's simply too much—too many amazing scenes and characters—to even begin the process of surgically removing them, holding them up to the light of the review, and rendering them vague enough to maintain some requisite mystery and yet contextualized enough to give each pinned down specimen some mouth-watering OOMPF! for the Dear Reader. It simply cannot be done. (People can cast their gaze in the direction of the myriad collegiate dissertations already written about this book and/or a book called n  Elegant Complexityn if they want in-depth analysis.) Luckily, many of the people I know who will read this review have already read the novel.

So there's a terrible type of rumor that roams around about this book, and Wallace more generally, and these sentiments can be rounded up and boiled down to "It's all PoMo trickery and no heart." Wrong. So very, very wrong. I’ve always seen this book as the emergent property/locus of a web-like arrangement of profoundly emotionally compelling portraits of people, places and things. This is its core, its essence, its fundamental organizing principle. Yes, there are some gags, like footnotes and some funny names, but what the naysayers seem to overlook are the hundreds of seismically moving descriptions of human struggles and triumphs; from the head-clutchingly/jaw-gapingly dramatic to the very recognizably monotonous (which can be very edifying, this process of recognition); from the painfully, inherently private and singular to the monumentally universal and public.

Wallace's desire to write a sorrowful book is fully realized here. I think it’s safe to say that this a tragedy—in the Shakespearean{4} sense of the term—and that it, like the greatest tragedies, does not simply pummel you with darkness but pokes holes of humor and joy through the opaque veil to allow for some breathing room. Indeed, there are some extremely funny things going on in this book and it’s mostly a darker shade of humor that is employing them. Not at all like putting a clown nose on a prisoner being executed or anything—DFW is much more naturally funny than that—but a beautiful balance of the genuinely sad, the genuinely funny and the instances of absurdity where both overlap.
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{4} FYI: The title comes from a line in Hamlet, "Alas, poor Yorick!—I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."
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I also think of this book as mostly embodying a style of realism, though there are occasionally some rather extraordinary things taking place as well. What I'm trying to stress is that it’s not some non-stop ride of wacky gimmicks and metafiction (which is strangely—and mistakenly—the impression some blurbs give of this book). Beneath the hilarious absurdity of things like business corporations annually purchasing the names of the year (which is a brilliant gag, by the way) there is a massive foundation of stark realism and humanism perched stoically beneath, and it's all just slightly, artfully tweaked in ways that makes you wonder how this or that instance of absurdity is really much different from the absurdity faced in your slice of the non-fictional world that you inhabit. I’ll go ahead and just state it plainly: referring to our units of measurement, like our neat bundles of 365 days, as things like "Year of the Adult Depends Undergarment" or "Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar" is less insane than the very real concept of corporate personhood.

As far as self-referentiality and the use of metafictional techniques are concerned, I simply see none of it. Nowhere are we "cleverly" "reminded" that we're reading a book—at least not explicitly. Nowhere is that little wink and nudge of "This is a book/I am an author writing a book" ever inserted into the prose. This was something Wallace very consciously avoided along with a species of irony that he’s referred to as being representative of n  "the song of a bird who’s come to love its cage."n

I've discussed this with Bram before and he makes some mention of DFW’s self-consciousness seeping through the pages of Infinite Jest in his wonderful, if slightly less religiously devoted review. Bram’s point seems to be more so that Wallace’s voice throughout the novel is very much his voice (the same type of charge gets launched at DeLillo, as I briefly covered elsewhere). This is indisputable. The thing is this: it doesn’t bother me in the least because, as Bram writes on the subject of DFW’s voice, "Whatever his reason for writing this way, it works because this voice is such a joy to read." Amen, brother Bram.

Indeed, I found it to be such a joy that I didn’t even notice this fact about the prose-style in either my first or second reading. I don’t mind that the thoughts of a physically deformed and mentally challenged teenager are narrated with the same voice as the thoughts of a clinically depressed thirtysomething woman, or a wheelchair-bound Québécoise assassin, or the prettiest (veiled) girl of all time, or an alcoholic experimental filmmaker and his childhood self, et cetera.

The book is written from a completely third-person perspective, too. This is an important fact to note. Had Wallace tried to cram his voice into first-person perspectives of the characters it would’ve been an unpublishable disaster. But he didn’t, it wasn't, so let's get over it and just come to grips with what it means to write from the third-person perspective. In sum, this book is proof positive, by my lights, that characters don’t have to take on wildly different tones of voice and manners of thought and speech in order to be rendered deeply sympathetic and compelling.

For most of the book the prose is so pitch-perfect and the on-page action so arresting that I simply didn’t make a note of this just-now-mentioned technical stuff about perspective, tonal-shifts, and so on. There are some relative lulls, like some of the extended descriptions of tennis matches, but on the vastly larger slice of the pie chart the book remains extremely entertaining, thought-provoking, tear-duct-lubing, belly-tickling, soul-massaging, etc. The scenes at Ennett Recovery House and the AA meetings are flawless and much of it struck me quite strongly as being amazingly insightful and emotionally jarring. Upon my second reading of the novel I discovered where the cover image of the sky might possibly have come from:

"You are at a fork in the road that Boston AA calls your Bottom, though the term is misleading, because everybody here agrees it’s more like someplace very high and unsupported: you’re on the edge of something tall and leaning way out forward...." (p. 347)

Everything involving the Incandenza family is superb. Same with Joelle Van Dyne (aka Madame Psychosis, aka P.G.O.A.T {Prettiest Girl of All Time}). Same with Gately. Same with the entire conceptual-metaphorical apparatus behind the notorious film mostly known as "The Entertainment" (officially titled Infinite Jest) as well as the actual socio-political entanglements that surround it. Same with the brilliant conversational back 'n' forths between Marathe and Steeply, where some of the greatest insights into the three major themes of the novel occur. Same with Wallace's sheer talent with language, including the coining of highly memorable terms and idioms. There are now two phrases I use around fellow fans of this book when the moment is appropriate: "the howling fantods" (in reference to feelings of extreme nervousness and high-strung emotional strain) and "to eliminate one's map" (in reference to suicide). I could gush on and on and on and on...

This all just makes me want to settle into Round Three right this very second and read it all over again—and I just might. Infinite Jest has the quality of slowly unfurling in your memory, which makes sense considering the sheer length, the descriptive depth, and the broad spectrum of content. Each re-exposed detail symbiotically attaches itself into the larger, self-organizing, cumulative memory of how fucking amazing the book was and indeed still is.

When I met the tome's final sentence and finished it off I was left with an amazing set of feelings that's very difficult to describe satisfactorily. Basically, I felt a deep abiding sadness at the fact that it was now finished. I found myself somewhat frantically flipping between the final page and the "Notes & Errata" section, irrationally seeking more words—I may as well have been tearing the room apart looking for meth money. I felt a physiological craving confined and radiating within. I wanted more! More entertainment! More communion. More redemption. More identification. And then as I sat stunned and staring at the final paragraph it hit me: David Foster Wallace wanted the reader to feel this way.{5}
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{5} On some level all writers and artists and anyone trying to "sell" anything (ideas, feelings, books, etc) to other people all want those people to keep coming back for more, but there was more than that standard set of intentions going on in Infinite Jest. He was trying to show people something about themselves, namely that sad, funny, and strange spectacle of continually seeking pleasure and relief.
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He wanted the reader to acknowledge Craving. He turned the mirror of the Ennett House upon the reader and captured their reflection and left them with things to think deeply about outside of the book. My eyes widened and my jaw literally dropped open and the word "Genius" popped into my head, scattering the cognitive noise and bringing me one more brief moment of Thoughtless Bliss.