‌ ‌‌شاید ادعای ری‌ویو یا نقد نوشتن برای این کتاب برای من کار بسیار گستاخانه‌ای باشد. و حداقل باید طولانی‌تر باشد و حسا‌ب‌شده‌تر. صرفاً‌ می‌توانم بگویم یادداشتی _شاید بی‌سروته و درهم‌برهم_ را خواهید خواند، که طلسم پشت گوش‌انداختن ری‌ویوی گودریدز نوشتن برای کتاب‌ها را شکسته باشم.

‌ ‌فکر می‌کنم مزاح بی‌پایان قطورترین و یکی از سخت‌ترین کتاب‌هایی‌ باشد که خوانده‌ام. و باور کنید، به‌عنوان کسی که از رحم مادر کتاب می‌خوانده و هیچ ابایی از تعداد صفحات زیاد ندارد، سخت‌خوان بودن این کتاب صرفاً به‌خاطر قطور بودنش نیست.
‌کتاب بسیار خاص و متفاوت است. حداقل خود من، نمی‌توانم تجربه‌ی خوانش این کتاب را به تجربه‌ی خوانش هیچ یک از کتاب‌هایی که پیش‌تر خوانده‌ام تشبیه کنم. و بعید می‌دانم که بعداً هم بتوانم در کتاب‌های هنوز ناخوانده دوباره تجربه‌اش کنم.
‌ ‌از آن کتاب‌هایی نیست که بتوانم به هر کسی معرفی کنم. نمی‌خواهم بترسانمتان، اما همان‌طور که ممکن است این کتاب به یکی از کتاب‌های موردعلاقه‌تان تبدیل شود و تا آخر عمر رهایتان نکند، ممکن است که حتی نتوانید/نخواهید کتاب را به پایان برسانید.
فرم نوشتار کتاب شبیه overthinkهای ذهن است.
۱۱۶صفحه‌ی انتهای کتاب پی‌نوشت‌اند. (بی شوخی.) به‌قول بچه‌ها، تجربه‌ی رجوع کردن به انتهای کتاب حین خواندن، چیزی شبیه تجربه‌ی تماشای بازی تنیس است. از آن جهت که نگاهتان حین تماشای بازی، از راست به چپ و از چپ به راست در حرکت‌ است.
کتاب پر است از شخصیت‌هایی که درگیر اعتیادند؛ به مواد مخدر، سرگرمی، رابطه‌ی جنسی و چیزهای دیگر (شاید بتوانم بگویم یکی از پررنگ‌ترین درون‌مایه‌های کتاب، مسئله‌ی اعتیاد در انسان مدرن است.)، شخصیت‌هایی که بعضاً درگیر اختلال‌های روانی مختلف و یا در معرض خودکشی (و یا خودکشی کرده)اند، شخصیت‌هایی با گذشته‌های دردناک و آزارنده. پر از صحنه‌هایی که قلبتان را مچاله خواهد کرد، پر از جزئیات دیوانه‌وار و وسواس‌گون، بخش‌هایی که عملاً احساس می‌کنید در حال خواندن دایرة‌المعارفی چیزی هستید، بخش‌هایی که باعث می‌شوند دلتان بخواهل والاس را در آغوش بگیرید، بخش‌هایی که موی زائد در بدنتان باقی نمی‌گذارند، بخش‌هایی درباره‌ی سیاهی و کثافت دنیا، بخش‌هایی که باعث می‌شوند پقی بزنید زیر خنده، مشکلات محیط‌زیستی و زیست‌شناختی، سیاست، تنیس، و صدها چیز دیگر. (مسلماً انتظار ندارید که بخش‌های یک کتاب ۱۵۱۲صفحه‌ای را بتوان به این سادگی‌ها فهرست کرد.)
می‌توانم بگویم تجربه‌ی خوانش این کتاب شبیه خود زندگی‌ست.
بگذارید به طور خاص درمورد دو سری بخش از کتاب که شاید در تقابل با هم قرار بگیرند حرف بزنم. (دقت کنید. تقابل، نه تضاد. تازه آن هم شاید.)
بخش‌های A: قسمت‌هایی که والاس به‌طرز دیوانه‌وار و ریاضی‌وارانه‌ای جزئیات فنی و تخصصی و علمی را پشت هم ردیف می‌کند. مثلاً چند صفحه انتگرال توضیح می‌دهد. :) (که البته نقش آن‌چنانی در روند کتاب نداشت. مثلاً خود من آن چند صفحه را این طور در ذهنم خلاصه کرده‌ام: "بازی اسکتون بر پایه‌ی یک سری محاسبات ریاضی پیچیده تنظیم شده‌است." حالا این‌که آن محاسبات پیچیده‌ی ریاضی دقیقاً چه هستند دیگر ربطی به من ندارد.

"Infinite jest è un'opera davvero spettacolare capace di intossicarvi con la sua comicità e la sua inesauribile invettiva, ma anche di disintossicarvi con pagine di profonda e lucida tristezza".
Jonathan Franzen

Credo che le parole di Franzen sintetizzino perfettamente che cos'è questa opera e le sue 1178 pagine ( escludendo le note che di per sè sono una componente essenziale).
"Infinite jest" è un viaggio, un viaggio che affascina e spaventa allo stesso tempo. Un viaggio affascinante perché sai che lungo il percorso incontrerai persone meravigliose, come la famiglia Incandenza, persone che ti cambieranno, persone con le quali vivrai esperienze memorabili, mentre dall'altro lato ti spaventa perché non sai chi incontrerai o cosa proverai e perché un viaggio di tale portata comporta sempre dei rischi.
"Infinite jest" è un viaggio che non si dimentica, è uno dei viaggi più importanti della tua vita, ma soprattutto è un viaggio che ti porta a ripartire, a ripercorrere nuovamente le stesse mete, gli stessi percorsi. Masochismo? Autolesionismo? No. E' semplicemente amore per questo scrittore che sono sicura mi riserverà ancora molte belle sorprese.

100 Words in Search of Precision

In the spirit of "Star Trek”, DFW boldly wanders through the darkness of the modern world, holding a candle, recording everything he witnesses in minute, almost helmet-cam detail.

He isn’t just preoccupied by or satisfied with the absurdity and comic potential of the world.

He wants to scrutinise it, diagnose it and cure it.

Out of the minutiae comes meaning and illumination.

It’s up to the reader to sift through the minutiae, to discard the mullock and the fool’s gold, and to find the gold that DFW has placed there for us to find.

His works are incandescent, deeply philosophical and deeply socio-political.



REVIEW:

Because, like the cast of "Ben Hur", my Review exceeds the permitted number of characters, you can find it in My Writings here:

http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2...

Please visit if you're interested in reading some views about the political philosophy of the novel.



DJ IAN'S ONE STAR REVIEW:


http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...



INFINITE HAIKU:



(Orin's Having) Too Much Fun

Horizontal eight.
Get the feeling you've been had?
What infinite jest!

[Sponsored by the Sex Pistols last gig, Winterland, January 14th, 1978]


The Sound of Young Boston

I can't see you, and
It's getting dark in my room.
God's not in the house.

[Apologies to Jonathan Richman and Paul Bryant]


The Secret's in the Service

Onward jesting servers,
Raise your ball and racquet more,
Don’t lob it to the fore.


Where Be Your Aces Now?

A lass for Yorick!
His backhand is as fancy
As his win/loss ratio.


P.G.O.A.T.

What became of the
Prettiest Girl of All Time?
Flawless 'neath her veil.


The Ghost of Jean-Paul Sartre Visits Boston AA

You know he is dead...
God as you understand him.
Can I bum a smoke?


Year of the Next Evolution in Vibrant Senior Living

I imagine us
Sharing some infinite jest,
Dignified and old.

[Apologies to Jonathan Richman and North Hill]



INFINITE BREAST:

----1----
---------
((((0))))



INFINITE TREKS:

Language, mind, time,
Space and fate:
The final frontier.
These are the voyages of the cartridge
"Entertainment".
Its five-year mission:
To explore strange new worlds,
To seek out new life in old civilizations,
To boldly show what
No man has been shown before.



WHAT A RACQUET, WHAT A F**KEN' RACQUET!
("Talking like a Moron, Walking like a Spiv"):
[Apologies to John Wade and The Libertines]

Oh, come all Good Readers tasteful,
Even if his words are wasteful,
It's not a crime to ignore him
Nor a folly to adore him.
Just because the author's famous
Doesn't mean we need disclaimers.
There's no need to involve the law
Nor your opinion to withdraw.
Just as long as you buy the book
From the website of Amazon.



READING NOTES:

My Reading Notes start here:

http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2...

They are not intended to be comprehensive.

I used them to track themes that I was interested in.



INFINITE JEST VANITY PLATES:

Just for fun, I compiled a list of maxims and catchphrases used in the novel:

http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2...



SOUNDTRACK:


Here are some songs I was thinking of:

Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers - Astral Plane

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVjmty...

The Modern Lovers - She Cracked [1972 demo]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H4p3l...

The Modern Lovers - Roadrunner

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgRYnc...

The Modern Lovers - Girlfriend

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veNzHk...

Nick Lowe / Rockpile - Cracking Up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0moGR...

The Soft Boys - My Mind Is Connected to Your Dreams

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5bEkI...

Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson - Hang On To Your Emotions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTAVBN...

Lou Reed - Hang On To Your Emotions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm934f...

Lou Reed - Who Am I (Tripitena's Song)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYLj6G...

Lou Reed - Who Am I (Tripitena's Song) and "Perfect Day" (Live)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iJa_n...

I feel like I just ran head-on into the brick wall that is Infinite Jest, and my head isn't quite clear enough to figure out what I thought yet.

I mean, it was a slow-motion run, given that I started this back in December and read it very, very slowly. I've taken a lot of time to think about it. Why don't I know what I think?

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

41st book of 2021.

My father’s been consistently asking me: Why would you want to read that? as I’ve been reading Infinite Jest. The usual baulking at its complexity, its endnotes, its length, its countless characters and whatever else it’s infamous for. I haven’t really given him a reason. Though, I have been calling him Mad Stork [1] as the Inc. boys call their father. I excitably told them both today I would finally be finishing the novel and they said nothing about that. Moms was more annoyed that Annoying Stork had bought a loaf of bread for £3, considering how small the loaf was [2].

Finishing it has left me feeling wiped-out/brain-mushed. I can’t/won’t spoil anything about it, only that the novel is, of course, very complex and requires concentration in abundance, particularly at the end. There’s a joke I’ve seen a few times (not a very good one[3]) about readers: A reader is only taken seriously when they’ve read Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest. Take that however you want, even as a pseudo-intellectual’s joke which it probably is, dug up from the depths of the pseudo-intellectual internet. But the joke does outline the general idea about this novel, that really, its own infamous reputation proceeds it. That this novel is very long and complex and no one has enough time in their life to read it. This novel is only about 1000 pages long but with the endnotes too, it does feel about 2000 pages long. It took me longer to read this than it took me to read Finnegans Wake, let’s put it that way [4].

The book must be read w/ three bookmarks. The first bookmark must go on a certain page around the 200-page mark [5] where Wallace sets out the chronological “years” in the novel; the second must go where you are in the novel [6]; the last must go at the point you are in the endnotes [7], of which there are nearly 400 entries [8]. It is a book centred around tennis and entertainment and drug-use and depression and loneliness. And, because it is a novel of this size, there are innumerable other things that come into it. Among them, a weird obsessiveness about dental hygiene. Interestingly, I read (before starting IJ) that Wallace was obsessive about his own teeth [9] (apparently he used to carry a toothbrush in his sock).

I would suggest liking tennis somewhat [10] for the pages and pages of tennis descriptions, but that being said, one isn’t necessarily interested in everything they read, it is the author’s job to make it interesting. There is a lot of tennis, a lot of drugs and a lot about fictional avant-garde movies [11]. Also a lot of suicide, violence, paranoia [12], rape, sex, etc.

These are the stages of the book’s progress: Until about page 200, I did not understand much (as in, why I was reading it, rather than the content itself) and considered giving-up frequently. Around the 200-page mark, Wallace gives a giant section of beautiful and profound little sentences [13]; these are wonderful. Then, till about page 400, I continued flirting between enjoying myself and wanting to give up, back-and-forth, back-and-forth. And then, from 400-700, I began enjoying myself and feeling a certain and deep affinity and sadness about the novel, which I hadn’t felt before. Then last few hundred pages become quite dense, block paragraphs for pages, semi-stream-of-consciousness [14], but once one finds a rhythm with it (like anything) they are enjoyable, and have some great lines still. Overall it is a long (very long) rewarding and multifaceted read. Sometimes it feels almost-more-than-Pollockian [15].

Wallace adopts the ultimate postmodern pendulum that swings between high-brow and low-brow. The prose itself is colloquial. He uses w/ and w/o often, uses like in like a conversational way, and like frequent swearing. All of them, from crap to cunt. If not for the acronyms which clog most pages in a Pynchonian way, Wallace’s love of big and unknown words from the very bottom of the dictionary [16], or even just words he has invented himself in true Joycean (in turn Kerouacian) manner, or the many, many, immeasurable number of characters (again in Pynchonian fashion [17]), it wouldn’t be like that hard to read w/ his colloquial language. You may even think to yourself at times, Shit, who said this was hard to read? [18] It never lasts too long though. After all Infinite Jest is infamously hard to read but famously funny. It is funny, in a way; I never laughed aloud [19] but I think it does have quite a good sense of humour. It also has a poor one. I’m not going to pretend DFW was a morally brilliant man (it doesn’t take many Google searches to discover that) and this novel is often regarded as being homophobic/racist/sexist/etc. Anyone who crosses their legs in the novel is referred to as faggy, Lenz, for example, presents many racist thoughts towards all sort of people, particularly old Chinese ladies. There’s a lot of sexism too. Some bits are almost physically hard to read, rape/child abuse/the works [20].

I distrust postmodernism [21] on the whole, but also find myself addicted to reading postmodern novels. The fact we are now in so called “post-postmodernism” [22] makes me more cynical than postmodernism ever did. Postmodernism can be brilliant but it can also be horrible. Infinite Jest is known as an encyclopaedic novel. I think why is fairly obvious by now. It’s set in the “near” future, no, the “not-so-distant” future. I think its vagueness works well, not pinning it down to a specific date coming up in our own futures [23]. America and Canada are a superstate. There’s quite a lot of political stuff going on in the novel, not all of it I understand. Same w/ the calculus, like in the Eschaton scene. As with any mammoth book like this, going in with the expectation of understanding absolutely everything is delusional and somewhat arrogant; this requires multiple readings. The amount of different threads are hard to keep track of, but that’s not necessarily anything new with a novel of this size. Despite the number of characters, there are really only two settings in the novel: Ennet House, a Boston house for recovering addicts and the Enfield Tennis Academy, down the road. He almost makes it simple.

It's one to be reread, without a doubt. My plan is to read Ulysses again at some point, and then next year, maybe two years, I’ll read this again. Of course, there are things that one cannot understand in one reading, many things in the beginning are answers to things at the end. There’s plenty of interviews out there with Wallace [24], one can find him talking about the book, its structure and all that. Is it a brilliant book? Yeah, I think it is. I don’t think it’s perfect. It’s Sternean structure is brain-melting at times, and when you’re in the wrong mood, this can be horrible. Wallace says in one of his interviews that people don’t sit and read anymore, that people are afraid of the quiet—there’s some great quote somewhere about silence in a Huxley novel [25]—and I think it’s even more apt than it was when Wallace said it. It’s a novel that requires a lot of work and time and quiet. It’s fascinating that it’s known as being a very funny novel and a very sad novel and that’s just because of that giant heavy pendulum swinging, taking you off-guard every page, from awful rape to people getting their foreheads stuck to windows. I wish I could fill this review with quotes and describe some of the craziest scenes but it wouldn’t be worth it. A great novel, without a doubt, constructed by a genius. Not a perfect man, no, but as Rochefoucald said, “None but great men are capable of having great flaws.” Nor should DFW's life distract from this literary doorstop, which, at the end of the day, teaches us about being alone, about being afraid, turning to drugs, and all the while attempts to make us smile with one half of our face and cry with the other.

L I F E--I S--L I K E--T E N N I S
T H O S E--W H O--S E R V E
B E S T--U S U A L L Y--W I N

[26]
___________________________________

[1] I reported this to my mother and she said more like Annoying Stork, as a name for my father. I told her that the Inc. boys call their mother Moms and she had nothing to say about that, neither for nor against.

[2] “£3 for this, Matty! What a waste of money! There’s nothing to it. £3.”
“I thought the same. When I saw it in the cupboard yesterday I wondered why it was so flat, it’s like those flat fish, what are they called?”
“Flat fish.”
“Oh, right.”

[3] Vonnegut once said in a Paris Review interview that him and his sister decided the funniest two jokes in the world.

The first one is this:
“Two Black Crows joke. The Two Black Crows were white guys in blackface—named Moran and Mack. They made phonograph records of their routines, two supposedly black guys talking lazily to each other. Anyway, one of them says, “Last night I dreamed I was eating flannel cakes.” The other one says, “It that so?” And the first one says, “And when I woke up, the blanket was gone.”

The second one is this:
“Do you know why cream is so much more expensive than milk?”
“No.”
“Because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles.”

These aren’t funny either.

[4] I had some semi-grand idea that would involve me comparing IJ to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and other big tomes but really I don’t think they are comparable [a], and I can’t be bothered to try anyway.

[a] This is a cheap answer, probably.

[5] In my edition it is page 223.

[6] You can’t pin this down because it inevitably moves as you read the book, unless you don’t read the book, in which case, if you forget about the bookmark or decide to leave it there, it will stay in the same place for a great duration of time, but probably not forever and ever as it’ll fall out or maybe decompose or something.

[7] This also moves as you read the book, though slower than your place in the novel. Likewise, if you stop reading the book and leave the bookmark somewhere, it will stay there almost indefinitely. Almost. Eventually it’ll fall out or maybe decompose or something as well.

[8] Let’s be specific: there are 388 endnotes.

[9] Interestingly, teeth problems/fears are common in great writers. From the top of my head, Martin Amis, Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce all had problems with their teeth. I only know this because I’m ironically quite obsessive about my own dental hygiene too. I worry that my teeth are always in perpetual danger of crumbling, falling out whole, exploding, anything. My parents mock my semi-routine checks of them.

[10] I was never exceptional [a] but my brother and I grew up having private tennis lessons with a small man named O. O’Shea; naturally, we often chanted things like O’Shea Ricochet. He eventually emigrated to Australia and we didn’t bother finding another instructor, so our tennis careers ended there [b]. Though, I must say, reading this has piqued my interest again in the subject and I have asked Annoying Stork if we can go and play at some point soon. In the novel somewhere tennis is described as moving chess. I like that.

[a] I had a mean backhand but I was a poor server.

[b] I’ve played since, infrequently, and can confirm that O’Shea would be horrified.

[11] One exceptionally long endnote details every single short film made by J. Incandenza. Near the end one realises why we’ve read them all. I’m not a big movie fan, or TV fan in general, but one of my favourite professors did try to get me into art-cinema. He suggested a load of movies, Ivan’s Childhood, M, etc.

[12] Pynchonian paranoia, one could argue, but instead of this—

—it’s people in wheelchairs.

[13] Famously: That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they do. Among others, That the cliche 'I don't know who I am' unfortunately turns out to be more than a cliché, or, That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else, or, again, That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak, or, finally, That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable. They sting a bit.

[14] Almost Mollybloomian.

[15] Reading it is nice and all but your brain is sort of going like this too:



[16] This is a metaphor. A dictionary does not have a bottom. You could argue which part of a dictionary, as an object, is the bottom, but the actual contents of the dictionary has no perceivable bottom. I mean the deepest caves of the dictionary.

[17] After all my copy of Consider the Lobster claims on the front cover, “The heir apparent to Thomas Pynchon”. Not to be confused with “The apparent heir of Thomas Pynchon”, which would be less declarative in its claim. And you’d ask, apparent? Who said? They said. Who is they??

[18] This is à la DFW. I can’t know for sure if you swear in your own head. Or even think in English in your own head.

[19] My friends claim I never laugh. They say, “Handel, you never laugh! You never find anything funny.” I was friends with M for six-or-so years before he saw me laugh for the first time, apparently, by his own definition of laughing.

[20] If you’ve read Ellis’ American Psycho then it’s almost nothing you haven’t seen before. The problem with it in IJ is how sincere it is. Ellis’ is so over-the-top that it’s almost numbing to read. This isn’t.

[21] I also distrust people who shower with the bathroom door wide open, people who put the milk in before the teabag, people who “don’t like The Beatles”, etc.

On some days: (modernism > postmodernism)
On other days: (postmodernism > modernism)

[22] Or even metamodernism, which at least sounds better. Right?

[23] DFW does essentially predict some things though in true dystopian Orwellian/Huxleyan fashion though. At one point he pretty much predicts Zoom/Skype, in a sense, and other things like Instagram, as people can put filters on their faces, change the way they look and edit themselves through an online communication platform.

[24] Silverblatt’s is probably the best, of course.

[25] Antic Hay, his second novel. And the jazz bands, the music hall songs, the boys shouting the news. What’s it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost it isn’t there…

[26] I better get my serve a lot better then. Thanks, Wallace.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti, this quote I believe sums up nicely the experience of reading "Infinite Jest". Among hundreds of characters trying to cope with a dystopian near future society, I believe there's not a single one that could be called sane or healthy. (Arguably, Mario Incandenza has a beautiful mind inside a severely handicapped body). An impressive gallery of misfits, addicts, loners and clinically depressive people are offered to the reader in lieu of Entertainment, challenging us to inspect, analyze and eventually redefine our positions in regard to the modern way of life. The words that first come to mind after finishing the novel are 'monumental' and 'exhaustive' and deeply, deeply disturbing.

Insane is just like a catch-term, it doesn't describe anything, it isn't a reason for anything.

Is the whole Incandenza family crazy? Are any of the people inside Ennet House balanced and dependable? Am I, the reader, free of addictions and self-deceptions? Or are we all fallible human beings, confused and frightened, lonely and perpetually sad? Is the O.N.A.N.-ite future society a dystopian nightmare or a documentary of the way we live now, something along the lines of that scary "Idiocracy" flick or, even more appropriate, the couch potatoes of the future seen in "WALL-E"? Is the novel truly a post-modern masterpiece or a grandiose, self-indulgent and cynical 'jest' aimed at a pretentious and shallow readership? James Incandenza, the avantgarde director of the novel has numerous examples of pretend entertainments that can be interpreted as both practical jokes and profound psychological essays. One of them is even called "The Joke" and could very well serve as a synposis of this 1000+ page novel:

... video cameras in the theater record the 'film's audience and project the resultant raster onto screen - the theater audience watching itself watch itself get the obvious 'joke' and become increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable and hostile supposedly comprises the film's involuted 'antinarrative' flow.

This 'antinarrative' atitude from the author gave me a lot of trouble as a reader more familiar with traditional plot and character developments. But if the intent of the joke is to push me out of my comfort zone and make me reasses my 'certainties' then Wallace's broken, time twisted and hallucinogenic style is eminently effective.

"Infinite Jest" is both story and commentary on the story, with the salient points explored in lengthy internal monologues, art-film critique and philosophical dialogue (such a conversation between two spies on a mountain top in Arizona goes on for several hundred pages). This should make the reviewer's job easier, but to do the novel justice said reviewer would probably need twice the number of pages in the book to make sure he didn't miss any nuance or causal relationship. I have read online that there are universities in the U.S. offering courses in interpretation of David Foster Wallace literary opus, and I can actually see myself signing up and taking such a course, in order to be able to discuss and share my feelings about the people encountered in the novel.

With the limited time at my disposal and with the word count limit here on Goodreads I believe it will be more useful that, instead of an exhaustive study of the novel, I make an attempt to simplify the equations and present them to potential readers in a way that makes this metafictional monster accesible and even desirable.

What if in fact there were ever only two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history's mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.

Instead of trackind several hundred people we can focus on two : Hal Incandenza and Don Gately. The rest of the cast are just gravitating around these two focus points, offering variations on any given theme or exercising outside influence on the inner mental landscapes of Hal and Don G. Hal is a 16 y.o. prodigy in tennis, with eidetic memory and a passion for grammar and encyclopedias. Don is a twenty-seven y.o. drug addict, burglar and connvict trying to put his life back together in a half-way house, attending daily A.A. meetings. Both of them come from disfunctional families, experiment with mind-altering Substances and have a hard time communicating with their peers.

The opening chapter in the novel is emblematic of the disconnect between the private and the public personality of the hero. Hal Incandenza earnestly tries to reach out and asks to be understood, while the audience shrinks back in horror and throws him directly into the loony ward.

I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I'm complex. I read. I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." [...] I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about anything.

The rest of the novel is actually this attempt of Hal / Wallace to talk about anything under the sun. Professional sports, drugs and addiction, movie making, terrorism, pollution, atomic energy, game theory, geopolitics, self-help groups, inner city violence, family disintegration, mental illness, physical deformity, sexuality, radio programs, art criticism, conspiracy theories, consummerism, grammar, probability theories, nuclear warfare, astral projection, suicide, etc. I promised I will make it simple, so I will put all these eggs in one basket named :  Entertainment . I believe the reduction is made possible by two observations from Wallace : addiction is not only about drugs, and everything we do is motivated by trying to get release from loneliness. Entertainment is the way we either seek self-escaping (oblivion) or self-confronting (knowledge and redemption).

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or a pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to givew our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into.

Entertainment as an addiction is the engine of the plot, as much as we can talk about plot in this antinarrative novel. Hal's father James is both the founder of the Enfield Tennis Academy where his son studies and where most of the action of the novel takes place, and the pioneer optical wizard and experimental film maker who tried (and apparently succeeded) in making the perfect Entertainment : a movie so addictive it turns its viewers into closed chapters / drooling, catatonic, empty shells.

The choice for death of the head by pleasure now exists.

and,
A device for extending O.N.A.N.'s self-destructing logic to its final conclusion

U.S. (allied with Canada and Mexico to become the Organization of North American Nations in the novel, a transparent reference to onanism) secret agents and Quebec terrorists both try to get their hands on the master copy of this movie, apparently titled "The Joke", by studying the Incandenza family history. A history marked by at least three generations of parent to child traumatic experiences, betrayals, adictions and phobias that culminate in the auteur's (James) gruesome suicide immediately after the production of this ultimate movie. I think I have at least four possible solutions to the puzzle of the Final Solution film, and the genius of Wallace is that probably every reader will discover a couple more than me, once he or she starts to ponder on their own addictions and phobias. (for example what I call hobbies my friends might call trivial pursuits; in my case it applies to reading, eating, watching five movies in one day, rock collection, computer games, etc). In James Incandenza's case, an unsympathetic critic might remark on his self-absorbtion, another reference to onanism:

Joelle thought them more like a very smart person conversing with himself.

a socialite / academic professor trying to impress her peers with her erudition and coolness :

... there was little question that the entire perfect-entertainment-as-Liebestod myth surrounding the purportedly lethal final cartridge was nothing more than a classic illustration of the antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist mechanism, whose logic presented commodity as the escape-from-anxieties-of-mortality-which-escape-is-itself-psychologically-fatal ...

For the students of Shakespeare, and the often mentioned reference to Hamlet from the title, a monologue on Death as the ultimate motivator, taken from another of the auteur's movies:

We thus become, in the absence of death as teleologic end, ourselves desiccated, deprived of some essential fluid, aridly cerebral, abstract, conceptual, little more than hallucinations of God.

For Himself, as James is called by his children, the movie is a final attempt to break the vicious circle of transferring the sins of the fathers onto the next generation:

Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self's fall into the womb of solypsism, anhedonia, death in life. A magically entertaining toy to dangle at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to make its eyes light and toothless mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To bring him 'out of himself', as they say. The scholars and Foundations and disseminators never saw that his most serious wish was : to entertain.

>><<>><<>><<>><<

With the last quote I believe I can make the transition to anoter of my pet theories - that the novel is not so much autobiographical as self-referencing. James and Hal Incandenza, even Orin in his compulsive pursuit of sex, Don Gately, Kate Gompert and the other addicts trying to work their way through A.A., all of them are alter egos of the author, who used the form of entertainment (a novel) as an attempt to exorcise his personal demons his decades long fight with clinical depression. The encyclopedic nature of the study of mental illness, addiction recovery programs, suicide and communication breakdown points to the author's own struggle and ultimate defeat in this infinite battle against oblivion.

Sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them. ( Katherine Ann Gompert)

and,
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.   (on suicide)

and,
"Ramy, I don't think I'm like thinking this is a feel-better story at all" (Kate Gompert)

and,
'I could use a quality laugh right now, Dark.' (Hal Incandenza)

and,
'Help! I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers! It's me, screaming for help!' (Hal, again)

and, finally:
'Touch me, just touch me, please!' (Barry Loach, outside a Boston metro exit)

>><<>><<>><<

Ahh, look at all the lonely people,
Where do they all come from?

Here comes Erdedy in the second chapter of the novel, sitting alone in his apartment, waiting for his drug dealer to bring him a bag of pot, right out of an alternate version of the Beatles song. Even his name reminds one of Eleanor Rigby:

He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and drying out and floating dryly away.

Erdedy is just the first (if you don't count Hal in the first chapter) in a long list of sad, lonely people that populate the pages of Wallace's masterpiece. The big question here is : are we born sad, dying little by little with every breath we take? or are we lost somewhere along the way, discarded like broken toys by the well-adapted, 'normal' people? How do we get infected with what Orin Incandenza describes in one place as a "a kind of peritonitis of the soul"? Look at Orin, in his top athletic form, the best punter in American football, young and rich and admired, wandering alone in his penthouse apartment, gazing at the desolate landscape of Arizona:

These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light - the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

Look at his brother Hal, 16 y.o. and already a secret pot smoker:

It occured to me that without some one-hitters to be able to look forward to smoking alone in the tunnel I was waking up every day feeling as though there was nothing in the day to anticipate or lend anything any meaning.

Basically, the attack comes from four directions : (1) family (Joelle notes that the Incandenzas were the second saddest family she has ever known) , (2)school, (3) marketing creating fake desires and (4) the job market, or "The Show" as the tennis students refer to their future careers. I could go on and on here recounting the heart breaking stories of wrecked homes and abusive parents, and the hundreds of drugs referenced in the text, but one quote should suffice for now:

Hal himself hasn't had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he's in there, inside his own skull, as a human being - but in fact he's more robotic than John Wayne. One of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there's pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely.

Another one has to stand in for all the school bullies that 'helped' us to grow up to the ways of the real world:

M.I.T. students tend to carry their own special psychic scars: nerd, geek, dweeb, wonk, fag, wienie, four-eyes, spazola, limp-dick, needle-dick, dickless, dick-nose, pencil-neck; getting your violin and your laptop TP or entomologist's kill-jar broken over your large head by thick-necked kids on the playground.

also, an explanation on why kids start taking drugs so young:

Recreational drugs are more or less traditional at any U.S. secondary school, maybe because of the unprecedented tensions: post-latency and puberty and angst and impending adulthood, etc. To help manage the intra-psychic storms, etc.

I don't have something witty and insightful about the pressures that come to bear later in life. What I have is a whole alternate review where I started collecting something like flashcards from life in Purgatory:

>>><<<>>><<<>>><<<

If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA's state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts:
- that the chilling Hispanic term for whatever interior disorder drives the addict back again and again to the enslaving Substance is 'tecato gusano', which apparently connotes some kind of interior psychic worm that cannot be sated or killed;
- that over 60% of all persons arrested for drug- and alcohol-related offenses report being sexually abused as children, with two-thirds of the remaining 40% reporting that they cannot remember their childhood in sufficient detail to report one way or the other on abuse.
- that certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on.
- that over 50% of person with a Substance addiction suffer from some other recognized form of psychiatric disorder, too.
- that purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation / prayer...
- that you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him / her / it.
- that loneliness is not a function of solitude.
- that cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape.
- that logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.
- that it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people.
- that a drug addict's second most meaningful relationship is always with his domestic entertainment unit, TV / VCR or HDTP.
- that sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, 'hurt'.
- that most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.
- that the people to be most frightened of are the people who are most frightened.
- that it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
- that no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
- that other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.
- that having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear.
- that there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.
- that God - unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both - speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.
- that at the zenith of the self-help-group movement in the B.S. mid-1990s, there were estimated to be over 600 wholly distinct Step-based fellowships in the U.S.A., all modelled, however heretically or flakily, on the '12 Steps' of Alcoholics Anonymous.
- that scopophobia is an anxiety disorder characterized by a morbid fear of being seen or stared at by others. Scopophobia can also be associated with a pathological fear of drawing attention to oneself.
- that newly sober people are awfully vulnerable to the delusion that people with more sober time than them are romantic and heroic, instead of clueless and terrified and just muddling through day-by-day like everybody else in A.A.
- that if you close your eyes on a busy urban sidewalk the sound of everybody's different footwear's footsteps all put together sounds like something getting chewed by something huge and tireless and patient. (Bruce Green)
- that a German word, 'Verstiegenheit' translates as: Wandering alone in blasted disorienting territory beyond all charted limits and orienting markers

[continued in comments]

wouldn't it be kinda funny if i read this.

an infinite jest, if you will.

Take a look at the reviewer quotes on and within this book. Most of them extol DFW’s brilliance—as they should. He’s obviously brilliant; it oozes from the pages. And yet a writer’s intellectual fortitude does not a masterpiece make, and I’m not convinced that Infinite Jest is a faultless harnessing of the man’s genius (although is any book really?). That said, this novel is very, very good.

For some reason, I feel an overwhelming need to explain why I’m giving this book four starts instead of five, which is pretty unusual since I consider four stars to signify a great book. Perhaps I feel a bit guilty because I’ve given out a (in)decent number of five-star reviews already this year. So I’ll go on record as giving Infinite Jest four and a half stars. There, I feel better already. I don’t know why but with revered, sprawling epics (e.g.War and Peace or even newer buzz-books like 2666), there is some unspoken expectation or pressure to either declare them masterpieces or to register some pretty significant disappointment. Maybe it’s because these types of books are just so long that any annoyances get stretched out and multiplied or, by the same rule, the pleasures get extended and compounded. Maybe it’s the hype. Or maybe it’s just my own weird issue.

Nevertheless, I’m going to shrug off this apparently self-induced pressure to make any excessively strong claims about Infinite Jest. I think I’m going to keep my positive comments to a minimum, partly because there wasn’t any single aspect (or combined aspects) that really blew me away on a gut level or inspired me to effusive evangelizing. There were a couple stand-out scenes for sure—Eschaton, The Fight, Barry Loach’s story. And I enjoyed reading it throughout, never once regretting the decision to lug such a beast around on my IJ-appropriate B Green Line commute. I never felt that the story had become tedious, which is an incredible feat in and of itself when you’re dealing with such a description-heavy book that mostly takes place over just a couple of weeks. Wallace does a great job balancing the different and occasionally-crossing story lines. His empathy is both abundant and restrained, but occasionally overly self-aware—see, for instance, Gately’s visits to Mrs. Waite: DFW bends over backwards to avoid making Don G’s actions/motivations too laudable, as if he’s afraid of getting called out for being manipulative or sappy. At times it felt as if you could see DFW’s wheels turning, attempting to cleverly protect his cleverness from accusations of pretension.

This touches on what is probably my most serious criticism of the book: the self-awareness that can surface a little too noticeably. I mentioned this in my half-way review below, but I get the feeling that DFW tried to familiarize or even “dumb down” some of the writing (and I’m not talking about dialogue here) with “like”, “kind of”, etc. as a way to balance or correct for the occasional tendency to show off (mostly with vocabulary or math-smarts). Based on a couple interviews I’ve read (see MFSO’s links below), he regularly struggled with this desire to showcase his talents or to use clever tricks. But really, who can blame him? Another major self-criticism, mentioned in an interview a few years prior to IJ’s publication, is his penchant for writing sentences that are technically correct but “a bitch to read.” Because there are plenty of these in the book, and since it is silly to believe that these types of sentences could be included unintentionally, I find this self-criticism to be a little disingenuous. These aren’t the types of difficult but beautiful sentences you’d find in Proust or Woolf. They’re a bitch to read because they’re sometimes, well, ugly (examples include things like putting “it’s its” together or including awkward repetitiveness within a sentence). Anti-aesthetic might be a better way to put it. But perhaps this is appropriate after all, since it riffs on a significant theme/jest within the novel itself re: Jim's apres-garde movies. Of course, the prose is mostly very enjoyable and rarely becomes distracting, but taken as a whole or in small chunks, the writing didn’t really give me that “click” or “buzz”. Maybe it’s just that the two aforementioned authors have turned me into a total aesthetics whore (and a very specific type at that), but I guess I just prefer reading prose that flows a little more pretty-like. And this is where the subjective really comes in, but it was when I picked up To the Lighthouse halfway through reading this that I realized IJ just wasn’t a five-star book for me. Ultimately, it’s as simple as that.

I did enjoy the cognitively dissonant joke (or jest) of including character-appropriate misspellings/mispronunciations of words…which would never have been in their vocabularies in the first place. It's like an illogically annular and drawn out Catch-22: word not in vocabulary-->so…corruption of word-->hence the misuse/ misspelling-->because…word not in vocabulary-->corruption of the word-->etc. Proclavity (sic). Tittymount (sic). Ebubblient (sic). And there's also the substituting of easier words for incorrect but usually more difficult words (e.g. disparaging in place of discouraging). Good stuff. But to continue the discussion of self-awareness, something that troubled me a little was DFW’s insistence on using racial and gay slurs while writing the thoughts of certain characters (mainly Gately), even when he writes the majority of their thought processes out of character (i.e. using complex intellectual analysis and highfalutin language). The self-aware footnotes come to the fore here, as DFW makes multiple attempts to explain/justify this move. But after you realize that he isn’t always going for realistic thought processes, this comes across as a pretty cheap way to jog the reader’s memory that this person is unsophisticated and of a certain background. So while I suppose it serves that characterization purpose, I’d be interested in hearing someone defend this decision. My question is: why not use some other method to remind the readers, rather than insisting Gately doesn’t know any other words for black people (a preposterous claim in the age of television)? Ok, ok so this review is starting to make it seem like I was disappointed with the book. I wasn’t. These are just the very few minor quibbles I had, and I’ll definitely be picking up more DFW at some point.

When I finally shut the book for the last time, I was left with an odd, anesthetized feeling. The ending kind of reminded me of Lolita’s finale somehow. There’s the same subdued desperation exploding into violence and cruel detail; a lose-lose hopelessness that cages the protagonists. For whatever reason, though, the ending seems very much beyond the point and mostly incongruous with the tone of the book as a whole. I think that this quote from Joelle’s interview near the end sums up the novel and/or DFW as well as anything:

Lenses Jim said were what he had to bring to the whole enterprise. Of filmmaking. Of himself. He made all his own.

Based on my experiences with IJ and This is Water, this concept of making and choosing the lenses with which you view others, with which you view life in general, is DFW’s primary thematic and moral grounding. It’s far too large a topic to delve into here, but in short, I think this book is a wonderful testament to hope, or as the Boston metro AAers (and The Dude) would say—to Abiding.


*******************************************************************
Half-way review:

Manny's Infinite Jest review inspired me to give a pre-finished update, although I'm not quite ambitious enough to provide more than this halfway offering. As the book is so long, it also makes sense to do this since any commentary I may have within me at this point will likely dissipate into the glorious late spring Boston air by the time I’m finished with this behemoth. I’d like to start by dispelling an Infinite Jest myth, which may have just been my own unjustified pre-read presumption. Rather than being overly abtruse or obtuse, the storyline(s) are actually pretty conventional and engaging. Based on the numerous professional (and less-so) reviews and articles, I was expecting something highly digressive and complicated, perhaps bordering on the inscrutable. Postmodern, Pynchon-esque, and c. What I have found is a surprisingly coherent and undisputedly novelish story with sentence structure nowhere near as complicated as I had imagined during my pre-read fantasies. The beginning may be a tad disorienting since DFW just dives right in, but it soon becomes clear that we have 3 storylines that occasionally intersect (Incandenza/ETA, Gately/Ennet House, and Marathe/Steeply/AFRs) with some side tangents that are always a little less tangential than they first appear. Perhaps reading 2666 a few months ago changed my scale for what is considered “digressive”, but I’ve found this to be a surprisingly contained (if still enormous and unwieldy), smooth, and enjoyable read thus far. Of course I don’t really know how things are going to play out, so maybe it’s going to be more digressive than DFW’s adumbrations would lead me to believe.

Living in the Boston metro area makes DFW’s setting descriptions an absolute delight to read. I’m not sure how his focus on aspects of Brighton, Allston, Cambridge, Boston, the Green Line (my major mode of transportation), and c. play to those who are not familiar with the area, but for those of us who are, it definitely adds a lot. I also think there is something to be said for conjuring up your own imagery without resorting to photographic memories, and I know that a lack of familiarity with a story’s setting has never impeded my love for a book (19th century Russia, drool). And...now I’m starting to wonder if my love for Infinite Jest would be greater if I wasn’t familiar with the setting. I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this matter; it is an issue that is certainly not limited to Infinite Jest.

I’m not quite sure what to make of DFW’s narratorial voice. I’m not even sure if narratorial is a word, but if not, then it’s even more appropriate for this hemi-review. As others on this site have pointed out, DFW uses essentially the same voice for the thinking and even the dialogue of many of the characters with a few major (but short) exceptions. Part of me wants to accuse him of laziness, but just looking at the book makes this idea extraordinarily ironic. Whatever his reason for writing this way, it works because this voice is such a joy to read. And it’s kind of funny when you turn to another footnote that says, “obviously Gately didn’t use this word” or whatever. Maybe it would have been a greater challenge for someone as brilliant as DFW to write profoundly within the realistic confines of Don G.’s mental capabilities. But it probably would have been less fun to read. There’s a colloquial casualness to the writing style that still takes me aback even 500 pages in, and I’m not really sure if I, like, totally like it or not. I mean, it’s kind of like off-putting to see le mot “mysticetously” mixed up with 90s slacker jargon. And the cynic in me kind of thinks that DFW used the most like anti-pretentious language possible to avoid accusations of pretention for famously/infamously using hundreds of words mentally available only to the likes of Hal Incandenza. But the aesthetic side of me like totally gets off on it.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of the annulation theme at this point (perhaps it’s not something that can be easily distilled), but one specific instance of it caught my attention and convinced me of DFW’s brilliance. It’s during Marathe’s and Steeply’s extended conversation when Steeply is trying to convince Marathe of the genius of the American way, of the valuation of freedom above all else, the freedom for everyone to make their own choices even if they are utterly pathetic; the avoidance of the authoritarian patriarchy he accuses Marathe of espousing. Basically, he’s defending the American way of life that leads to the pursuit of happiness to the point of ridiculous hedonism, to capitalistic excess. DFW argues pretty convincingly for both sides here, not easily betraying his personal feelings on the matter. Yet during one of their pauses, we get this:

“A bonfire of young persons was burning some k. down away on the desert floor, the flames burning in a seeming ring instead of a sphere” (p. 423).

It’s a subtle nod to the fact that Steeply’s argument is fully annulated (i.e. it follows in a completely connected, rational fashion from it’s premise), yet it is also hollow at its core. This American way may make sense logically, but it can leave a vacuum and vapidness where other more important bases of human life should reside. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but the sentence seems too well-placed and too observationally strange to be coincidence. Great stuff—can’t wait for the 2nd half.

This quote from DFW ~10 years ago gets at what I was trying to articulate in the first paragraph above:

"I think it makes at least an in-good-faith attempt to be fun and riveting enough on a page-by-page level so I don't feel like I'm hitting the reader with a mallet, you know, 'Hey, here's this really hard impossibly smart thing. Fuck you. See if you can read it.' I know books like that and they piss me off."

The part in quotes between the quotes is more what I was expecting. Infinite Jest is certainly not "work" in the sense of difficult or painful--it just takes a long time to finish.

*******************************************************************
Preview:

I've recently developed a to-read list that has become a tad overwhelming (don't be fooled by the goodreads list, which is short so as to maintain a comforting illusion/delusion). With so many amazing unread books out there being discovered at a pace exceeding my reading rate by about 100X or so, it becomes increasingly difficult to choose what's next. Do I want to read a classic, another modernist, a postmodernist, a post-postmodernist? After reading Dave Eggers introduction to Infinite Jest, I have chosen the latter. While IJ may indeed be most accurately described as postmodern, I have a suspicion after reading excerpts ("Good People", "Wiggle Room") from the forthcoming posthumous The Pale King, as well as coming across some of his quotes about the staleness and restrictions of the form (or formlessness) after 40-odd years of irony and detachment, that DFW will be viewed (if he isn't already) as a seminal literary figure who adumbrated--and more importantly ignited--a post-postmodern focus that eschews detachment in favor of empathy, cynical irony in favor of the kind that circles back toward compassionate sincerity. And all of this while offering fresh holds for grappling with capital-T Truths and avoiding traps of sentimentalism and pedantry.

Anyway, excuse my criminal oversimplification of literary categorization and nomenclature. Back to Eggers' introduction. This is where I was sold into making this my next read:

"Wallace is a different sort of madman, one in full control of his tools, one who instead of teetering on the edge of this precipice or that, under the influence of drugs or alcohol, seems to be heading ever-inward, into the depths of memory and the relentless conjuring of a certain time and place in a way that evokes--it seems so wrong to type this name but then again, so right!--Marcel Proust. There is the same sort of obsessiveness, the same incredible precision and focus, and the same sense that the writer wanted (and arguably succeeds at) nailing the consciousness of an age."

And then, to seal the deal: "It's to be expected that the average age of the new Infinite Jest reader would be about twenty-five." Hey, I'm twenty-five. Time to give this a shot.

Edit: I've also just discovered that The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment is most likely 2009. It's meant to be.

This book is exhausting!

The first half is a lot of fun, which parallels the mind expansion of recreational drug use. The familiar landmarks in the Greater Boston Area are like carnival rides. But does anyone truly desire to be a carnie their entire life?

It's hard not to notice how much Wallace puts pieces of himself in this story. Perhaps not all the drug use (often misinterpreted by critics), but more the emotional unfulfillment. It's a shame Wallace was never a fan of comic books. A new medium may have given him a new purpose.

The subplot of the spies is fun, but there is so much going on in the book simultaneously, including hundreds of supplemental pages of footnotes, that it is often difficult to keep track of what exactly is happening unless you make the effort to try repurposing it in chronological order.

Through this pinnacle work, I think Wallace was trying to decode that the basic human condition is being fucked up and insecure with one's self, trying to find productive ways to occupy your time in search of personal fulfillment. What is "entertainment" by definition? Self-medication, which has become an even more troublesome epidemic with ADHD prescription drugs, can turn into substance abuse and strap you into a crazy roller coaster down the rabbit's hole. When does it stop? Will it ever?

Wallace writes of Alcoholics Anonymous, "It's supposed to be one of AA's major selling points that you get to choose your own God." (443) Wallace's writing often has an anti-authoritarian tone simply by use of detail, but (correct me if I'm wrong), Wallace at times struggled to buy into things bigger than himself. When he did (I.e.: romantic interest in Mary Karr or perhaps this book...), it becomes almost niche. His great heroes of writing were philosophers and he desired to create an opus that they would be proud of post mortem, perhaps throwing more shade with the deceased Incandenza as a foil. Madame Psychosis is also a direct holler to all of this philosophical jargon.

In regards to gods, Salinger is worshipped in the literary world, but further research will reveal he lived a very distanced and isolated life, which directly influenced his frustrated kin. Maybe the appeal of Hemingway (still not my fave...) is that his work is closer to the simpler side of the tracks.

Wallace was absolutely brilliant and I love his writing, but how does the story of his life end? What was his ultimate solution to the "theorem of life" he was constantly trying to extrapolate?

Incandenza's film, The Joke (397) may be more important than the sacred copy of Infinite Jest. "You Are Strongly Advised NOT To Shell Out Money To See This Film." (397)

There are also fart jokes.

Rest in Peace big guy.

(Original rating 4 stars)

Upon a second (and third, and fourth...) read and further examination, this is one of the coolest pieces of literature I've ever processed. Once the book "clicks," it resonates inside of you.

* * * * *

The word "wraith" is used exactly 143 times, but I'm sure that was just coincidence.

Joelle Van Dyne (the "prettiest girl of all time") is 1.7 meters tall, which is roughly 5'6", the same height as Emily Jean Stone. They both have HD green eyes.

IJ is significantly easier to re-examine with marginalia.

* * * * *

The brain-shaped building is where Madame Psychosis transmits her FM radio show.

WTF is water?

For the best howling fantods about this tome (I read them all), go read  Infinite Jen’s. And for some pro-grade kertwang about it, I recommend watching Leaf by Leaf’s vlog.

Approximately (or estimated…more likely guessed…truth is I picked a random number) 47 characters are described so intimately as if written in a De Niro-ish method-acting way. Their stories interconnect with a randomness that could only be replicated in real life.

And nothing beats the estimated (guessed, randomly picked number 47) character intros:

…though he (Don) was the size of a young dinosaur, with a massive and almost perfectly square head he used to amuse his friends when drunk by letting them open and close elevator doors on…
…Hal is sleek, sort of radiantly dark, almost otterish, only slightly tall, eyes blue but darkly so, and unburnable even w/o sunscreen, his untanned feet the color of weak tea…
…U.S.S. Millicent’s hair, which was almost osseously hard-looking, composed of dense woven nests of reticulate fibers like a dry loofa sponge…
…He (Kenkle) was dark-freckled and carbuncular and afflicted with excess phlegm. He was an incredible spitter, and alleged his missing incisors had been removed…


This is now my favorite book. Mostly because of how captivated I was by the writing and storytelling, but also for the personal realizations I had ID-ing with about every character (reading it while in a maximum-security prison trying to reconcile all the harm I caused, having grown up less than an hour from Boston, anonymous 12-step program member recovering from various controlled substances and mental illness diagnoses)

It drudged up thoughts of all the ppl I may have thought less of or spoken down to or harmed. Evoking the saddest thoughts towards an overwhelming melancholic epiphany that my actions may have influenced someone to demap themself. The odd kid at school, the one nobody wanted to sit with at lunch, or the person we avoid, maybe they live down the street and mumble to themselves or anyone else who is overtly suffering. What do they face at home, and what was their life experience? If we were curious and asked them questions, like "how are you", and you know, like really listened, could that be the difference in say, Arthur continuing to work on his mental health, or him letting his psychopathy spiral him into becoming the Joker?

Infinite Jest is the McGuffin in the story, yet the entirety of the book is a gestalt of genuine understanding. For all of you who read it and did not like it, do us both a favor and don’t ever talk to me again. Ha! Just joshing ya.

This is water.

Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Jen. Thank you, DFW.

DJ Ian's Sunday Evening "Tell Me What You Really Think"

You're listening to Radio KCRCR, "Tell Me What You Really Think", where we listen to the critics and you talk back. That's if there's any time left after I finish my rant. Hehe.

A lot of listeners ask me about my namesake. What about that other Ian Graye, you say. The one on GoodReads. What do you think of him? And what did you think of his recent review of David Foster Wallace's magnum opus?

Well, let me reassure you: that other Ian Graye is a wanker. Don’t trust his five star review of “Infinite Jest” (“IJ” for short, but not for long).

He is a classic pseudo-intellectual, who occasionally comes under the sway of people like Nathan, MJ and a few female Good Readers with brains and/or ambition, and tries unconvincingly to run with their small herd, while simultaneously feigning the impression of reading, appreciating and reviewing the big books that appeal to them. He is a post-capitalist lapdog of the tamest and most ineffectual kind.

This is what he would say, if he had the guts. Actually, it’s not what he would say, it’s what I'm saying.

He can wallow in pretension.

IJ is a dogs breakfast. Nobody has actually read it from cover to cover. Nobody has understood it on its own terms. Anybody who reckons they’ve read it or understood it is lying and needs to be exposed for the fibbers they are.

The sooner there is something that is post-postmodernism that we can get our hands and minds and kindles and iPatches on the better. No wait, it doesn’t matter.

Postmodernism was invented so that nerds could take money off other nerds.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world can eat, drink, snort, smoke, dance, party and have sex regardless and in spite of the postmodernist nerdfest going down, down, down in the library.

Length

Surely, it is enough to state the length of this book to condemn it.

If an author has 1,100 pages in them, then write four novels of 275 pages each.

Can Sting possibly be any better on the fourth day of his tantric sex than he is on the first?

What is the point? To achieve a target for the Guinness Book of Records? For as soon as you break the record, somebody else will want to beat you and your record will last for, how long, one year, at most?

Repetition

In a book that long, there must surely be a lot of repetition of themes and subject matter, if not dialogue and actual words.

As for a book whose ending simply takes you back to the beginning? That's not what I call recycling. Recycling is the yellow bin. Or, wishful thinking for charities, two copies sitting side by side in a second hand book store.

Self-Indulgence

See my comment about Sting. Beyond that, I risk being guilty of the post-modern crime of repetition. In fact, I might already be guilty. Damn. How ironic.

Irony

Show me somebody who really knows what irony means and I’ll show you a bullshit artist.

I mean, what does “an incongruity between the literal and the implied meaning” mean?

Is there any literal meaning that is not implied? Surely, DFW meant everything his words implied.

Therefore, they are not incongruous, they are deliberate and congruous.

This is starting to sound like that other Ian Graye, so I will stop.

Playfulness

OK, so they play tennis in this book. So what?

And so what if he plays with our minds? Writing this bloody book probably played with DFW’s own mind. How can you control something as gargantuan and prolix as this?

It plays with our minds, because it played with his. If he had won the game, it would have been a shorter, sharper, better book and a more pleasant experience for us.

There is a reason tennis has a tie-breaker. IJ needed a tie-breaker. Around 300 pages.

Black Humor

I like black humor, white humor and Jewish humor. I haven’t heard any other types yet. But I hope I do eventually.

However, I can’t remember any good jokes in IJ, nor can I remember LOL’ing.

Even if I could remember one, there’s no way I would ever tell a mate in a pub or print it on a t-shirt, which is my ultimate test of a good joke, well, an aphorism, anyway.

Intertextuality

I mean, are you serious? Who would invent a word like “intertextuality”, but a postmodernist wanker?

Did the English language really need this word? Did it have to be imported from France or Italy, or wherever?

Intertextuality…”the relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history…an indication of postmodernism’s lack of originality and reliance on clichés”.

Put two things next to each other, juxtapose them, as the other Ian Graye would say, and you have a relationship (a “juxtaposition”). So what?

If you want to refer to another book in your book, it’s a quote if it’s acknowledged or plagiarism if it’s not.

So what? Any graduate student can do this. We used to call it cheating.

As for cliches, we were taught to eschew them in my day. DFW uses truckloads of cliches, mostly old ones, but many new ones of his own creation. How pathetic. There are nearly as many cliches in IJ as there are in Hamlet. I mean, "To be, or not to be", if Shakespeare was half the writer he's supposed to be (or not to be), he would have steered clear of that old chestnut.

Pastiche

Once again, write your own bloody book. Don’t copy somebody else’s. Sampling is cheating. If I want to read the other book or listen to the other song, I’ll find it on iTunes.

Metafiction

Another word created by postmodernists for postmodernists. It’s like a secret handshake. A club for us and not for you. Because you won’t let us into your club, and your club is blockbuster, best-selling fiction with a home and a boat in the Bahamas.

Anybody who can write should strive for a home and a boat, better still, a houseboat. If you haven’t got it in you, don’t waste trees or cyberspace. Write a blog. Do your pathetic little reviews on GoodReads. Or pathetically long reviews, in the case of my namesake.

Fabulation

I mean, honest, we’re talking fiction here, and some critic has to introduce a synonym and pretend it means something different. A distinction without a difference. A high distinction without a job prospect. This is today’s academia for you.

Poioumena

This word makes me want to vomit.

I mean I love Maoris and their language, but words weren’t meant to consist of four consecutive vowels. It's inconsonant.

Historiographic Metafiction

Another one. What, aren’t the old words good enough for postmodernists? This would have been edited out of the wiki article if anybody knew what it meant or had the guts.

Instead, it’s left in, and college students in my wake will struggle to apply it correctly in a sentence for another 20 years.

If this term was a dog, it would be put down. In fact, this term is a dog. Bang.

Temporal Distortion

It gets worse. “Fragmentation and non-linear narratives”. In a word, drugs. Nobody used this language when the poison of choice was alcohol.

In the old days, the bell would ring, and you’d say, “Oh, is that the time?” Not temporal distortion.

Magic Realism

All the best drugs come from South America. Say no more. But put a frat boy in a broad brimmed hat and sit him on a horse and it doesn’t make him a gaucho or a magic realist.

Technoculture and Hyperreality

Doof doof. I can’t remember one computer in IJ. Unless you count microwaves and whatever they played the cartridges on. And, I mean, who remembers cartridges?

Paranoia

The only source of paranoia for me in IJ is the sense that DFW might have known what he was talking about and I didn’t get it. But if he did and I didn’t, then I’ve read all the other IJ reviews on Good Reads, and no two of them are the same, so quit the bullshit and admit it, nobody gets it. It’s time we fessed up, it can’t be got, we weren’t supposed to get it, DFW didn’t design it to be got, leave it alone.

IJ is a conspiracy by the paper manufacturing industry to consume paper, put it inside a hard cover and never let it see the light of day.

Yes, a paranoid conspiracy, I know, but guess what, it worked.

Maximalism

A big word for “long”.

Minimalism

A big word for a little idea. Incongruous, if not ironic, I know.

Encyclopaedic

Yes, IJ is long, but credit where credit is due, it contains a lot of words and meanings, about a lot of things, but let's face it, nobody ever reads an encyclopaedia from beginning to end, we all dip in one entry at a time, if not randomly, and we wouldn’t know shit about all the other bits that we didn’t read.

Let’s hope there's not a question about them in the exam.

Well, that's about it from me. Let me leave you with one more serious thought.

Party at my place. Come on.

KCRCR. Whatever will be will be. And whatever will not be will not be. That is the answer and there's the rub. Thanks, Bill. Can I have my bottle back now, please?

Oh, is that the time? Let's cross to Rupert for the news.



CHOOSE YOUR REVIEW:

"Infinite Jest" elicits diverse reactions. I thought I might try to express some of them, both negative and positive.

The above review is my attempt at a negative review.

My positive reviews are mentioned below.



TAME AND INEFFECTUAL POST-CAPITALIST LAPDOG FIVE STAR REVIEW

This is a positive capsule review with a few add-ons:

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...



NERDS ONLY PSEUDO-INTELLECTUAL FIVE STAR REVIEW

This review is my attempt at a more analytical, but positive, review:

http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2...



THE "TELL ME WHAT YOU REALLY THINK" VOTE COUNT (AUDITED BY CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS NICE WATERCLOSET)

DJ Ian:

February 17, 2013

41 likes

Post-Capitalist Lapdog Review

February 17, 2013

38 likes

Nerd's Only Pseudo-Intellectual Review

February 17, 2013

27 likes

DJ Ian's one star review jennifer garnered more "likes" in 12 hours than either of the other five star reviews did in 10 months (they were posted in April 2012).

There isn't a proper way to give a review to this book without overdoing hyperbole and superlatives surrounding its greatness. A friends asked me what it is about - I replied it was about the best fiction I've ever read.

DFW was a genius. Read this book.