‘I read,’ I say. ‘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 don’t want anything except for the feeling to go away. But it doesn’t. Part of the feeling is being like willing to do anything to make it go away. Understand that. Anything. Do you understand? It’s not wanting to hurt myself it’s wanting to not hurt.’
...
Objects move as they’re made to, at the lightest easiest touch.
...
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
...
Other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.
...
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

I’ve wanted to read Infinite Jest since it came out 25 years ago. But with a length of almost 1,100 pages, almost 400 endnotes, and a reputation as a very difficult read even for literary fiction (I think my favorite description called this book “Generation X’s  Ulysses”), I was just too intimidated to try it. So I want to start my review by thanking the PopSugar Reading Challenge, and their devious entry to read “the longest book on your TBR,” which forced me to finally give this book a shot.

A Non-Spoiler Overview of Infinite Jest:
A 30,000-foot description of Infinite Jest would say that there are three broad stories being told. First, there are the goings on amongst the students and staff at the Enfield Tennis Academy, founded by the late James Incandenza, now run by his widow Avril, still attended by his sons Hal and Mario (who have an older brother named Orin who graduated years earlier) and an assortment of memorable other students, especially Michael Pemulis. Second, there are the goings on amongst the residents and staff of the nearby Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, a nine-month residency and treatment halfway house for drug addicts. Third, and stay with me here, there are the goings on between Rémy Marathe, a member of Quebec’s most feared terrorist group, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents—the Wheelchair Assassins—and a government field operative, Hugh Steeply, who is undercover as a female reporter named Helen, as they lead separate searches for a videotape known as “The Entertainment” that is so captivating that people literally watch it until they die.

Ok, So What Is Infinite Jest About?
As you’d expect of an 1,100-page novel with aspirations to be A, if not The, Great American Novel, Infinite Jest is about a lot of things. It’s about entertainment, the things we choose to do to occupy our minds and our lives. Relatedly—as not every entertainment is positive—the novel is about drugs, several types of addiction, treatment (especially AA), withdrawal, relapse. It’s about depression and suicide, which may have been inevitable but especially tragic given that David Foster Wallace ultimately killed himself. It’s about how we try and often fail to communicate with one another. It’s about technology and the harms it causes physically, psychologically, socially. It’s about talent, realized and unrealized, and tennis (aka “chess on the run”), which DFW played (and played quite well) as a youth. It’s about family, relationships, and the influence of deceased or absent parents on their children. And along the way you’ll learn quite a bit about the Québécois separatist movement and the Cambridge area of Boston.

What Makes Infinite Jest So Challenging to Read?
The biggest thing probably is that Infinite Jest is told out of sequence, using a calendar of its own invention that is eventually explained somewhere in the middle of the story. Indeed, the novel’s opening chapter is chronologically the last thing that happens in the story. The tale jumps back and forth between characters, and time periods, though as the book progresses characters from seemingly separate storylines begin to converge and the timeframe becomes somewhat more straightforward. The story is primarily told from a third-person narrator, but in some places the storytelling is through different characters’ first-person perspective, or transcripts of conversations, or other odd presentation including the famous endnotes, which sometimes provide technical information like a normal footnote might, but at other times tell whole, lengthy stories apparently a bit too tangential for the main text. And a fair number of events seem to happen offscreen, and have to be inferred from the changes between scenes. Though I could certainly have told you it has a complicated structure, I learned afterwards that DFW based it on something called a Sierpinski triangle, which is a mathematically-generated pattern of triangles inside triangles that looks rather cool-looking though I have no idea how it explains the structure of the novel.

Cool, But Should I Read Infinite Jest?
Infinite Jest will not be for everyone. It’s very long, the story is confusingly non-linear, with neither a clear central narrative nor a clear resolution of the various plot lines. When I said I gave this book “a shot,” I mean I geared up like I was going into battle with it, devouring the entire book over a four-week period by listening to the two audiobooks (the 55-hour main text and the separate 8-hour recording of the endnotes) and following along/making notes in an ebook copy. I couldn’t imagine keeping the story straight over a much longer period of time, yet that kind of pace was only possible for me because I took three long car rides during that time.

But if you have ever thought you were intrigued by the idea of reading Infinite Jest, I absolutely recommend it. The entire novel is insanely imaginative. It was prescient about matters as varied as Instacart, streaming television, the current preference for audio calls over video calls, and a certain recent President. It is maybe the most sweeping and harrowing description of drugs and addiction in American literature. And yet, the novel is often comical, and downright hilarious in places.* Most of all, though, I’d recommend the novel for its brilliant writing, which is richly detailed, full of observations and clever descriptions.** DFW is Shakespearean in his willingness to simply write new words into existence, and he can describe something as mundane as how a group of people eat a meal in a way that is funny yet still revealing tiny nuggets of character that flesh out more developed characters and give a little texture to minor ones. I’m sure I didn’t understand it all—it’s simply too complex to fully grasp with one reading. But I enjoyed it every step of the way, and the next day I don’t think about Infinite Jest will be the first since the day I started reading it.

*I suppose no self-respecting review of Infinite Jest would be complete without a least one endnote, so here’s my first. Perhaps the funniest scene in this novel, and one of the funniest I’ve ever read, is the Eschaton scene. Eschaton is an insanely complicated strategic game played by the Enfield Tennis Academy students, in which the players and their clothes and their territory over 6 tennis courts represent various countries, and they take turns lobbing 400 dead tennis balls that each represent a nuclear warhead at each other. It unfolds like a deranged game of Risk, complete with genuine outrage among the players as the events unfold. There’s a brilliant depiction of the scene in the video for “Calamity Song,” by The Decemberists. Indeed, for a depiction in Legos of a number of scenes from this novel, you can check out http://www.brickjest.com.

**I mean, just marvel at this quotation, which was too long for the start of this review:

Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation—utilizing a hand-held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (6 [squared]) or 36 little pinholes—let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet—and this was the retrospectively marvelous part—even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided. During a traditional call, e.g., as you let’s say performed a close tactile blemish-scan of your chin, you were in no way oppressed by the thought that your phonemate was perhaps also devoting a good percentage of her attention to a close tactile blemish-scan.

Di Wallace ho già letto il brillante saggio: "una cosa divertente che non farò mai più" che ho davvero apprezzato, una fusione ben riuscita di umorismo e sociologia e dopo aver acquistato e tenuto lì a prendere polvere per un paio d'anni in libreria il suo romanzo più famoso mi sono deciso e l'ho finalmente iniziato.

"Infinite Jest", mostro venerato e temuto.

A vedersi appare come un bel tomo grassoccio di circa 1300 pagine, più o meno la lunghezza di un "Signore degli anelli" o uno dei romanzi Malazan o ancora un tomo della Folgoluce di Sanderson, insomma niente di spaventoso per un lettore di fantasy, siamo abituati a questi numeri.
Quello che invece colpisce come un gancio diretto alla bocca dello stomaco è la capacità di Wallace nel fregarsene completamente del lettore medio e nell'evitare attentamente di essere accessibile ai più. Lui scrive a modo suo e pazienza, sta a noi cercare la concentrazione necessaria per seguirlo nei suoi voli pindarici lessicali oppure utilizzare il volume cartaceo come semplice fermaporte.

La trama di Infinite Jest è riassumibile pressappoco in una manciata di righe ma Wallace si sente in dovere di riempire le restanti 1300 pagine iniziando a raccontarci di tutto; eventi, situazioni e pensieri a ruota libera, senza freni e regole, tutti però racchiusi nell'immobilità, nella depressione cronica, nella dipendenza senza speranza, raccontati con un tono che fa dell'umorismo il suo punto di forza utilizzando una struttura narrativa a incroci e salti temporali differenti e non sequenziali che legano il lettore con una camicia di forza inamovibile e indistruttibile e lo costringono alla lettura forzata del testo dimenticando di mangiare e andare di corpo. Talmente surreale da sembrare reale. Ho trovato difficilissimo staccarmi dalle sue pagine, è come un buco nero supermassiccio, impossibile rimanere indifferenti.

Lo stile e l'abilità di scrittura di Wallace stupisce e affascina, cattura l'attenzione tra neologismi, vocaboli inusuali, ripetizioni ossessive, frasi talmente lunghe che cerchi ancora il punto dopo una pagina, dialoghi sopra le righe studiati con una cura maniacale e la capacità di dettagliare ogni cosa a livello molecolare.
In poche parole Wallace si diverte, ancor più che nei suoi saggi, a mischiare le carte in tavola e stupire con la sua indiscussa, mostruosa abilità. Volutamente.
La sensazione è quella di ascoltare una radio accesa saltando per brevi secondi da una stazione all'altra cercando di intuire al volo di quali canzoni si tratta e infine trascriverne il testo a memoria.

E così passano le prime 600 pagine, che sembrano molte ma siamo solo a metà romanzo, e ci portano lentamente in questo mondo quasi futuristico ma che somiglia tristemente ai nostri giorni in cui però tutto è alquanto bizzarro.
Bizzarra è la situazione politica con un bel muro di plexiglass ai confini degli Stati, bizzarra è la società con le sue regole social consumistiche eccessive e i suoi numerosissimi personaggi, tutti con seri problemi esistenziali, autentici prodotti della loro società malata.
Il consumismo senza limiti la fa da padrone e detta le leggi ad ogni livello, la pubblicità entra fin dentro le ossa.
Pensate alla statua della libertà con al posto della fiaccola un bel prodotto da pubblicizzare tipo un hamburger gigante di plastica di svariate tonnellate o il novero degli anni che acquisisce il nome di un bene di consumo tipo: "siamo nell'anno del pannolone per adulti Depend". Per citarne ancora abbiamo anche delle enormi catapulte che sparano nello spazio capsule con la spazzatura prodotta dagli abitanti e le scorie radioattive, quando non cadono accidentalmente sulla città stessa e sulle loro teste annebbiate dalle droghe.
Ma Wallace non è uno scrittore di fantascienza, si vede e non vuole esserlo. Il suo mondo è solo una parodia che affascina e racchiude le infinite storie dei suoi personaggi. Come un cerchio, non inizia e non finisce, procede avanti e torna indietro.

Una parodia, un mezzo artificioso, come il suo "Intrattenimento": un video che assorbe la mente di chi lo vede annullandone ogni volontà fino alla morte. Unica possibilità di libertà. Servizi segreti composti da assassini senza gambe su sedie a rotelle. Agenti segreti speciali che adottano tattiche di travestimento bizzarre e discutibili come l'utilizzare persone di colore per impersonare uomini bianchi e uomini bianchi per impersonare individui di colore. Un delirio.

Si procede avanzando a piccoli passi mettendo ordine, soffermandoci maggiormente sulle vicissitudini dei tanti personaggi descritti in modo ossessivo e microscopico donandogli una connotazione da vicini problematici della porta accanto o conoscenti di vecchia data ormai perduti. Si finisce per conoscerli talmente bene nelle loro specificità fisiche e psicologiche ma ci si dimentica, stranamente, di provare emozioni per le loro azioni che rimangono distanti. Soli e abbandonati anche dal lettore.

Infinite Jest è un romanzo sulla dipendenza brutale in ogni sua declinazione: dipendenza dalle droghe, dipendenza dal consumismo sfrenato, dai mass media invasivi.
Abbiamo la casa di recupero per tossicodipendenti, la scuola di tennis per giovani promesse, le strade piene di disperati, drogati e senzatetto, questi i luoghi principali dove Wallace, da maestro giocoliere delle parole, ci trasporta in mille situazioni diverse toccando sempre vette di dolore, mancanza e rimpianto, mai una gioia per nessuno e la speranza scivola via tra le dita come polvere al vento. I suoi personaggi sono prigionieri del loro mondo e ne sono consapevoli.
I giovani tennisti non hanno modo di crescere, occlusi dalla loro conoscenza enciclopedica e da una società che li guida su percorsi già delineati fin dalla loro tenera età. I residenti della casa di recupero sono protagonisti e allo stesso tempo spettatori della loro triste e solitaria vita, accumunati dalle disgrazie agli altri residenti ma imprigionati tutti nella loro stessa disperata condizione.
Tutta questa prima metà è magnetica, la parte che ho seguito con maggior interesse. 5 stelle.

Poi nella seconda metà, il "gioco" di Wallace, per quanto mi riguarda, inizia a cedere e rischia di rompersi involvendo su se stesso.
Si raggiunge, forse, una maggiore chiarezza della trama principale riuscendo a collegare i pochi punti nascosti nel caleidoscopio proposto, ma viene meno quel senso di novità, stupore e divertimento che mi aveva accompagnato nelle fasi iniziali. Continuano ad essere narrati eventi e situazioni con l'aggiunta di altri personaggi che vanno a sommarsi ai precedenti.
Leggere ancora e ancora di tizi che si divertono ad ammazzare cani e gatti soffocandoli in sacchi di plastica, altri in piena fase finale da dipendenza cronica immersi nelle loro feci e stupri di minorenni tetraplegici inizia a sfiancarmi mentalmente e la pazienza termina. Il trucco ormai consumato dello scioccare il lettore con questi mezzi non basta più, la novità è perduta e lo schema tende a ripetersi, all'infinito. Tutto già visto nelle precedenti 600 pagine.
La trama non decolla mai, evidentemente non serve, è un pretesto, gli eventi e le innumerevoli situazioni secondarie, descritte per pagine intere, arrivano anche ad annoiarmi. La concentrazione si arrende e quel senso di divertimento e stupore provato all'inizio sfuma inesorabilmente e collassa completamente verso un finale che sembra non voler chiudere un bel niente. 3 stelle.
Buon Infinite Jest per tutti.

Si dice che è il viaggio che conta, sono pienamente d'accordo ma aggiungo: al termine di un romanzo mi chiedo sempre cosa mi ha lasciato? cosa mi hanno dato questi personaggi? Qual è il messaggio?
Analizzando le 1200 pagine, oltre allo stile indiscutibile e dotato dell'autore, fonte di meraviglia, e le risate situazionali delle tante scene al limite del grottesco, mai in me questo Infinite Jest è riuscito a suscitare emozioni vere, nulla mi ha legato veramente a questi individui rotti, malati e senza speranza che vagano in un mondo di cui sono immagine riflessa. Forse anche questo isolamento lettore/personaggio era voluto da Wallace.
Eppure mi inchino alla sconfinata abilità di Wallace nel catapultarmi, come la sua spazzatura volante, in questo mondo degenerato, triste e chiuso, con le sue scene surreali, a volte vomitevoli, ma anche divertenti, che rimarranno impresse nella mia memoria a lungo.
Cosa mi rimane di questo romanzo? Sicuramente anche la sua straordinaria capacità di saper intrattenere.

Certamente non ho detto tutto, ma forse ho detto anche troppo, non è un romanzo facile da leggere ne un romanzo da venerare o mitizzare, senza alcun dubbio un'utile esperienza di lettura.
Scusate la lunghezza.

I should have hated this book. 1079 pages of small text with loooooonnnnggggg paragraphs and little white space so it feels like you’re reading a newspaper from 1881. Plus, 96 goddamn pages of endnotes. *1 The plot, such as it is, doesn’t really come into focus until several hundred pages into it, and even though it’s set in the near future where something very strange has happened in North America, this doesn’t get explained until about mid-way through the book so you’re left feeling confused and bewildered a lot of the time.

There’s an almost endless cast of characters. Long sections of the book have detailed descriptions of things that don’t seem crucial to the plot. *2 And then there’s the fact you have to use two bookmarks because you’re constantly going back to the endnotes. *3 Some of the endnotes contain long wandering passages that also don’t seem relevant to anything. *4

The ending isn’t very satisfying. *5 The main plot point about the search for a cartridge of ‘entertainment’ so good that it will literally make anyone who sees it immediately stop living their live and stay in front of the television until they die because they’ll refuse to do anything but watch it, including eating, drinking, using the toilet, etc. *6, isn’t given much resolution, either.
The book just kind of stops, and you have the distinct impression that DFW could have done another 1000 pages or so without breaking a sweat if he hadn’t eventually eliminated his own map. *7

So after all that, why was my first instinct after finishing it to go back and immediately start re-reading it? *8

I was completely engrossed when I was reading this book. No matter what weird detours it took, I was more than happy to just keep turning pages like one of those poor suckers who got snared by The Entertainment. If this book was endless *9, I probably would have spent my life cheerfully reading it and then asked for a copy on my deathbed just to try and squeeze a few more pages in.

I’m not sure why I liked it so much. In fact, the way this book got into my head gives me a slight case of the howling fantods *10 Considering it’s a book that deals a lot with obsession, this is more than a little unsettling.

I’m sure someone with an English degree could spend the rest of their life trying to deconstruct this book, but I don’t have the intelligence, skill or patience to even try. Wallace did something unique and crazy with this, and he had the talent to make it work. I don’t know how, and I think that figuring it out might be like when you learn how a magic trick was done so I’m just going to shelve it, always be glad that I took it on and managed to finish it, and re-read it someday once the memory of the endless pages of endnotes has faded. * 11

Oh, and I would have given it 5 stars, but you know, the endnote thing… *12

*1 - Yes, 96 goddamn pages.

*2 - I now know way more about tennis drills and Alcoholics Anonymous than I ever really wanted to learn.

*3 - Seriously, there are 388 endnotes in this freaking thing.

*4 - There’s an 8 page filmography listing all the movies that were supposed to have been made by one of the characters.

*5 - Somebody email me and explain what the hell happened.

*6 - The closest comparison would probably be a really kick-ass episode of The Wire or Battlestar Galactica.

*7 - ‘Eliminating maps’ is a slang phrase from the book meaning to either kill someone or kill yourself.

*8 - I didn’t. Mainly because I couldn’t bear the thought of dealing with the endnotes again.

*9 - And DFW did his best to make it that way…

*10 - ‘Howling fantods’ is another slang term from the book that means to get creeped out. E.g. Seeing Michael Jackson’s horrifically surgically altered face on magazine covers after his death gave me the howling fantods.

*11 - Some of the endnotes are so long that they have their own endnotes. That’s just messed up.

*12 - I’m not kidding. They are completely out of control.

No sé ni qué decir. Han sido siete meses de lectura, al principio sosegada, hacia el final enfebrecida. Se trata de uno de esos libros que cambian la forma y el significado de lo que entendemos por escribir y leer. De esos no hay muchos. DFW, genio absoluto.

5/17/17 edit: I'm upgrading this one to 5 stars, because I still cannot stop thinking about it a year after finishing it.

There are 2 kinds of difficult novels: those that you don't enjoy while reading, but you genuinely enjoying having read, and those that you only enjoy while reading because the small picture stuff is infinitely better than the novel as a whole. Infinite Jest is one of the latter, and I think that's why people never really stop reading it; it's only good while you're reading it. You finish and then start right over again, trying to piece things together until you create something in your mind that slightly makes sense of it all.

This thing is a real love/hate affair. There are moments of true brilliance that are exceptional achievements, and the characters are fantastic, the world-building absolute top-notch, but if you have to leave the "ending" up to your audience to imagine in their collective heads instead of – I don't know – WRITING IT, you wrote yourself into a corner and didn't/couldn't write your way out.

Yes, I've gone back and read the first chapter after finishing it. Yes, I understand the chronology. Yes, I've read all the theories online. I get what probably happened, but how did it happen? Why did it happen? How did those strings and threads of story and plot actually come together? The answer is: they didn't. If I have to construct a way for all of this brilliant stuff to come together myself, it means that the author never did. It's just a hand-wavy sort of "oh and then stuff happened and then the end" cop-out.

There are threads in this book that insinuate all kinds of things, meaning that you can find evidence to setup any sort of ending that your heart desires, and it's just as valid as anyone else's theories, because there is no actual ending. Think Hal in that first chapter is actually Mario pretending to be Hal? They're both described as fire hydrant shaped, maybe he was. Think John Wayne was an AFR plant all along, AFR agents and John Wayne are both described by the same quotes from The Terminator, maybe he was. Or maybe none of that, because there isn't an ending, so we do not and will not ever know what actually happened. DFW created a piece of entertainment that once read, leaves the reader only wanting to read it again and again and again and again. It is an Infinite Jest.

Again, the brilliant stuff is so brilliant that I still enjoyed it immensely, and have to give this 5 stars, and I get that postmodernism is all about ontological vs. epistemological approaches to fiction, but good lord at least have it slightly wrap up just a tiny bit!

2015 Book I was Most Afraid to Hate

I read 11%. I can't do this....

Emotionally I feel

10 % amused.
90% frustrated bored and irritated.

Sorry to my buds that love it but time is toooooo short to struggle through a very long book that I'm starting to resent !

onwards and upwards :-)

In 1863 Abraham Lincoln decided that the fourth Thursday of each November would be recognized nationally as Thanksgiving. Today happens to be the fourth Thursday in November. Happy Thanksgiving.

I would like to give thanks to the fact that I finished this mother-effing book today.




It's now 9:40 EST as I start to write this review. I finished reading approximately five hours ago. Since then I have polished off almost an entire bottle of Chardonnay. It's taken me this long to a) get a nice enough buzz on, and b) have any desire to update my review to this book. My desire to review this book is equal to the desire I had to read this book - both seem like a really good idea, but in the process of either I sort of feel like I'd probably be better off wrangling a squirrel with my bare hands. But, okay, to be fair, there were times while I read this that I really enjoyed it. My wrists never actually enjoyed holding the book, but my mind was amused once in a while at the mental gymnastics which were required to get through some of the passages. Other times my mind told my eyeballs they were really effing dumb to keep looking at the page. Those were the times in which the book was set off to the side and wasn't picked up again for sometimes weeks at a time. It sat next my bed for the most part. I hated this book during those times. It was there when I went to sleep at night and it was there when I woke up in the morning. It might as well have had eyes because I felt it constantly looking at me. I think one morning it even handed me my glasses.

Infinite Jest became a third roommate. One that wasn't even paying rent, but it gives okay head so I kept it around.

I read 37 other books in the time that I spent also reading Infinite Jest. Another GR friend read only 24 other books during her reading of this book. No, I'm not judging myself. Okay, maybe I am a little bit. Excuse me, I need another glass of wine.

I know, I know. This whole review is completely unstable. Why rate a book so high if the review itself sounds so low? I never take almost four months to read a book that I love, so that fact alone must mean I really hated this, right?

Oh, if only it were that easy.

I don't love Infinite Jest. I think a part of me hates it. Actually, a large part of me hates it. I hate that it took me almost four months to read it, and I hate that it consumed so much of my time and energy. I hate that I so very much wanted to know how it ended, preventing me from abandoning it entirely. I hate that there were so many endnotes, and sometimes those footnotes went on for a really long time and may as well have been whole chapters in and of themselves. The different story lines? Hated them. I can't tell you how many times I swore at the book, how many times I swore at the memory of David Foster Wallace himself for writing such a book, how many times I argued with myself, "Summabitch, this is like postmodernist fiction - no, it's worse than postmodern literature... this is like... post-postmodern literature..." At times I thought that maybe I should give Ulysses another read because in comparison it's like reading those Dick and Jane books. (BTW, reading Joyce is nothing like reading Dick and Jane books, and Infinite Jest is really no more difficult than reading Ulysses. I'm just waxing hyperbolic here.)

But there were some really incredible aspects to Infinite Jest, and I would be wrong not to give some shout-outs to those things as well. The story lines that I hated? I also sort of loved them. There's really no good way of giving the story line any sort of true justice here. There's a reason the book is over a thousand pages - you're crazy if you think I'm going to even try to sum it up here. Don't be lazy, read it yourself. Anyway, I loved the stories, which only makes me hate the book even more. Hi, I'm a woman, get over it.

Incidentally, at the same time I've been reading this I've also been reading some crazy modern French philosophy dudes, and secretly I've been making comparisons between the two books. Which is why when I reached this passage (highly edited to hurry along my point for this purpose, bold fonts are mine for emphasis) on page 792 I sort of vomited a little in my mouth before screaming and passing out a bit:

n...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, as detailed in perspicuous detail in M. Gilles Deleuze's posthumous Incest and the Life of Death in Capitalist Entertainment...

On page 838-9:

n  To concoct something the gifted boy couldn't simply master and move on from to a new plateau.n

In case you were wondering, the other book I am reading at this time is A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Deleuze and his buddy, Guattari. Hello! Coincidence!? That's pretty crazy. That requires another glass of wine to process.

Seriously, Deleuze and Guattari are written all over this Wallace guy. I know very little about Wallace. I know he wrote books like Infinite Jest, had a rough life, died way too young at his own hand, and... well, that's pretty much it. I haven't read anything else by him, though I might. The point is I don't know how much he was into those crazy Frenchies, but I would say he had to have read them, studied them, or maybe, like myself, was a part of a really pretentious book club in which they spend almost five hours dissecting three chapters of A Thousand Plateaus at a time. The thought actually made me feel a little closer to Wallace.

But then I remembered how angry I've been at Deleuze and Guattari as well over the past few months and decided they're all back on the bus. (The Bus, btw, is just a pretend bus inside my head where I imagine putting people that I don't like onto said bus and then eventually driving them all off a cliff. A really high cliff.)

At the same time, it's genius. Wallace was genius for writing this book, a non-traditional dystopia which, I might add, also sort of gets me all hot and bothered because I do like a well-written dystopia. He was genius for making all these connections to things like Deleuze and Guattari, things that a lot of people don't really read; it made me wonder what other references he made that I'm not familiar with and therefore I missed completely. I was happy to at least catch that one.

It seems this is the sort of book that people either love or hate - there's very little middle-ground on this one. It seems people read this more than once, though for the life of me I can't imagine ever wanting to read it again. I'm glad I read it once, for sure. And when I say "glad" I mean it in the same way that I mean it when I say I'm "glad" my mom made me eat really nasty vegetables when I was a kid. I didn't like them but they were good for me. That's sort of what Infinite Jest is. A giant, thousand-+-page vegetable that you know is good for you but it doesn't really taste that great, and putting ketchup on it doesn't help. I'm just a healthier reader because I was able to stomach it.

But it didn't change my life. I refuse to say that it did. It will, however, stick with me. And there again is that stupid genius of Wallace. He wrote a big spanking book that manages to really stick with a reader. But, like I ask constantly, especially when it comes to Deleuze and Guattari - was it necessary??

I sort of feel like that Rip Van Winkle guy in that Washington Irving story. Like I've been asleep for a really long time (in this case, it's been since August 2nd when I started reading Infinite Jest) and now I'm awake and holy crap, things have changed with the rest of the world. I would read Infinite Jest before going to bed at night, and then wake up suddenly only to realize I had been dreaming about reading Infinite Jest. There was no break between putting the book down, turning off the light and falling asleep. It all just continued in my head. And it seems this is the kind of book that people remember where they were while they were reading this more than they can actually remember what it's about. I remember where I was when I heard Kurt Cobain had died. I remember where I was in my life while I was reading Infinite Jest. The finer details of my life are actually a little blurry during this reading though because it consumes so much energy to read it that it sort of overshadows everything else.


So that was my Thanksgiving. I knew part of my plan for the day was to get totally trashed on wine and finish Infinite Jest, which is mostly why I didn't invite my brother over to celebrate the day with us. (Sorry bro!) Now I've been sitting here giving two big middle fingers to the copy of Infinite Jest beside me. Eventually maybe we'll make up, but for now it's time for bed because, alas, I have to work in the morning and I have to sleep this Wallace-Jest-Chardonnay-buzz off. If you read all the way down to this sentence then you're awesome and you are probably worthy and capable of reading Infinite Jest on your own. I wish you well. Tip: Read all of the endnotes.

I've been waiting, panther-like, for the right combination of caffeine and personal gumption to strike, to attack writing about this, since it really is one of my favorite books ever-ever, and one of the most fascinating things I've ever read. I've read this book twice and I could care less what people say about it, because when I *do* care, I tend to grit my teeth over the ridiculous comments & reviews that tend to come up in discussing David Foster Wallace's work. People like to levy the criticism that the book is "sloppy" or "digressive". Really? You think? An 1100 page book with 200 pages of small-print footnotes might be a little digressive or indulgent or maddening? It might stray a wee bit into uncharted, dark-woods territory? Jeez.

There is, in art, what I like to call the "crazy project". Once you go to work on the Crazy Project -- C.P. for short -- you don't leave the Crazy Project. You don't FINISH the crazy project. You can -- when you are really involved in it, I mean really involved -- scarcely even talk about it; you may not even realize you're involved in it. The C.P. involves being given a hammer (the only real tool of the artist), a mouthful of nails, and being sent "over yonder hill" and told to do AS MUCH DAMAGE AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN with the hammer you have been given. When working on the C.P., the creative force is one in the same as the destructive force, and your hammer is a useful tool regardless of which way you are swinging it.

I think DFW is one of the most fascinating authors alive -- he's doing work with the English language in the tradition of Kathy Acker, Bill Burroughs, or James Joyce. The marketplace demands "novels" and so people oblige, but there is a difference between a "novel" and a BOOK, and I would consider a book to be more interesting -- if more difficult and less "composed"-- and Infinite Jest is definitely a BOOK, and shouldn't be treated as a "novel" in the same way, say, "Life of Pi" is a novel (and I do think Life of Pi is terrific, don't get me wrong). But, if you want immaculately written works of fiction by Wallace, check out his short stories -- especially the ones in Girl w/ Curious Hair -- because these conform more to what you would expect from traditional notions of "reading fiction". If you want a beautiful, wildly ambitious, insanely indulgent, uncompromising mind-bending skull-violating MESS, one that comprises an entire Victorian manor of the Crazy Project, then Infinite Jest may well be worth your while.

The book is, definitely, a mess, let's not mince words. It is also obsessively-compulsively mathematical in the way that DFW seems to enjoy; there is an order to the chaos, and it did take reading it a second time to pull out some of the exquisitely crafted crystalline plot strands he was working at. Linearity & coherence of disparate plot elements is not what the book is interested in, be warned.

But before I make the case of this being some academic project with no soul, let me say that reading this, I was genuinely surprised and moved by how deep & real the characters in it become. The characters in here are terribly tragic, in a real Shakespearian sense (the book's title is after all a reference to Hamlet), and their tapestry in this book's pages is as intimate and heartrending as it is vast; this book is a language project but one that remains absolutely invested in the lives of the people involved in that "project".

The book is about a lot of things: American culture & the nature of desire, fathers and sons, art, addiction, institutions, drugs, consciousness, film & the nature of narrative . . . too much to go into. More than anything, I think, the book is about addiction, and how our desires are moderated and mediated by culture, and how desire & addiction are entwined, and how Westerners approach these things.

Infinite Jest is wildly funny and, like I mentioned above, almost unexpectedly moving: there is a kind of veneer between the reader and the characters; they are guarded and stoic people, for the most part, and "getting to know" them can be as frustrating as trying to "get to know" someone in your own life who is guarded and careful with their emotions. But over the course of hundreds of pages you learn the inner-workings of IJ's huge cast, and their emotional motivations and subtleties begin to resonate with you in ways that dig so deep I think they're almost frightening.

This book is dense enough -- to say the least -- that I think you can get out of it whatever you are willing to put into it. Isn't this true of most good art? But the depth here is incredible. To say I'm "biased" and a bit blinded to criticisms about this book is hardly the point -- I think its a marvel, I think its a mess, I think it taught me what the difference is between a book & a novel, and why I think BOOKS are what the front-line artists working on the Crazy Project are really hammering out.

update/addendum: I wrote this when DFW was still alive. It pains me to even go back and read this review -- "one of the most fascinating authors alive". I can reliably drop the last word of that now. DFW's suicide still stings like no other artist for me. I do know I'm not alone there, a lot of people who admire his work feel it. We were robbed -- it's selfish, incredibly so, but so is suicide.

Objectively, I still think Girl With Curious Hair is probably the best place to start, but I didn't start there, I started here, and it worked out okay. Just know this is a glorious mess, be patient with it, the book wants to be your daddy, but you have to be its daddy, let it teach you as you guide it it -- it's a living thing, this book, all the more precious now.

Nope. Just nope.

After about the dozenth new zany character with a new zany backstory even more zany than the last; the mysterious all-world conspiracy lifted straight from Pynchon at his least subtle and most whacked-out druggie paranoid; the lack of any meaningful characterization or plot progression; the footnotes that add absolutely nothing to the understanding of the main body of text; and, oh god, the cringe-worthy academic attempt at AAVE – it dawned on me that this is scribbling. The scribbling of a brilliant, tortured, over-educated, hypersensitive graphomanic. A novel it is not.

If that's the thing you're looking for, by all means, enjoy. Otherwise, stick to his short stories and essays, where the form forces him to rein that shit in and be the brilliant, tortured, over-educated, hypersensitive writer for whom the accolades are truly deserved.

Admittedly, Infinite Jest is a tough book. You start the book having no clue when it is happening and who the various characters are. There is stuff that happens in the opening pages that explains events at the end of the book, albeit over 1000 pages and hundreds of footnotes away. I'd say it is quite elliptical. That being said, it is an amazing piece of literature. I forced myself through the first 300 and then 400 pages and at about 500 pages I finally hit my stride and was able to follow through to 1071 (yes this was the British printing not the American one). I loved the characters and the high comedy that is here as well as all the wacky situations in the drug rehab centre and the tennis academy. The president reminded me a lot of the current American regime (I could almost see the Statue of Liberty carrying a Trump Tower logo across her forehead or maybe a Chick-Fil-A sign) and the text was occasionally of incredible beauty and insight.

Take this passage from the Marathe/Steeply dialog:
“Someone who had authority, or should have had authority and did not exercise authority. I do not know. But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what.Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing. So completely forgetting that when I say choose to you you make expressions with your face such as “Herrrrrre we are going.” Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions.”

This is such a perceptive description of why Drumpf was elected. A vast swath of Americans are driven by short attention soans, knee-jerk reactionism based on their inability to choose and their reliance of "alternative facts." President J. Gently is eerily similar to Drumpf - the coming destruction of Standing Rock by the pipeline (from which Drumpf himself - oh, sorry his son - will profit), how is that different from the Concavity? DFW's book can be read as much of a warning againsy Drumpf as Roth's The Plot Against America or Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. And I digress...An important book for the 21st C! And oh, so relevant!

I talked for a few hours to fellow Goodreads reading addict Nocturnalux and tried to get her convinced that this should be on her reading list. It remains for me a landmark work requiring infinite patience to get the reveal of the infinite joke at the end.

¡La terminé! ¡La terminé!
Terminé La broma infinita (1996), la obra maestra de uno de los mejores representantes del posmodernismo norteamericano: David Foster Wallace (1962-2008). Y no puedo por menos de decir que me ha costado lo suyo, más de 1200 páginas y casi 400 notas, algunas de ellas verdaderos textos independientes de varias páginas con sus propias notas.

En un entorno distópico, poco importante para la obra en sí, imaginemos una escuela de tenis de élite con más de 100 alumnos. Wallace nos narra, durante más o menos un año, su vida cotidiana y las relaciones entre ellos, con sus familias y con sus cuidadores (Aunque el lugar no tiene la mayor importancia, podía ser cualquier escenario).

Si contamos la cantidad de personajes y el modo, meticuloso hasta la extenuación, como el autor nos muestra hasta los más pequeños detalles de la rutina diaria (cómo se rascan la nariz o sorben la sopa), creo que queda explicada la extensión de la novela.

Si a todo esto le añadimos:

Multitud de temas, subtemas, cambios constantes de escenario, de tiempo, de registros, de voz, de personajes. A veces lo narrado deja, abruptamente, de ser lo cotidiano y pasa a ser tan profundo, o de una crudeza tal, que realmente te quedas impactado. A veces, aparecen verdaderas disertaciones filosóficas que te obligan incluso a ralentizar la lectura para no perder el hilo de la narración.

La infinidad de referencias a productos de todo tipo (ropa, comidas, medicamentos…), lugares, personajes, referencias cinematográficas, musicales y televisivas norteamericanos que distraen en gran medida la atención de los lectores extranjeros y dificultan la comprensión de las múltiples connotaciones que seguro poseen.

La minuciosidad en las descripciones que puede ralentizar el ritmo de lectura (emplea casi 100 paginas para contar un partido de tenis), aunque en ningún momento se repitan. Es obvio, que nos encontramos ante un excelente narrador, aunque no encuentro la razón para la que nos cuente lo que nos cuenta con ese nivel de detalle.

Un lenguaje denso, pero, eso sí, impecable (no hay nada superfluo ni redundante). Siempre está sucediendo algo, aunque muchas veces te preguntas qué importancia puede tener. Aunque no hay que desesperar, La broma infinita está también llena de cosas interesantes y, sobre todo, de algunas increíbles situaciones surrealistas que te pueden provocar tanto el llanto como la risa, o las dos cosas a la vez.

Con todo lo anterior parece obvio deducir que La broma infinita no es nada fácil de leer.

No sé si he entendido bien lo que el autor desea comunicarnos, pero sí he notado a lo largo de toda la obra un poso de decadencia que interpreto como una crítica a una sociedad caduca, con una falta total de valores, de ideales, de planes de futuro. Una juventud con un individualismo exacerbado y una falta total de compromiso con los demás. En conjunto, parece una total exaltación de la nimiedad.

Es evidente que Wallace tiene un talento incuestionable para la narración. Escribe de una manera muy personal y diferente. Otra cosa es que nos interese lo que está contando o que seamos capaces de entender lo que quiere decirnos con ello. Yo no lo he tenido muy claro. Aunque seguro que ha habido muchísimas cosas que se me han escapado.

Lo que más me ha disfrutado, aparte de esos momentos de hilarante surrealismo, es la genialidad del autor en la creación de ese universo complejo de la escuela y, sobre todo, la increíble descripción, tanto física como psíquica, de los personajes (estamos hablando de decenas).

En conclusión: una obra de gran envergadura, de incuestionable calidad literaria que muchos lectores no podrán llegar a disfrutar… o, ni siquiera, a acabar.

Three things in my life that have been my greatest achievements that have required the most energy and dedication:

1. Getting my MBA
2. Raising two kids
3. Reading Infinite Jest

The writing is amazing and well researched. The story is complex and troubling. So complex, in fact, I am still not quite sure what happened!

I am going to be doing a lot of talking to my friends who finished it and lots of searching around on the internet to figure this one out!

But, I didn't dislike it - but, if I were to recommend it to someone, I am not sure yet what criteria I would base the recommendation on. My brain is still puzzling and I may take awhile to recuperate!