Have you ever, due to excessive consumption of amphetamine salts while prepping for the SATs, arrived at a piss-party only to realize, upon being cordially welcomed, that you can’t produce the fine motive forces required to roll the expected reciprocations from your tongue? That’s because it’s velcro’d to your palate by rampaging dehydration. You’ve made a mockery of this golden production. Take your academically haggard, gaunt, overstimulated ass and kick gravels. It’s clear you weren’t fit to erotically purge the contents of your engorged bladder in front of a live studio audience. And now you know how I feel about writing a review for this cinder block of recursive empathy technologies ever-collapsing in on itself at Infinite (!) levels of granularity. A device of unparalleled imagination that not only solicits your active participation in feeding sums into the function of its fractal bloom, (which even normal books can manage), but turning a lens of chaotic self-similarity upon your presence within the book/reader system, their mutual porousness exaggerated beyond normal limits until one sublimates into the other, like tantric, peyote-enhanced cunnilingus which culminates in an orgiastic phase transition from local to universal. It is the kind of literary experience which causes you to re-examine what’s possible with symbols arrayed just so.

And but, I feel like I need a cigarette.

I suppose it’s only appropriate that I disclose how I feel about David Foster Wallace. I consider DFW a genius, full-bore. I have watched/read interviews with him with the kind of enthusiasm generally reserved for cult adherents who willingly accept the lethal Hawaiian Punch and dipsomaniacally smile with cherry red lips while acquiescing to ritual oblivion. I have grown teary eyed more times than I can count, seeing the sensitivity and compassion and diffidence and fundamental brokenness of DFW in dialog with journalists and young students. I think his commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College, This is Water, should make sweet love to your ear holes as many times as your acoustic refractory period will allow, this includes everyone who isn’t too hip to give a shit, or thinks that giving a shit is a good thing even if they can’t personally stop being obnoxiously, terminally, nihilistically hip. (It’s on YouTube, please lube your cochlea and pay attention to your partner.) So, no, this isn’t an objective critique of this very large, pathologically prolix, tumescently footnoted, detail obsessed, dangerously depressive, deliriously funny, pharmaceutically erudite, piece of exploded, cyclical chronology suffused with pathos, screaming meemies and howling fantods. I am one of those being Infinitely Jested upon, and I don’t much care. Jest me. An Enfilade of Jests along the meridians of my dyspeptically disposed, electrochemical wad of glial goop and myelinated fire. In short: Jest my brains out. (Infinitely)

I can’t clue you in to the anfractuous plot of this book, not only because my words will be inadequate, but because you deserve to be Jested upon unprepared, free of preconceptions and badly formulated theories. And yet, there is a universal (mis)(pre)conception about this book. That it is prohibitively difficult. That all but highly trained, literary minds will deliquesce before it like the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. And while I would agree that it’s a challenging read, it’s important to qualify what is meant by that. This book does not require you to be anything more than patient and attentive. (Although it will be of immense help if you’ve done a lot of drugs, maybe not enough to impair you permanently, so I’ll amend that to - an optimal amount of drugs - and have read a fair number of books in order to stretch your word-bag) It is not difficult for the sake of it, which is the insinuation bundled with the frequent appellation of “masturbatory”. It is not difficult without purpose. It is difficult because the rewards are commensurate with the effort required.

Stylistically mercurial, with modes of expression convolved like randy snakes deformed by partially digested mice packed to the whiskers with Methylenedioxymethamphetamine. By turns realistic and parodic. Reoccurring themes of anhedonia and addiction rhythmically kiss like sine waves through the ether. Absurdity explodes like magnesium filaments from the most unlikely directions, eliciting grins, guffaws and barking adenoidal laughter which may/may not echo the clattering of your marbles around the rim of cognitive incontinence, or a nasty sinus infection.

As a relatively innocuous example which won’t impact your future fun:

“Fictional ‘interactive documentary’ on Boston stage production of Weiss’s 20th-century play within play, in which the documentary’s chemically impaired director (Incandenza) repeatedly interrupts the inmates’ dumb show-capering and Marat and Sade’s dialogues to discourse incoherently on the implications of Brando’s Method Acting and Artaud’s Theatre Cruelty for North American filmed entertainment, irritating the actor who plays Marat (Leith) to such an extent that he has a cerebral hemorrhage and collapses onstage well before Marat’s scripted death, whereupon the play’s nearsighted director (Ogilvie), mistaking the actor who plays Sade (Johnson) for Incandenza, throws Sade into Marat’s medicinal bath and throttles him to death, whereupon the extra-dramatic figure oh Death (‘Psychosis’) descends deus ex machina to bear Marat (Leith) and Sade (Johnson) away, while Incandenza becomes ill all over the theater audience’s first row.”

This particular thing, for reasons that may be mysterious to you (and myself), caused me to laugh so much that it bordered on physical discomfort. Regretfully, I have not been able to properly communicate its comedic genius to others in my immediate vicinity, but I expect better from you lot.

Alfred Korzybsk is credited with the quote: “The map is not the territory.” In a paper he presented called A Non-Aristotelian System and its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics. He also said: “the word is not the thing.” Claiming that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. It’s an admonition to not mistake the model for the actual reality. But you’d be forgiven for being duped by the verisimilitude with which DFW depicts those who suffer from being rudderless, in their myriad efforts of self effacement, through means chemical and consumerist. This is a truly unique book, by a brilliant and tortured mind, and if you give it a chance, it will seduce you away from the comforts of traditional narrative structures and show you something unforgettable.

“OK, David, I see what you are trying to tell me about entertainment addiction, optimization culture and the corporatization of government. You are very prescient, and I actually agree with you. But I also kind of want you to fuck all the way off because you felt the need to be this obtuse about those topics. You felt the need to make me jump through your hoops to hammer in your points, and now I feel just as beaten up and sore as Hal does after a long day of practice, and yes, I will go hide in a corner and smoke a big joint now, because my brain feels like you ran it through a fryer and I need to relax. And by the way, when you wrote ‘Technically gorgeous.... But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness—no narrative movement toward a real story.... like a very smart person conversing with himself’, did you mean your own book? Because you stole the words right out of my mouth, buddy.

Look, I get it. You are way too smart for the average reader, and I understand why you want to make them work for it, but ‘hard to get’ never worked for me, I am way too literal-minded to play those games. I have been reading up on you and I am pretty sure you’re on the spectrum – that’s obvious from some of your stream-of-consciousness passages, I recognize it because that’s how my brain works too! I have no objections to making the neurotypicals run in circles, but how can you be so brilliant and so boring at the same time? In this case, I really mean it when I say: ‘It’s not you, it’s me’. It really is. It’s me that doesn’t want to spend my precious few hours of dedicated reading time forcing myself to get to the next brilliant part of your book by enduring the parts that make me incredibly frustrated. I just don’t have that kind of patience or time anymore, and I really am sorry. I just feel like I need to focus on other things… I think there was a lot of potential there, but let’s face it, we’re simply not compatible. I’m sure other readers who love you will more than make up for my leaving you behind. I am obviously an outlier here, so don’t let it hurt your feelings; I’m sure you’ll make someone else very happy with your book.”

Misogynistic, self-indulgent, interminable, pompous, pseudo-intellectual claptrap.

After finishing my reread, I feel pretty much exactly like I did the first time. This isn't the best book I've ever read, but it ranks high on my all-time-favorite list due to just how much it means to me, personally. I will always recommend this book to anyone who wants a better understanding of depression, addiction, and mental illness in general. I don’t have the time to type out anything substantial, but I will say that this book isn’t perfect, but it is certainly perfect for some – it’s damn near perfect for me.

Here’s my original, subjective and emotion-based, review:


It has been just about a year now since I first finished Infinite Jest. I have since read many novels - many recommended by Wallace (by proxy) himself, or by fans of his - and, while a few have come close, nothing has yet taken its spot as the (subjectively) best book I have ever read. Over the past year I have re-read a good portion of this book, while reading many other books that have been called, by many, "similar" - and found a lot of new favorite authors this way. I figured it was about time to write a real review, regardless of how daunting that task may be, or just how many others have already done much better than I could ever hope to. The bottom line is this: Infinite Jest changed me, it really did. In so many ways.

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

This was the novel that showed me just how unbelievably beautiful prose can be, how every word (even if there are 500,000+) can feel as if it was chosen for a purpose. It was the first time I had ever sat down and read the same section over and over until it was time for bed, basically using my entire self-allotted reading time on just a single page, and not regretting it in the least. There were times when I felt as if Wallace was putting into words everything I have always felt, somewhere in my heart, but could never hope to adequately express. I regularly found myself giggling at the honest absurdity, and then moments later crying uncontrollably at the brutal truth of what it means to be human. I fell in love with the WORDS first, the structure of the sentences. That had never happened to me before Infinite Jest. Wallace set the bar high, and few have reached those heights for me since.

“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.”

There's something much more important this novel did for me, and it is something I will never forget, because the effect of it is apparent each and every day. Infinite Jest helped me to get through one of the hardest times of my life. I was an addict, a bad addict. I will not go into any more detail than that on this website, as it is both unnecessary and hard to talk about it any detail, but that is the simple truth. I had hit that oh so clichéd "rock bottom", and I was trying, desperately, once again, to pick myself back up. It was then that I decided to finally pick up that gigantic blue book, the one with the pretty sky on the cover, that had been mocking me from my dresser for months. I have been through some truly terrible things – things that, to this day, keep me up at night. I have done things and had things done to me that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I have felt that desperation – that complete and utter lack of hope – and, just to make this as clear as I can, DFW fucking nailed it. He did. There were many times that I would be reading scenes and it felt as though I was reading something written specifically for, and about, me. Finally, somebody understood, in a real way, just how hopeless and stuck a human being can feel. It absolutely destroyed me, emotionally, repeatedly, and the stains left by my tears remain, to this day, on many of the pages, as proof of just how powerful these words can be. I am not at all ashamed to admit that I slept with this book next to me for weeks after finishing it, and will still pick it up from time to time – not even always to read, but just to hold it, hold it and remember.

The below quote is one that I feel the need to revisit regularly, as it encompasses, so accurately, just the way it felt to be so helplessly in the grasp of a substance you had at one time completely underestimated. It still gives me chills.

“--and then you're in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it's the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it's you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you, and the puke-, drool- and Substance-crusted T-shirt you've both worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest's center and centerless eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see you've been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land in. You see now that It's your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It's gotten you into is undeniable and you still can't stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can't stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around.”

I am sure everybody here knows, at least to some degree, what it feels like to truly believe your only choice now is to give up. I know I do. Well, David Foster Wallace knew that feeling also. A little too well, unfortunately, and the proof of that is in each and every one of these pages. It is hard to not see Infinite Jest in a certain way, knowing what we know now about his passing and the reasoning (at least, the assumed reasoning) behind it, but I believe it is important to try to separate the art from the artist, however hard that may be, and I certainly tried my best to do so during my reading. Even still, I failed at times, and you may as well. There were times where I felt I was in a sort of dialogue with Wallace, and I will definitely cherish those moments and how much they helped me, for the rest of my life.

“We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?”


I realize I have so far done little but gush, but it is hard not to. This book really does mean a lot to me, and I wanted to give my personal account of just how powerful it can be to the right person. I am well aware that this book is not for everyone, and a lot of people didn’t like it, or couldn’t even finish it (or the first page, somehow). It is long. Really long. Comically long, even. At times, you can feel each page, each word, passing slowly by, and it seems as if it might never end, but then, once it does, you – if you are anything like me – will wish it never had. There were times when the pages would fly by in a blur, and I would knock out 70 or 80 pages in one sitting. Other times, 10 pages could take what seemed like hours, and leave me feeling exhausted. Even after I realized this was something special, and it had already safely secured a spot among my favorites (this was about 200 pages in), I still had to put it down for days at a time when it became overwhelming, and read other, lighter, things in between. This is not an easy read, but it isn’t really all that hard, either. It is a book that teaches you how to read it as you go. If you are interested in reading it, you have probably heard/read this exact thing from someone, but just in case: give it 200 pages. At least. If at the end of those ~200 pages, you still haven’t found anything redeeming, this book isn’t for you, and that is okay. But, if you like the prose, and enjoy it on a scene by scene basis, but are perhaps completely lost and/or confused, STICK WITH IT. It is all worth it. I promise.

Infinite Jest, at the time of me writing this, has over 6,000 reviews. Nothing I can say here hasn’t been said before, likely in a more eloquent way. Still, I felt the need to put these thoughts down, if only for myself. I have been talking about this book to anyone who will listen, for a year now, and will almost surely continue to do so for the remainder of my life. If I can convince just a few people to read this book, I will have done something positive for this world. I know that I am a better person having finished it, and I don’t think I am alone in that. Wallace exposed me to myself – and sometimes it hurt. He repeatedly shoved (somehow lovingly) the terrifying truths of existing into my face until I felt like there was no point anymore, and then he held me and told me that it would all be okay, and just why that is. This novel is something special. It will always be relevant, because the arguments, themes, and philosophies it presents are something eternal. David Foster Wallace was a very rare kind of writer, and I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to read these words. It is the closest I, or anyone else, will ever come to speaking with him again, and that is okay. It has to be. To this day, I often pick up this tome, flip through the pages, touch the cover, and feel a little less alone. I know that there was someone out there, however briefly, who truly understood what it means to just like exist, and how difficult, ridiculous, terrifying, at times a bit torturous, and absolutely beautiful a thing that really is.

"Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace is a monumental work in contemporary literature, renowned for its complexity and depth. Set in a near-future North American society, the narrative weaves together multiple plot lines, including those of a tennis academy, a drug and alcohol recovery center, and a dystopian political landscape, with a focus on a film so entertaining that it incapacitates its viewers.

Pros:

9/24/2022 ***THE FULL DIVE INTO AN EPIC MESS OF WTF***

I did it!!! I committed to and finished this beast of a book. Excuse me for a moment while I dart off to pour myself a Tito’s & Soda in celebration of such a momentous event.

*The room fills with sounds of the glug-glug of vodka pouring into a glass, ice cubes clinking together and the hiss of the carbonation from the club soda.*

I still feel the book is too brilliant for me. Most of it flew over my head, circled back to poke fun, before shooting off into the depths of drug induced logic. Yes, I am calling it out for that. The mind of a person who dips into the finer arts of reality bending habits would see this as a completely different experience than I did. Head nod to a world my current life situation will not allow me to be a part of.

I did take down some notes. Moments that caught me and did not let go:

n  Pg. 501
“…and his bottom’s crack all the way down to the anus itself was now visible because the force of his fall had pulled his white slacks down ever farther.”

Pg. 566
“Not and never love, which kills what needs it.”

Pg. 651
“But on that night he seemed to be the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself.”n

Would I recommend this book to others? Absolutely. Come one, come all and step up to the challenge of doing a once in a lifetime reading experience.

REVISED STAR RATING TO THREE BECAUSE THE RESULTS OF THE TEDIOUS GOLD SIFTING IS EQUAL TO THE TIME IT TAKES TO DO IT.

1/8/2017 ***ORIGINAL REVIEW FROM WHEN I DID A DNF AND DASH***

I tried my hardest, I really did. It took a few days and one hundred tedious pages before the reality of what I had before me completely sunk in. This book is just too big, too beautiful and way too brilliant for the likes of someone like me. It’s not the first time I have been rejected by a book and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt it won’t be the last. (In case you are wondering, it’s usually people but a book hurts way worse.)

But seriously, this book is a monster. I saw enough of the show to know that my pleasure would not equal the pain of my reading it. It may be brilliant or it may be a complete turd; all I know for sure is that I’m not investing anymore of my time into figuring it out.


9/24/2022 ***UPDATED REVIEW TO COME***

Zes volle weken had ik nodig om deze meesterlijke mammoetroman eindelijk (na twee eerdere midscheeps gestrande pogingen) uit te lezen. Gemiddeld 2 tot 3 uur per dag, zonder een dag over te slaan. Ik las ook enkel 'Infinite Jest', terwijl ik gewoonlijk toch meerdere boeken tegelijkertijd lees. De woorden van Dave Eggers in zijn inleiding bij deze editie kloppen: 'It needs your full attention'. Ik las DFW's voor velen onleesbare roman op m'n Kindle, met de paperback erbij. Voordeel van de Kindle: de X-Ray functie (register van alle personages, met uitleg en kruisverwijzingen), het ingebouwde woordenboek (DFW's vocabularium is schier eindeloos) en de Word Wise-functie (contextuele verklarende woordenlijst). Verder gebruikte ik de schitterende IJ-Wiki: http://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/ én de vaak verhelderende analyses en synopsissen op LitCharts (bestaat ook als app): https://www.litcharts.com/lit/infinit.... De combinatie van dit alles maakte het boek voor mij heel toegankelijk.
Ik ben van plan om er later nog meer over te schrijven, want dit is op veel vlakken een van de meest overrompelende leeservaringen uit mijn toch al bewogen lezersleven. Ook zal ik nog wat randlectuur tot mij nemen: de bio van DT Max en 'Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself' van David Lipsky (waar de niet onaardige film 'The end of the tour' op gebaseerd is).
Nu val ik in een zwart gat: wat te doen zonder mijn dagelijkse dosis IJ?

Update: ik las dat Wannes Gyselinck, samen met Freek Vielen en Willem de Wolf aan een DFW-trilogie werkt, met het eerste deel dit najaar al op de planken. Lees Wannes zijn mooi essay over DFW hier: https://www.rektoverso.be/artikel/de-...

Ambivalent about footnotes? Prepare to re-evaluate that feeling.

INFINITE JEST was the third DFW book I read and like many young males, I originally read it back in college. And like with many other young males, it changed the wiring in my brain. This novel made me want to be a better reader and a better writer. It introduced the idea that a heady, complicated novel need not be a bore or a slogfest (though there are certainly a few points in INFINITE JEST that are slower than others). Despite being one of the most clever and intelligent books I've ever read, Wallace's literary tome is also one of the funniest and most touching, too.

DFW was a singular force, a writer's writer, and he was always conscious of his reader, whether he meant to have to eat your brain broccoli, or wanted you to roll off your seat in fits of laughter. He could also reach out from the page and clench your heart like few writers can. Wallace allowed a generation of readers understand their loneliness, their surprising disappointment with some aspects of life, and reassured us that there was a lot to think about in this world—much of it being lovely and beautiful, too.

All David, All the Time

I suspect anyone who scales this mountainous tome will confess to some level of obsession for having done so. For me it took the form of extra reading time walking the sidewalks from the train to the office. I noticed I was given a wide berth when people saw the size of the prow coming their way. With such preoccupation you might imagine I was lost in the story, but it was more like getting lost in thoughts about the author himself. He and his sprawling intellect loomed large on every page, as did his full frontal honesty, his playfulness, his complexity, and yes, his clinical depression. I suspect everyone reading this already knows the David Foster Wallace story: genius writer, gifted teacher, empathetic friend and all-around cool guy couldn’t get his brain chemistry right after rejiggering his meds and that meant the end of him.

Like many others who finally tackle IJ, I had already read many of Wallace’s essays, interviews, and speeches. I even read Lipsky’s extended interview that became a book. So it was all too easy to read IJ with what I already knew about the man firmly in mind. Not losing myself in the story is far from a criticism. I mention it only because a Wallace-centric lens may make my take on the book less about the tangibles and more about what might have made him tick. If you’re like me, you find glimpses into real genius, tortured or otherwise, pretty fascinating.

The best puzzles are those that make you struggle, but not so much that you can’t solve them in the end. With the challenge Wallace set out for us, he wants us to think hard, knowing that that can be a reward in itself. In interviews, he said he never intended to be ambiguous. He wanted us to understand despite the inherent difficulties. I would guess most readers come away feeling like the heavy mental lifting paid off, but they may also have a sneaking suspicion that there was even more that a complicated guy like Wallace was trying to say that may not have come through right away. Maybe that’s why smart people seem to get so much out of the experience and fans often reread it. It’s because it’s a challenge. [Note to self: Don’t even think about picking this up again until your head is good and rested.]

Summary, Structure, Themes and the Like

One thing that struck me was that Wallace took the old write-what-you-know advice to heart. He featured tennis, addiction, philosophy, and social commentary. At the same time, he seemed to thumb his nose at certain writerly conventions. He often had very long sentences, paragraphs that would last for pages, and vocabulary words that even the most pedantic litterateurs would agree are excessive. And what about those discursive authorial intrusions – the endnotes – damn near 100 pages of them? It makes me wonder if Wallace was saying to the establishment, “It’s against the rules, but I can make it work.”

I’ll give an abbreviated plot summary since this is already feeling long. Besides, there are plenty of other reviews that set the stage well, including one by my astute friend Robert. There are three main stories. One is set at an elite junior tennis academy in Boston founded by James O. Incandenza who had formerly been a very good player himself, a brilliant scientist, and a somewhat misunderstood film maker. His wife, Avril, is French Canadian, obsessive-compulsive, teaches grammar at the academy, and is still “endocrinologically compelling to males.” Their sons Orin, Mario and Hal are all extreme in their own ways. Orin is a born ladies man and now a punter in the NFL, Mario is a remarkably well-adjusted guy for one with a whole host of physical deformities and challenges, and Hal (who is probably the most like Wallace himself) is precocious beyond belief with his verbal acumen, having memorized large sections of the Oxford English Dictionary. Hal is a high-ranked player and very focused, but his talents seem programmed. Any joie de vivre, or feeling of any kind, for that matter, seems squelched. This is not completely at odds with his status as a striver.

A few klicks away from the Academy is Ennet House, a residence that runs a drug and alcohol recovery program. There we meet, among others, big Don Gately, a former thief and Demerol addict. He’s a counselor now, with a mostly good heart. The AA Kool-Aid may not always taste great, but he knows that it’s good for what ails him. When it comes to selling it to others, he’s all the more credible for his doubts. Joelle Van Dyne is another resident. She is one of the story connectors since she was once Orin’s girlfriend and had been the lead in several J.O. Incandenza films. She’s notable, too, for the veil she wears to hide her face. We’re left to wonder whether it’s to conceal a disfiguring scar or, as she once intimated, because too many men fall crazy in love once they see how flawlessly beautiful her face is.

The third story centers around an extremist group of Quebecois separatists called Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (Wheelchair Assassins). They formed after the US convinced Canada and Mexico to join them in becoming the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN). (Robert’s right, referring to someone who comes from this union as an Onanist has to have been a fun joke for a word guy like Wallace.) Secession is their goal. Their weapon of choice is an odd one: a film called Infinite Jest by one J.O. Incandenza. It features Joelle Van Dyne and somehow enthralls viewers so completely that they cease to want anything else and ultimately die. It’s like rats that can’t stop pressing the pleasure bar. If the assassins can get their hands on the master copy, they can reproduce it, and bring those weak-willed pleasure seekers in the States to their knees. Will they find the original? This is the plot’s primary engine. I’m afraid I don’t do it justice, though, with my description. The other big question concerns how, in the beginning of the book, in a kind of flash forward, the lexically brilliant Hal had lost his ability to communicate. And there were questions about Don, too, as he dealt with terrible pain in his hospital bed after standing in harm’s way on behalf of one of the Ennet House residents. Will he succumb to the lure of those wonderful, addictive painkillers? Lots of other people have problems to resolve, too.

Wallace once said in an interview that the structure for IJ was motivated by something called a Sierpinski triangle. Leave it to a guy like him to use a fractal design from chaos theory for such purposes. I can kind of see it, though. You start with an equilateral triangle – a side for each of his main stories. You then imbed another equilateral triangle within the original, leaving three scaled-down triangles around it. Each of those can represent a further excavation, delving deeper into the three stories. Then, each of those smaller triangles can be subdivided yet again meaning even deeper drilling. I wonder if the fact that these subdivisions can keep going ad infinitum means something about an ultimate lack of resolution. But then maybe the patterns that are set in place in the story are supposed to be enough. We’re meant to extrapolate what’s needed in order to understand. It’s easy to draw parallels, too, between the structure and the penetrating nature of Wallace’s thought processes.

While the plot is a bit of a puzzle, the themes are not. It’s pretty clear what topics Wallace wanted to address. He had a lot to say about addiction (some of the best pages were about the craving, the guilt, the deal-making with oneself, and the feedback loop with depression), perfectionism (in athletics, grammar, obsessive behaviors, and even the perfect pleasure), entertainment (films, sports, recreational drug use), family relations (not always pretty, almost always poignant), and anhedonia (depression’s little brother, and something Wallace seemed to know a lot about). Here’s an IJ snippet intensifying the last theme: “dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain…the person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise…It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.” Sounds terrible; all the more for its plausibility.

One of the most interesting themes, though, and one literary taxonomists and critics were quick to pick up on was Wallace’s point about the “popular delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive.” It’s for statements like this that many have labeled IJ post-postmodern, where cold detachment gives way to earnest empathy. Related to this, someone interviewing Wallace’s wife, Karen Green, asked her if she thought the best of him made it into his writing. She said:

"I guess it depends how you define best, but in my opinion, no. The writer's voice took on a life of its own, which I think he found very constraining. I think part of what he was struggling with was how to change that voice. Cleverness, particularly for someone as clever as David, is the hardest thing to give up. It's like being naked, or getting married as opposed to having one-night stands. People don't want to be thought of as sentimental. Writers don't anyway."

Green and Wallace used to have a long-running jokey argument along these lines, about whether Wallace should allow his "inner sap" into his prose. "I thought the inner sap should be allowed out sometimes," she recalls. "It was quite a wonderful thing. I'd argue that sometimes when a piece of writing, or a piece of artwork is too clever it loses that ability to connect. David was obviously trying some of that, and it's those bits of the book I loved the most.”

Then there is what Wallace himself said on the topic within the IJ text:

“We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté…the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America…that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclittically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for; this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.”

A blogger and fellow fan of those passages said, “This is why I read Infinite Jest. Not for this statement, though I believe it is the key to the post-postmodern literature we’re all alive and lucky enough to watch take shape. But because it took Wallace 700 pages to get the reader to a place where she could hear this. Read it without a sarcastic roll of the eyes.”

When a guy who is as naturally hip and cool as Wallace was opines about the dangers of a culture where hip and cool irony is all the rage, you pay more attention. Hits us where we live, doesn’t it?

A Helpful “How to”

The book has a certain cult appeal. There are classes, books, and sites dedicated to it. Something that really helped me get through it was a site called Infinite Summer. Back in 2009 someone had the idea to divide the book into 75 page chunks that readers would get through each week and then tune into the site for panel discussions, summaries, and comments (without spoilers). It’s all archived so you can follow along even though you can’t actively participate. I liked their link to a special IJ dictionary which, trust me, comes in handy. Admit it, you might not know one or two of the following: Samizdat, fulvous, teratogenic, halation, and Csikzentmihalyi. And that's just a random sample from pages 93-98. I found, too, that even when I thought I was reading carefully, someone will have commented on something I hadn’t picked up on or asked a good question, and this helped me appreciate it all that much more.

Stray Bullets

I’ve got just a few more points to make, but lack both the smarts and the energy to structure them well, especially if fractal geometry is required. So bullets will have to do.

-tThis was a funny book in places, especially the language, but Wallace’s stated goal was to write something sad.

-tA disproportionate number of characters sounded clever and/or professorial – even some of the young tennis players.

-tMany if not most of the characters had extreme physical characteristics. Avril was 197 cm tall, which, when you do the conversion, is 6’6”. Husband James was half a head taller than that. Gately was a huge football player who even in his early teens was well over 200 lbs. and ran a 4.4 40 – NFL receiver type speed. Conjoined twins played as a doubles team at the tennis academy. Another player, one who tried to seduce Mario, weighed over 400 pounds. We often suspend disbelief while wondering what Wallace was trying to say about this. Could the physical and intellectual extremes say something about the way he viewed fictional constructs, or himself?

-tIs there a relative to LOL when a section is so good, so insightful, so well put you want to announce it to the world? If so, IJ earned a few. And I’m more discriminating than most with my OL sentiments.

-tAn Infinite Summer commenter mentioned the famous Jerry Garcia line that summarized the Dead Head phenomenon. It’s like black licorice, he said. Not everyone likes the stuff, but those who do REALLY do. Jest Heads (if I’m allowed a neologism in Wallace’s own tradition) seem much the same.

-tAt the same time, IJ could also be likened to drinking from a fire hose. Actually, that’s such a worn out expression. Plus, it wrongly implies you get nada to slake your thirst. I invite commenters to come up with something better. Reading IJ is like _____.

I’m not the first person to point out that reviews often aspire to the work being reviewed, at least in format and style. Well, I think I got the length part right.*

For those of you who’ve never tried black licorice and are open to different things, at least take a bite. Forswear anhedonia. Enjoy!

*IJ fans will agree, though, that endnotes serve as the real coup de grace – literally in this case.

I actually wrote and posted a review of David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest:

Nearly a decade after publication, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest remains a literary ink-blot test. With its 1,079 pages (including nearly 400 footnotes), and its fondness for gags, drugs, cultural theory, recent US popular culture, scientific minutiae, and Latinate vocabulary, the novel still divides readers on matters of literary technique and the question of Wallace's literary talent.

I tend to believe the author's stylistic pyrotechnics are not bright enough to hide the comparatively dull substance of his writing; but I can't completely dismiss Wallace as a literary artist. Infinite Jest is not the Next Big Thing (except for the size of the tome itself), but it's not truly fodder for the Moronic Inferno, either, as Dale Peck and the rest would have it.

The novel's tragic flaw is its lack of emotion depth. Wallace seems more interested in inventing acronyms and an "après" filmography than in developing characters. The author's utilization of the language of pop psychology and millennial technological frenzy to portray teenage tennis phenoms is largely dead-on. Wallace hits definite false notes, however, in drawing the mostly lower-class residents of a halfway house as if they were operating from the same frames of reference as the junior tennis stars.

Focusing on such young, shallow characters violates the Big Rule of compelling fiction: There has to be something at stake. You may not forget Hal Incandenza, the teenage tennis and linguistic prodigy who is as close to a protagonist as this novel offers; but it is this implausible combination of natural gifts, not Wallace's rendering of character or of his story itself, that make Hal memorable. Hal's lower-class counterpart, a thirtyish petty thug and recovering addict named Don Gately, is more intriguing for the difficulty of his situation. But Wallace presents Gately as lacking self-awareness to a degree that kills whatever sympathy readers might otherwise hold for him.

Wallace's experimental style does not disguise the essential weakness of his writing here either. Few of the narratives coalesce, and it is often difficult to imagine why editors did not simply send certain passages off to the exosphere. The apparently arbitrary chronology works against any sort of pace Wallace might have established. And, though the novel wisely ends on an ambiguous note, this note is frustratingly oblique. It's difficult to imagine why a writer blessed with such intellectual gifts would offer up a shaggy dog story as his magnum opus. Infinite Jest feels like it should have ended at least 500 pages before it actually does, and yet it hasn't earned an ending.

Wallace should be commended for his attempt to add intellectual depth to modern American fiction without sacrificing the traditional literary devices of characterization and narrative, and to dramatize the effects on the consciousness, and the conscience, of our hydra-headed consumerism. But the difference between a laundry list of our contemporary social maladies and a novel that compellingly addresses these is all but infinite.

Reading Infinite Jest feels a bit like when you’ve had some friends over for dinner, you’ve all had a jolly good time, it’s getting a bit late though, the guests are leaving one after the other, and but there is this one guy, a brilliant guy, a bit of a show-off, to be honest, a kind of beefy guy you wouldn’t want to mess up with too much, and, above all, a horrifyingly garrulous guy. And he is lying there on your couch, slowly but steadily draining your liquor cabinet, and droning on and on, and oh! but it’s already 4 a.m., and everyone else is long gone, and he is still there telling all sorts of rambling anecdotes you can’t make head nor tail of, so but then at some point your eyes start itching like real bad and he’s babbling and pouring himself another glass of Wild Turkey, and at length, you accidentally drift off and, as you suddenly jump back and open your eyes, the guy is still relentlessly talking, the tide in your drink cabinet is “way out”, and meanwhile, you realise rosy-fingered Dawn is rising across your dead-bottles-littered living room... And but then, right at that moment, out of the blue, in the middle of his sentence, that conversationalist from hell glances at his watch, mumbles something about it being already 1079h or some such, gets up, grabs his coat and leaves. And so but so you realise you really need a fucking shower.

Now in all earnestness, Infinite Jest is a pretty beefy beast. And it’s not just a matter of length (just about one thousand densely-laid-out pages + another thick, even tighter cushion of endnotes). The material, the style, the composition are a challenge to the reader as well. It is quite clear that David Foster Wallace is insanely talented and capable of pulling out all the stops literary-wise: a variety of styles and speech patterns and dialects, unearthly situations, deeply layered characters, several-pages-long sentences that still manage to make sense and remain grammatically sound, a blend of casual phrasing and hyper-scholarly pedantic jargon and neologisms, bits and bobs of French (in fact, French-sounding but laced with blunders and mostly borderline gibberish), sudden left turns from hilarious to grotesque to horrifying, and the list goes on.

On the other hand, Infinite Jest is in toto and quite literally a puzzling novel — a giant 1,000 piece jigsaw with missing bits. It seems as if DWF had been writing this monster haphazardly, throwing one scene after the next on paper, all over the map, introducing one character after another, without much consideration for any form of consistency or reason or storytelling technique or quite knowing what he was doing. As if he had been throwing stuff against the wall to see what would stick, and in the end, just left everything in (allegedly, he removed some 600 pages from the initial manuscript before publication, but still!). As a result, the book is rhapsodic, bloated, and seems to display a disjointed and sometimes irritating and gratuitous series of vignettes, anecdotes, dreams, hallucinations, esoteric digressions, silly acronyms and endnotes, winks to Homer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky and Joyce and Nabokov and Pynchon and Bazin and Deleuze and Scorsese and Lynch. In other words, a jumble of bits and pieces of attempts that, in some cases, would and, in others, wouldn’t adhere so much to the rest of the picture. In essence, perhaps, a “stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit” (p. 911)? This holds even to the very end, which doesn’t provide any sense of closure or resolution or Gestalt. The novel ends in medias res, as abruptly and randomly as it started. In other words, it doesn’t end.

So, for the most part, the readers of this sprawling and baroque novel are expected to hone their understanding and piece all this material together into something that might make some sense. As the narrator puts it at some point (talking about something else), Infinite Jest sometimes feels to have “no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience” (p. 740). But in the end, and as a result of the sheer length and complicated, disorderly structure, they might find that, although their patience has been tried to the nth degree, there is still a sort of power of accretion which, for want of producing a proper story, does indeed paint the picture of a whole epoch: our time.

Infinite Jest is an insane form of speculative fiction. The story takes place in some trippy dystopian alternate reality, where North America has become one single country, governed by a halfwitted show-business-celebrity president (rings a bell?), where mindless consumerism is rampant — even the Gregorian calendar and the Statue of Liberty have become ad spaces — and massive amounts of toxic rubbish and radioactive pollution are catapulted into a large chunk of territory to the N-E Appalachian Mountains, turned into a giant Chernobyl-like landfill. It is also a book featuring (among other things): the daily life of a bunch of kids at an upscale Tennis Academy, a multi-generational family saga (the Incandenzas — compare to, say, the Buendías in One Hundred Years of Solitude), a series of wrecks at a drug and alcohol rehab centre, and a group of French-Canadian terrorists.

Most characters in Infinite Jest seem utterly miserable, suicidal, damaged, depressed, obsessed, lonely, lost. The book is also, in a way, an existential study about the struggle of being human in our postmodern reality. But in my view, at the core, Infinite Jest is a book about addiction and its devastating effects. That is addiction in all imaginable forms and shapes: drugs, alcohol, sex, success, mindless entertainment, so on. One of the central and most fascinating threads in this novel is about a movie that is so very entertaining and compelling that anyone who starts watching it won’t be able to stop watching it again, on a loop, to death — the wild dream of any media and entertainment tycoon, no doubt. Incidentally, that movie is titled Infinite Jest.

In a way, Infinite Jest (the movie within the novel) illustrates the most extreme version of addiction. Infinite Jest (the book), on the other hand, is a stark satire of a society that has become the slave of cheap and mind-numbing, soul-destroying pleasures, force-fed to everyone by a capitalist system that pretends to bring happiness to humankind but is in actuality driven to endless consumerism only.

And so, Infinite Jest is ultimately a book about literature as a form of art and as an industry. Infinite Jest (the novel) is radically, obsessively antiformulaic, “anticonfluential” (to use one of the narrator’s terms); it doesn’t pretend, doesn’t try to provide, even denies the reader any form of low-grade, profit-oriented, passivity-inducing, addiction-inducing literary pleasure. In short, Infinite Jest (the novel) is the direct opposite of Infinite Jest (the movie within the novel).

Ironically though, the book’s publication was intensely marketed and hyped in the US (as a comedy, mind you, which cannot be further from the truth!); it has become, in most English-speaking countries, especially since DFW sadly “eliminated his own map”, a cult bestseller of sorts.

همیشه اینجوری بودم که وقتی یه کتابی رو خوندم، برای خودم خوندم و چرا باید براش ریویو بنویسم؟ مخصوصا وقتی که قبل از من بودن افرادی که ریویوهایی نوشتن کامل‌تر و بهتر از چیزیه که تو ذهن منه. حین خوندن کتاب فکر می‌کردم که می‌تونم جلوی خودم و بگیرم و برای این هم چیزی ننویسم یا نه؟ طبعا نتونستم. حداقل الان نظرم اینه که برای خودم دارم می‌نویسم تا شاید ذهن مشوشی که بعد تموم کردنش برای آدم می‌مونه کمی مرتب شه. پس به چشم نقد، تحلیل یا تفسیر به این کلمات نگاه نکنین. این یه یادداشته برای خودم و شاید افرادی که دوست دارن یادداشت‌های دیگران برای خودشون رو بخونن. (بخش اول متن برای کساییه که می‌خوان کتاب رو بخرن و از اونجایی که قیمت کتاب تو ایران عالیه شاید بهتر باشه بدونن با چی طرفن.)
این کتاب ۱۵۱۲ صفحه‌س. همین عدد به اندازه کافی زیاد هست که عده‌ای رو از خوندنش منصرف کنه. نکته اینجاست که این عدد هم با چیزی که تو ذهنتونه متفاوته. با توجه به فونت ریز کتاب، حجم زیاد پی‌نوشت‌های نویسنده که فونتش از فونت خود کتاب هم ریزتره‌ (۱۱۶ صفحه و در هر صفحه ۳۹ خط) برای من خوندن هر صفحه دو برابر حد معمول طول کشید. که یعنی با یه کتاب ۳۰۰۰ صفحه‌ای طرفین. از طرفی خیلی باید حواستون جمع باشه که چیزی رو از دست ندین و مجبور نشین دوباره برگردین چند پاراگراف قبل و شروع به خوندن کنین. کتاب در نگاه اول پراکنده‌س ولی به شدت پیوسته‌س. پس اگه می‌تونین یه زمانی برای خوندن ۳۰۰۰ صفحه کتاب رو بدون استراحت طولانی مدت خالی کنین بیاین سراغش.
اگه می‌خواین هیچ چیزی رو راجع به داستان نفهمین به خوندن ادامه ندین.
داستان عجیب و پیچیده شروع می‌شه. چند صد صفحه اول رو می‌خوندم تا بفهمم کلیت ماجرا چیه. بعد به خودم اومدم دیدم یه سری آدم نشستن رو ویلچر و می‌رن آدما رو می‌کشن، یه سری آدم تنیس بازی می‌کنن، یه سری آدم مواد می‌کشن یا سعی می‌کنن مواد نکشن و من چقدر از خوندن داستان این آدما لذت می‌برم. هر احساسی که وجود داره با بیشترین شدت ممکنش تو این کتاب هست. طنز،‌غم، خشونت، میل جنسی و افسردگی. یهو می‌بینی از سر یه پاراگراف تا تهش وصف فرو کردن دسته‌ی دسته‌ی تی تو دهن یه نفر و فشار دادنش تا جایی که از طرف دیگه‌ی بدنش بزنه بیرون رو داری می‌خونی. یا می‌بینی به خاطر خوندن یه پاراگرافِ دیگه از غم بدنت سرد شده و صدای نفس کشیدنت رو هم نمی‌شنوی.
کتاب داستانش رو صاف و ساده بیان نمی‌کنه. فصل اول کتاب از نظر زمانی آخرین قسمت کتابه. برای همین از هیچ پی‌نوشتی هم حتی نباید رد شین. چون تیکه‌های پازل کلی سراسر کتاب پخشه. با رعایت این قانون بارها پاداش دقتتونو می‌گیرین. از اون طرف اگه جایی رو نخونین ممکنه به آخر کتاب هم برسین و نفهمین سرانجام فلان خط داستانی چی شد.
وقتی کتاب رو تموم کردم شروع کردم به خوندن فصل اول. (با توجه به اینکه از یه جایی به بعد معلوم می‌شه اول کتاب بعد از همه جریانات کتابه.) حین خوندن دوباره‌ش یه سری جملاتی رو دیدم که باعث شد بغض کنم. شاید اینکه صفحه ۱۳۰۰ کتاب آقای والاس یادش می‌فته خونه بچگی هل رو به یادش بندازه براتون تعجب‌آور باشه و بگین کلا ۱۰۰ صفحه مونده و والاس به جای هیجانی کردن ته کتاب داره چه غلطی می‌کنه؟ اگه خوب خونده باشید کتاب رو متوجه می‌شید که تا اینجا بارشو بسته و همین چنتا تیکه پازلن که جا موندن. وقتی هل به قول خودش دراز کشیده کف زمین و دنیاشو افقی می‌بینه به جای اینکه عمودی ببینه. به جای دیدن هرروزه دیوار، تیرهای سقف و می‌بینه. اینجا باید یادش بیاد که خونه قبلیشون چه شکلی بود. با این دید که نگاه کنید به جای گشتن دنبال هیجان با ناراحتی این تیکه‌ها رو می‌خونین. بعد کتاب تموم می‌شه و می‌رید فصل اول و اونجا می‌بینید که این خونه از اول کتاب بهش اشاره شده و حتی یادتونم نمیاد که همچین اتفاقی افتاده. شاید این مدل نوشتن والاس به این دلیل بوده که یه سرگرمی‌ای مثل سرگرمی توی کتاب بسازه. شاید می‌خواسته کتابی بنویسه که تا تمومش می‌کنی مجبور شی بری از اولش بخونی بیای جلو. شاید برای همینه که مثل همه قصه‌های دیگه پایانش پایان نیست. بلکه یه تیکه مثل تیکه‌های قبلیه.
یه سری حس‌ها رو بهش اشاره کردم که تو این کتاب وجود داره. انسانیت (خیالتون راحت. تو کتاب با این صورت کلیشه‌ای که از معنا تهی شده بهش پرداخته نمی‌شه.) یکی دیگه از این حس هاست. وقتی به خاطر اثبات معنویت یا انسانیت دو نفر می‌رن دم مترو و یکی‌شون ادای گداها رو در می‌آره، ولی به جای اینکه بگه به من پول بده دستشو دراز می‌کنه و می‌گه به من دست بزن. و هیچ‌کس خواسته‌ش رو برآورده نمی‌کنه و از دور براش پول می‌ندازن. غیر از یه نفر که غیر انسانی‌ترین ظاهر ممکن رو بین کاراکترا داره، که دستشو می‌گیره و به گرمی فشار می‌ده و اون یه نفر بین دو برادر دیگه‌ش که مشکل اونو ندارن از همه به پدرشون نزدیک‌تره و پدرشون این اعقتاد و داره که با دوتای بچه دیگه‌ش نمی‌تونه راحت حرف بزنه مگه اینکه مامانشون اونجا باشه.
به این فکر می‌کنم چرا کسی که همچین صحنه‌های پرنوری از زندگی رو خلق کرده به زندگی خودش پایان داده. شاید والاس هم مثل جیم اینکاندنزا بوده و در سخت‌ترین شرایط زندگیش عزیزترین فرد زندگیش با گذاشتن یه بطری تو دفتر کارش از سر حسادت باعث شده به نوعی کله‌شو بذاره تو مایکروویو و مایکروویو رو روشن کنه. نمی‌دونم. ممکنه.
تشکر می‌کنم از مترجم بابت گذاشتن چندین سال از عمرش برای ترجمه این کتاب. تشکر می‌کنم از نشر برج برای چاپ این کتاب و این‌که تا جایی که تونستن صفحه خالی نذاشتن،‌ از فونت غیر معمول بزرگ برای زیاد کردن صفحات استفاده نکردن و با قیمت معقول این کتاب رو منتشر کردن.
اگه چیزی از حرفام نفهمیدین و زمانتون رو تلف کردم عذر می‌خوام. شاید خوندن این متن هم فرصتی بوده که زندگی بتونه به کارش ادامه بده و باهاتون بی‌پایان مزاح کنه.