My 18-minute Reader's Guide, with analysis and discussion and a suggested bibliography: https://youtu.be/3qYRPa8m-so

[[Infinite Jest is a wonderfully circular, majestically fragmented, wildly ambitious literary triumph. It's the most astonishing expression of maximalism to be found in form of novel, with its vivid, neurotic, higly-energetic style, its nervous humor and absurd descriptions. It's an addictive book, an incredible story of self-liberation and self-imprisoning. Massively entertaining and rewarding and sad and beautiful, it is by far the best book I've ever read.

Video-Review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snnvbK... ]]
Boy was this review enthusiastic. Don't believe the hype but yeah, it's a pretty good book!

Come altri prima di me, ho terminato la lettura di Infinite Jest col proposito di rileggerlo immediatamente (anzi, ho già cominciato); fatto che sembrerà curioso a chi si preoccupa per le dimensioni del romanzo o a coloro che sono stati respinti da una lettura che presenta obiettivamente momenti assai faticosi.
Il punto è che è si stenta a comprendere all’inizio la reale utilità dell’enorme quantità di informazioni che DFW ritiene di dover fornire al lettore (e che chi legge sente di non poter saltare); ed è solo quando sei definitivamente immerso nel mondo ri/creato in IJ che ti accorgi che quelle informazioni erano effettivamente necessarie perché tu ti trasferissi dal tuo mondo al suo, e che quel mondo assume per te statuto di realtà in forza della sua totale definizione in rapporto alla tua percezione non solo mentale, ma principalmente sensoriale.
E’ solo dopo che hai visto tutti quei luoghi e tutti quei corpi, annusato tutti quegli odori (e quelle puzze, quante puzze!), ascoltato tutti quei suoni e quei rumori, toccato tutti quei materiali e quegli oggetti, sentito sulla tua lingua tutti quei sapori;
solo dopo che ciascuno dei tuoi sensi è stato reso più vivo, più acuto -qualche volta insopportabilmente acuto- da una capacità di descrizione che vive, oltre che di un’incredibile capacità di osservazione, di una estrema precisione della lingua (della quale comprendi man mano l’assoluta mancanza di vanità e la natura profondamente morale, come se nell’esattezza della lingua risiedesse ormai l’ultima possibilità del bene umano);
quando finalmente tutto è così reale che senti nella tua mano la pallina di Hal, quando i colori acrilici del cielo di quella Concavità cominciano a fondersi nella tua mente col pensiero di Napoli, i Tp con lo schermo del tuo PC, quella Accademy con la scuola in cui porti tuo figlio e la sigaretta che accendi distratto con un joint, riconosci finalmente che in gran parte quel mondo è il tuo, è GIA’ il tuo.
Ed è allora che ti casca la mandibola, quando ti guardi intorno e vedi che se lì dentro non c’è una sola persona felice e nessuna vera forma di piacere (solo bisogno di stordimento, ma niente della sublime gratuità del piacere), questo ti riguarda; è allora che senti la necessità di tirare il filo di un ragionamento e cercare la speranza di una via d’uscita; è allora che mi sono accorta che al centro di quel mondo c’è un grande buco nero, e che quel buco nero è la Mamma.
Ma è anche allora che smetti di provare a riordinare la cronologia degli eventi, di voler comprendere esattamente tutti i perché e i percome, e rinvii al dopo le molte suggestioni che la lettura ti offre nel suo scorrere, come quando viaggi su una macchina veloce e percepisci solo confusamente i colori del bosco o la forma della casa che stai superando, perché la fretta di arrivare è più importante.
E se rinvii tutto al dopo, è perché improvvisamente tutto quello che vuoi sapere è come stanno; sapere se Don se la caverà, che ne sarà di Hal, se Orin tornerà ad amare una donna, se qualcuno si occuperà ancora di quell’angelo deforme con lo sprone, sapere di Pemulis, di Joelle e di tutta quella gente che se la incontrassi per la strada cambieresti marciapiede, e che invece ti ritrovi ad amare.
Ed è così che la lettura diventa bulimica e capisci alla fine che DFW ha fondato, ha ri/fondato, per TE la possibilità di un’empatia che forse è l’unica speranza di salvezza per te, e magari per tutti.

Ma certo, un libro è solo un libro e prima poi toccherà ricominciarlo e vedere bene com’è fatto.

Meglio prima:

“ ANNO DI GLAD
Siedo in un ufficio, circondato da teste e corpi…”

**Note: This review was written almost 10 years ago. I would gladly delete it, but it appears some people have engaged in fruitful back-and-forth in the comment thread. I let it stand for the sake of their discussion, but since every once in a while I wake up to an email informing me of how some stranger on the internet thinks I'm an asshole (and as I'm also a person who can't stand the heat and would gladly get out of the kitchen if I could), I'd like to add a few disclaimers.

This review was written by a young woman who never dreamed more than 2 or 3 people would read it. Hence, I was not attempting to be Northrop Frye. I was being silly. I entirely agree the review would be better if it attempted real, concrete criticism rather than aggressive shrugging. To write that review, though, I would have to really care about Infinite Jest, and I just don't. God knows I've tried, but I don't.

That doesn't mean I think DFW had nothing to say. He certainly did, and I'm sympathetic to lots of it. But postmodernism is not my genre. I have no patience with it.

Finally, this review was the product of an incarnate, imperfect person with background associations and moods trickling into their work. I had a chip on my shoulder when I wrote this and my AHWOSG review; you could say I was sneering at someone(s) in the review because I hadn't the guts to do so face-to-face (of course, sneering is bad and one shouldn't do it on the internet or face-to-face). As I wrote above, a good and meaningful review would be far more impartial, specific, and clear. But this isn't a good and meaningful review. It's a hasty sneer with perhaps some basis for its attitude but certainly not in the review as written, and the author would gladly delete it save for the fact that it hosts a comment thread other people find productive.

So enjoy discussing the works of DFW with my blessing, but if you are awaiting a response from me on the merits of the book or to further explode in fireworks of snark, I'm afraid you'll be waiting in vain. The thread stays; please, be polite to one another. Even if snark has some ground in the truth, it only encourages snark in others, and no one feels good or changes their mind when they feel attacked.**
END NOTE, ORIGINAL REVIEW BEGINS


Infinite Jest is a symptom of something wrong in the literary world: is there nothing else out there with meaning people can find to adore? It's neither a work of genius, nor is it insightful. There are serious things wrong with this book. I think the bigger problem here is why anyone, anywhere, thinks this is brilliant. Somehow the advent of smarmy advertisement and sterile, banal corporate living over the past one hundred and fifty years has invaded our literature, and we think it's wonderful and genius and metaphorical... why? Because it is self-referential, because it's mocking us on a deep level? I thought good literature was something people could access (or at least should be able to), that ideas should be understandable, and should have real content. As many a wiser human being has pointed out, if it's not even mildly coherent, it's probably bogus. Critics rave about this novel for many reasons, one of which I suppose is so they don't have to talk about the concrete and tremendous problems we are actually facing... God forbid literature should be anything more than a ridiculous competition between whose work is the most ground-breaking and incoherent. It shouldn't be a surprise, I guess, but it's depressing anyway. It was only a matter of time before our publishing companies started thinking something like this was a good idea.

(*second note: since i wrote this review i've found myself looking at other works of foster wallace and thinking these may actually be interesting. my dislike of this particular novel is not meant to be an attack on the author, or any of the people who love it. but i'll let my over-the-top comments stand, and acknowledge here that yes, they are a bit much)

It's my habit to write on the inside sleeve of a book the words from the text that I can't define or don't understand. Here is the resulting list from the back inside sleeve of Infinite Jest:

apocopes
bolections
reglets
dipsomania
quincunx
varicoceles
simpatico
aleatory
experialist
agnate
pedalferrous
fulvous
louvered
sangfroid
gibbons
apercu
eidetic
murated
tumescent
recidivism
erumpent
rutilant
hale
purled
nacelle
sulcus
imprecated
tumbrel
comportment
scopophobic
asperity
rapacious
afflatus
bathetic
brachiform
strabismic
ascapartic
avuncular
adit
factota
chuffing
neuralgiac
tumid
eustacian
xerophagy
gynecopia
suborning
solecistic
lissome
ascapartic
anapestic
bradyauxetic
lordosis
corticate
mucronate
codicil
lume
nacreous
puerile
thanatoptic
spansules
hasp
prognathous
nonuremic
apothegm
apicals
selvaged
caparison
cunctations
aphasiac
etiology
prolix
chyme
amanuentic
falcate
jejune
catastatic
eschatology
declivity
mafficking
cuirass
vig
miasma
cordite
cirrhotic
reveille
tektitic
crepuscular
threnody
emery
mysticetously
anechoic
anorak
erumpent (again - apparently I didn't remember it from the first time)
aphasiac
reseau
diverticulitis
cathexis
skirling
dun
exaculates
aphasia
anodized
picayune
caprolaliac
verdigrised
coruscant
anaclitic
catexic
sybaritically
restenotic
malentendu
peripatetic
lordotic
rictal
thanatopic
olla podida
inguinal
sudoriferous
swart
emetic
parotitic
alacrity
sinciput
kyphotic
ciquatoxic

I didn't realize until later in the book that DFW often makes up words.

I will post a full review at my blog, meekadjustments.blogspot.com.

the world of ideas as they blow through the buttons of our coats, through the letters in our rooms, through the flowers in our tombs, blowing every time we move our teeth.

I want to give it zero stars.

This book is a giant pile of pretentious drivel. With a thousand pages and hundreds of endnotes (endnotes dammit! you need two bookmarks for this shit!) it's a book full of promises that are never delivered. By the end it feels like a practical joke has been perpetrated on you and the appropriate response is to punch the author in the face. Seriously, it would be a mild response. I feel that assaulting him blows to the head with a copy of the book would be considered a justifiable attack.

"Infinite Jest" is a work of incredibly bleak and profoundly, hopelessly desperate, literary genius. The writing is unquestionably brilliant but riddled with world-class Angst, despair and utter anguish. If you were to concoct a cocktail of the literary brilliance of Pynchon and the grim futility of Coetzee, then you would gain a sense of what to expect in this novel which goes on infinitely in its reading. You will find yourself incredibly challenged by this long and daunting novel with its hundreds of characters and at times maddening rambling about the endless little nuances of tennis, drug addiction and a bizarro central plot involving Quebec separatists and "Samizdat," a ghastly entertainment which debilitates people by converting them into lotus-eaters on a massive scale like obsessed viewers of reality TV. The "infinite" in the title infers that this novel will take you a long time to read: it's a major literary commitment of which I many times questioned the value as its contents are in too many pages hideously and unbearably ugly. It would not be an overstatement to advise that "IJ" may well be the ugliest masterpiece ever penned by the human hand in all of American literary history. Only a horribly tormented soul like DFW could have written a book this painful as an experience to read: be warned that in many places this novel is unreadably dark and by that I mean this novel rendered unto me a visceral effect akin to nausea, justified only by the Shakespeare quote from which the title is extracted like a rotten molar, but the work is so brilliantly written that one is driven to carry on in the reading anyway. I found only "Finnegan's Wake" more challenging as a read than "IJ." It's clear that Wallace learned a great deal from Pynchon with his selection of a horde of deeply flawed characters whom DFW seemed to select from the cast of a vast freak show. They suffer tragically life-changing catastrophes, physical and psychological, which render them acutely mentally and physically dysfunctional. I don't really see the point of injecting, relentlessly, so many characters into a novel either in the case of DFW or Pynchon and found myself highly irritated by both novelists for populating their books with so many bit-players. DFW's use of apt simile is adept and engaging. The notes were a major, distracting pain in the ass and often deliver only petty, meaningless minutiae. The big problem is that it's nearly impossible to connect all the dots as the writer or even as a committed reader so that legions of characters are tossed into a narrative bouillabaisse for no damn good discernible reason and, thus, are inconsequential on a grad scale and|or are so roughly and crudely sketched that one wonders why the cast members were chosen who contribute so little to the grander work. It seems like a waste of time all around but the verisimilitude is not lost on me. The main characters are drawn with endless detail and become round human beings whom we often hope will come out of their heartbreaking debility but are never able to overcome their gaping, massive, catastropic, infinite tragic flaws. It's like reading Homer's vivid and infinite description of the endless deaths of warriors diversely by spear and arrow at Troy in "The Iliad." So you'll need a long scorecard if you harbor any hope of keeping up with the coming and going of this epic cast. BirdBrian shared an incredible link to the Sierpinski Gasket on his review of "IJ", which sheds light on the dizzying fractal of the character threads of the novel without which it might be incomprehensible: http://images.fastcompany.com/upload/.... DFW is challenged ultimately to tie together the obscure array of threads of the story line unleashed over the first 150 pages to dizzying and even distressing lengths and the exposition seemed infinite and bewildering. As in life and in this novel grand aspects of the work never become clear, coherent, enlightening, understood or resolved. Either DFW simply became lost and exhausted in the narrative mechanics of his inscrutable, fractally based plot or he wants us to know that life imitates art and we really never figure it all out in time. So where does the "jest" come in? Perhaps, life is futile and the joke is on you for trying to make sense of it because like this novel you never really will truly fully grasp it all in time. There are scant few, pithy lines of wit in this book, the best of which appear frequently as favorite quotes by devoted readers. At the root of the "jest" is the Shakespearean quote from "Hamlet": "Alas, poor Yorick!--I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it." A primary theme of the novel struck me as the need of humanity to carry the maimed, addicted, poverty-stricken and diseased upon its back as in one way or another we are all deeply flawed and afflicted, and that is simply the nature of existence as we know it as inter-connected souls and members of the human race in our lifetimes. In "IJ" individual tragic flaws are often balanced by individual gifts and the relative balance may determine the outcome and sense of human happiness that as individuals we experience in our lifetimes. The tragedy for me about this novel was DFW's utter myopia to the true, common, quotidian beauty of life: his literary lens is relentlessly focused, indeed tragically obssessed, with the grotesque, bizarro, freakish ugliness of life. As a Bostonian he tore my beloved, beautiful, native city to shreds aesthetically and rendered it in epic catalogue as a literary slag heap. DFW's dark, high-definition lens must have overcome him, given his epic battles with addiction and losing battle with depression, to the extent that he found himself overwhelmed and at the end of a rope by his own hand. His literary legacy is dazzling and he will remain immortal in the American, indeed, global pantheon of literary novelists. Ultimately, I detested the infinite, painful futility of this work of meta-fiction but clearly recognize "IJ" as the work of a literary genius of the highest order.

Muffled thumping, light feedback. 'Mmmyellow, my name is Tom and I've read Infinite Jest eight times.'

Gasps, murmurs of sympathy mixed with disapproval. The chair nods. 'Step One is admitting the problem. We're glad you're here.'

'Problem? No no, see, I'm just here to borrow your PA system. New shit has come to light- if you'll turn to page 851 the first-person narrative resumes to answer page 17's "yo man what's your story"' speaking faster as several unexpectedly burly group members rise and advance toward the podium 'and you can tell Hal doesn't drop DMZ because' muffled thumps, sounds of struggle '--a series of people laying in bed! The ceilings always billow, all of them!' grunts, heavy breaths, microphone squeals '--everyone's story is pretty much like your own! They're all heroes of non-action! Re-read endnote twenty-fo--' mic is cut


*

I was going to make a cheeky post about how the best way to enjoy Infinite Jest is to be a white cishet American male born between maybe 1969 and 1989 with one or more diagnosable mental disorders plus personal experience with substance abuse and who remembers when VHS tape rewinders were peak technology. But in fact the best way to enjoy Infinite Jest is right there in the title: just read it over, and over, and over again...

(all that other stuff helps plenty, though)

SEVENTH READTHROUGH REVIEW:
ME2ME, A 5 A.M. CONVERSATION

-You're going to read it again?
-Ugh, I don't even want to. But yes.
-What the hell for?
-I was thinking: if I read it 8 times then an 8 is a sideways infinity and that's even in the book so, like, what a reference, what an homage, right?
-But this would be 7 times.
-Right. Well, then, just one more after that.
-...
-...
-...
-I need more Don Gately.
-...Yeah, me too. I'm in.


Around halfway through endnote 90 (which itself is 4 pages long) Don Gately says: "It makes me feel good you think I'm decent to talk to. That's supposed to be why I'm here. I sure needed to talk, at the start. Can you remember where you were headed before I broke i— interrupted?" (1001)

This is arguably what passes for a joke in Infinite Jest.

See, Gately is a reformed thief who used to burglarize houses to support his drug habit. So when he starts to say "before I broke in" he catches himself and corrects it to "interrupted."

This quote-unquote joke I did not catch until my fifth reading of the monster that is Infinite Jest.

It's the kind of thing that could well polarize your readers.

5 stars out of 5. I'll talk your ear off about this one if given half a chance.


MY FIRST REVIEW, JANUARY 2016:

There are books and then there are BOOKS.

Once I told a friend that my mom's favorite book was "Atlas Shrugged" and my friend said she was just trying to impress me with page count. Some might feel the same about "Infinite Jest", which boasts 1079 pages (981 of prose and the remaining 98 all footnotes). It's experimental, it's self-aware, and it's complex. Or it's not complex so much as detailed. Overdetailed. Hyperdetailed. But it's also apologetic, like the author knows he's got something really important to say and he's just so terribly sorry to bother you with it in this way. Maybe knowing that the writer later killed himself colors my opinion, but the whole book is infused with gravitas. There are scenes full of energy and others that are boring in their normalcy, yet it's all described in baroque intricacy that makes the mundane seem powerfully important.

"Infinite Jest" is the story of Hal Incandenza, a teenage tennis prodigy from an affluent Massachusetts family, who briefly visits an addicts' halfway house. It's also the story of Don Gately, a reformed thief who finds an unpleasant but effective recovery through the same house's 12-step programs and becomes a hero in the process. It's also also the story of a secret short film so addictively entertaining that anyone who watches it dies, slowly wasting away as they freeze catatonic and unable to turn it off. And it's also also also about all the context in between and around and behind all that, like the recent war that forced all the North American countries to merge, and the way Hal's father killed himself after filming the film in question, and the Canadian wheelchair assassin squad seeking to find the master copy so they can weaponize it.

"Infinite Jest" reminds us of what words can do, what books can be, what serious-literature-as-art looks like. I admit, I had to turn to the Internet early on to search for some clarification. But even that foray into cyberspace felt right, like the text was only enhanced as time moved us all ahead into a fully digital age. It's all part of the experience, and "Infinite Jest" is absolutely that: an experience. Anyone who has finished it seems to remember where they were when they did, sometimes if only because of all the other things they weren't able to do because they spent so much time reading it. My copy comes with an introduction by Dave Eggers who compares it to exercise, and that's a very apt comparison. Reading it is like flexing your brain muscles. It's not quite like lifting weights but rather more like posing in front of the mirror and thinking "I look good."

I admit also that I skimmed some sections. I skimmed much of the minutiae of the tennis academy routines. I skimmed the plodding Eschaton games. I skimmed the goofy puppet show film and the political farce of how O.N.A.N. got set up. These are worldbuilding scenes bloated out of control, methodical and tiresome and pretty damn boring. And the phone conversations between Hal and Orin? Please. Nobody talks like that.

On the other hand, I was riveted by the scenes in the addicts' house and at the Boston AA meetings. And I was transfixed by the delightful passages with Lyle, the locker room guru who maybe can hover and gives out sage advice to troubled teens at the tennis academy. And I laughed out loud when I read about the feral hamsters breeding in the nuclear wastes, among other things. The prose could surely benefit from a trim, a couple pages here or a dozen there to help speed the narrative along. And those footnotes aren't particularly illuminating; I stopped checking them very early on and my understanding didn't suffer any. Maybe this is all an artistic choice—if the book is truly about life in America and how we're all escapists trying to endlessly entertain ourselves to distract from the unpleasant thought of our inevitable death, as the critical consensus appears to be, then these long stretches of dull text must reflect a singular truth about living in reality: there's plenty of parts of life itself we'd love to skip over, right? But we can't. We are bound to continue on forwards one minute at a time.

So, in the end, what to say? Is it perfect? Well, no. But it is dramatic and perception-altering and significant. The depictions of addiction and depression resonate deeply. It is absolutely touching and Very Important. But it's not easy, and I don't know that it's very re-readable, even though a second reading is strongly encouraged as the ending loops right back around to the beginning a la "Finnegan's Wake". You could just keep reading through and starting over and jumping right back down the rabbit hole, as it were, which is very appropriate given the exploration of addiction and the symbolism of the mystery movie.

2 of 5 as a work of entertainment, 5 of 5 as a work of art, and thus 4 of 5 stars from me overall.

* * *

OK, OK! Amended six months later, on 5/9/2016. 

I've thought about this book more than any other. I've read critiques of it and watched movies based on it and speculated upon it and legitimately thought "If you want to 'get' me you've got to read 'Infinite Jest'."

It pops into my consciousness every couple of days or so, and if that isn't what makes a 5 star book then I don't know what does. 5 stars out of 5. It's something else!

SECOND READTHROUGH REVIEW:

Infinite Jest is like a persistent earworm, a song that you just can't get out of your head. And but so I had to read it a second time, not even a full year after my first go-round.

In all honesty, I fear for the future of this book. Will it seem hopelessly dated in another few decades, with its quaint cartridge-based media and its 1990s "TV rots your brain" fears? I hope not. I think there's enough universal human truth to serve as a foundation upon which the rest can sit. But if hard-pressed, I would have to admit that IJ may not deserve a spot in the fabled Canon Of Great Works. Maybe it's not Great, maybe it's merely Very Very Good. And yet, it stands apart as unique, as an exceptionally well-crafted piece of art (I daresay even Art, with a capital A). Every detail is balanced and counterweighted with exacting precision and care. It's not just long for the hell of it.

This is DFW's great trick: to write a novel so lengthy that it encompasses and mimics several distinct experiences. There's the "everyday life" experience of finding great detail in the minutae of everyday living. There's the mimicry of the high-def films that JOI supposedly composed, with great depth of focus in each scene. There's the experience of the recovering addict, the "huge slabs of glacial time" that Gately now experiences, counting seconds as they tick by. There's the giddy thrill of occasional spurts of action, of a mystery that never quite comes together. And there's the dizzying array of seemingly endless interconnections between tragically lonely people who don't actually connect and yet whose narratives overlap and cascade in unforseeable ways.

So, were I to stand IJ up in relation to every other Great Western Novel, I'd get self-conscious and give it a 4. But this book has become a part of me, has articulated experiences and feelings that I've had in a way that is almost painfully beautiful, and challenges my way of thinking not only while reading but afterwards.

5 stars.
FOURTH READTHROUGH REVIEW

"...little more than an olla podrida of depressive conceits strung together with flashy lensmanship and perspectival novelty." (791)

"...the complete unfiguranted egalitarian aural realism was why party-line entertainment-critics always complained that the wraith's entertainments' public-area scenes were always incredibly dull and self-conscious and irritating, that they could never hear the really meaningful central narrative conversations for all the unfiltered babble of the peripheral crowd, which they assumed the babble(/babel) was some self-conscious viewer-hostile heavy-art directorial pose, instead of radical realism." (836)

This is my fourth reading of Infinite Jest and I'm very pleased to say I've come to a fuller and more satisfying understanding of both the key plot points and the thematic interrelation of the various strands and settings. I think I can satisfactorily say who the narrator is, who sent out the Entertainment cartridges and why, and what happened to Hal in the end that left him incapacitated in the opening section – although for each of these questions there is still a tantalizing ambiguity that obscures any real, firm answers. I think I can express how this is a modern retelling (and arguably inversion) of Hamlet. I think I can fully grok the parallels between competitive athleticism, political fanaticism, and drug addiction/recovery. I think I can appreciate how self-referential and sly winking jokes like Himself's filmography and Found Drama and annular fusion and endnotes within endnotes are both the ultimate manifestation of and the jumping-off point for moving past Postmodernism and its alleged toxic effect on meaningful human contact. To get to this point I had to read the text three times through, listen to it once as an audiobook, and spend hours and hours reading critical analyses and online community reader responses. But what's amazing is how much I enjoyed doing this, spending so much time with this book as a personal mission and a source of entertainment and a means of enlightenment through literary critique. I am not exaggerating when I say that Infinite Jest inspired me to be a better person, challenged me to identify areas of my life in which I had grown complacent, and turned me into a rabid convert who will evangelize its worth to anybody willing to listen.

But I think I understand why people dislike this book. Despite its reputation as a comedy, it's not especially funny, really, and in fact often seems designed to be joyless. The humor that is on display is what we'd call "gallows humor" and it's delivered in dense, maximalist prose. Everybody knows that brevity is the soul of wit and the best jokes are often one-liners or come in a quick setup/punchline delivery. Here we've got the opposite: long-winded, over-detailed, extremely analytical buildups to a punchline that's either passed by quickly or buried within a long explanation full of caveats, clarifications, and trivia. So you're not often going to laugh, really—maybe some smirks and at best a chortle but not a lot of knee-slapping.

And for all the really truly excellent passages (the history of videophony, "Tennis and the Feral Prodigy," the M*A*S*H-inspired downward spiral of Steepley's father, Clipperton's Glock, JOI's father's drunken rambling garage-set monologue, the redemption of Barry Loach) there are some really truly not excellent passages, too. Stuff that seems experimental in an unrefined college undergrad kind of way ("Here is a list of things that are blue," the wince-and-cringe faux-ebonics of "Wardine be cry," the too long and too cribbed-from-an-urban-legend email chain about a bricklayer's accident). Some of these post-modern-type experimental prose formats do not hang well together, and give the text a choppy feel. Supposedly this was DFW's intent—but we give him a lot of leeway on intent, I think, often apologizing for things that actually weren't 100% successful in their execution. The "yrstruly" section gets my vote for worst offender here.

Plus, there are a lot of shocking and backward-seeming tendencies on display that will doubtless ostracize non-white, non-straight, non-male readers. The casual use of "faggy" as an insult and the one-dimensionality of any of the gay characters, the "big man in unconvincing drag" running joke. The peppering of racial slurs and stereotyping. These are not enlightened views and they don't hold up under scrutiny as attempting to satirize or shock for the purpose of social change. I think DFW just thought that stuff was funny, in an immature way. And yeah, I'll give him a bit of slack since that really was the way people talked in the 90's and in particular in Boston which is hardly a hotbed of tolerance or acceptance. But I really think that these traits work against the book's reputation in the long-term and mark it as a period piece. I bet DFW would regret these race and gender elements in particular and revise them heavily, if not excise them completely, were he writing it today. Because for such an important message as how difficult it is to truly communicate and how valuable empathy is in human relations, you can't display such wanton ignorance and expect to get through to people. We've also got the troubling issue of Wallace's real-life actions being far from model behavior—he was at best an asshole and at worst a criminal stalker—and whether that undercuts his message here, especially since he seemed to be striving to pour himself into this work and shatter the standard literary critic's conception of the Intentional Fallacy as a sacred cow of sorts.

For me, this is still a 5 star book. But it emphasizes the "for me" aspect of any experience, and I can appreciate where it falls flat or fails to be accessible to contemporary audiences. For me, I'm extremely glad I've read it and chewed on it so aggressively. Maybe now, having wrestled and danced with it so long, I can put the book aside for a while and go out and do what it's really exhorting us to do: live life, don't just watch it.

SIXTH READTHROUGH REVIEW

Never have I ever disliked so much a book I enjoy, nor for that matter so enjoyed such a dislikable book.

Life-Altering.



Does for the English language and the definition of what it means to be an American what Citizen Kane did for cinema.

Some of the most riveting two million words I've ever read.

And probably the most hilarious 800 pages of footnotes I have ever read.

I've never been the same since.

A friend once told me that the only appropriate response to a person who calls you or your work "genius" is to calmly and clearly enunciate the words "go fuck yourself."

Make of that what you will, but when DFW committed suicide, that's the only response I could make to any and all queries for a week.

Enjoy his masterwork. I did.

Further notes:

1. Read this one on an e reader. You'll need to summon the dictionary often. Hilarity often ensues.

2. Apple and Oxford specially commissioned DFW (and other notable authors of the day) to compose the entries for their iOS dictionary. So once in a while you'll run into a pretty funny definition (anywhere, not just this book) written by DFW, on iPads and iPhones.

3. If you hate this, I will support your right to do so with my last calorie. But be warned I scroll past peevish reviews of this book wearing this expression, every single time:

اول کتابم نوشتم: «کتابِ آن‌هایی که احساس تنهایی شدیدی می‌کنند…»
و بعد از تموم شدن کتاب و گذروندن یک دوره‌ی سه‌ماهه سر و کله زدن با فهمیدن کتاب و صحبت‌های جمعی، فکر می‌کنم که این تفسیر خیلی درسته. چون اونهایی که احساس تنهایی عمیقی دارن، خیلی بیش‌تر فکر می‌کنن، انگار همه‌اش توی سرشون زندگی می‌کنن و نشخوار فکری راحتشون نمیذاره؛ درست مثل والاس و کاراکترهاش.
کتاب دقیقا برآمده از ذهنی افسرده اما به غایت باهوشه، خیلی حرف برای گفتن داره اما تمرکز نداره تا مستقیم بره سر اصل مطلب و خط داستان رو پیش بگیره، دائم مطالبی رو پیش می‌کشه که از حرف اصلی طفره بره (مثل ریاضیات پیچیده) یا دغدغه‌هاش رو در خصوص تمناهای انسانی مطرح کنه (مثل روایت گذشته کاراکترها و مسیری که طی کردن تا الان این‌قدر تنها و درمانده بشن).
همیشه گفتم که اگر کسی درد افسردگی رو نکشیده باشه، اصلا نمیتونه در توصیف اون حتی یک قدم به آنچه افسردگی واقعا در واقعیت بر سر آدم میاره، نزدیک بشه. به همین دلیله که والاس رو خیلی دوست داشتم و دوباره با خوندن کتابش یاد سریال محبوبم درباره این موضوع، یعنی Bojack Horseman افتادم و برای دوباره دیدن سراغش رفتم.
جیمز اینکاندنزا مثل بوجک تنها و طردشده است و حتی رابطه‌اش رو با فرزندانش از دست داده، فقط ماریو که از همه انسان‌تره و توجه و مهربانی‌اش در این جهان عجیب و غریب دیستوپیایی کامل‌تره میتونه هم کلام و همراه جیمز و تنهایی‌اش بشه.
هل و اُرین هر کدام به نوعی پر از خشم و تروماهایی هستن که نتونستن به درستی از وجودشون تخلیه‌اش کنن و حالا درمانده و مفلوک، به اعتیاد پناه میبرن؛ اعتیاد به ورزش حرفه‌ای، مواد و سکس.
دان گیتلی از انفعال خودش سرخورده شده و حالا مواد رو کنار گذاشته تا دوباره به زندگی برگرده و در تلاشش از صفر، فقط برای اینکه به خودش یادآوری کنه وجود داره و به جلو قدم برمی‌داره من رو یاد خودم می‌ندازه.
نمیشه نادیده گرفت که نقش زن‌ها در کتاب، کم‌رنگ و شاید حتی کمی مغرضانه است؛ جوئل از گذشته‌اش و مهم‌تر از اون، بدنش و زیبایی‌اش یعنی حاشیه‌دارترین دارایی یک زن، آسیب خورده و آوریل اینکاندنزا از بدنش، سواستفاده می‌کنه. مادر بی‌نقصی نیست و از سمت فرزندانش نسبتا طرد شده.
کاراکترهای فرعی کتاب و داستان‌هاشون هم ریز ریز آدم رو به حیرت می‌ندازن و فکر خواننده رو به شدت مشغول می‌کنن. (نبوغ والاس در این زمینه ستودنیه)
در واقع‌ به نظرم هر کدوم به تنهایی، سوژه‌ی یک داستان مجزان.

در نهایت باید ترجمه‌ی معین فرخی و زحمتی که برای کتاب کشیده رو ستود چرا که حداقل برای من اصلا قابل تصور نبود که متن اصلی این کتاب رو‌ بخونم. ترجمه‌ی نوشته‌های نویسنده‌ای مثل والاس با بازی‌های ادبی‌اش و جهان پیچیده‌اش به شدت سخته و وقتی کتاب رو می‌خونید متوجه خواهید شد که کلمات و عبارت‌ها‌ چقدر عجیب و غریب کنار هم چفت شدن.

کتاب رو گذاشتم در قفسه‌ی کنار تختم که جلوی چشمم باشه و همیشه سراغش برم، حتی شاید برای یک بار خوندن کامل دوباره.

پ.ن: برای فهمیدن کتاب، نیاز به کلی سرچ در اینترنت، کلی حرف زدن با جمع افرادی که کتاب رو میخونن یا خوندن و کلی علامت‌گذاری و تمرکز دارید که همین تجربه‌ی خوندنش رو خیلی متفاوت می‌کنه.

USHER: Goodreads court is now in session, the Honourable Judge Chandler presiding. All rise.

JUDGE: Mr Wise, you appear before the court today on the charge of failing to adore Infinite Jest, an act in gross and flagrant violation of basic Goodreads standards of decency. How do you plead?

WARWICK: Well...I mean presumably this kind of thing is all subjective opinion, so—

PROSECUTOR: Let the record show that the defendant utterly fails to deny his foul sin.

WARWICK: Hang on—

JUDGE: So noted. If found guilty, the maximum sentence I can hand down is...DEATH.

GOODREADS MEMBERS (from gallery): Hooray! Kill him! Burn the heretic!

WARWICK: Whoa, wait a minute there, don’t you have to assign me some kind of lawyer or something, so I can defend myself? Like in Perry Mason?

PROSECUTOR: Your honour, in view of the gravity of his crimes, we believe the defendant should be compelled to represent himself.

JUDGE: I agree. Do you have any evidence to present in your defence, worm?

WARWICK: I’m glad you asked, m’lud, and thank you for showing such admirable neutrality.

VOICES FROM CROWD: Get on with it, scum!

WARWICK: All right! Well, to be completely honest, my heart began to sink from the very first page. This was my first exposure to Wallace’s fiction, so I was paying quite close attention to the opening paragraphs to try and soak up this style that so many people have fallen in love with. Defence Exhibit A – the opening:

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair [...]. My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X.

WARWICK. I submit I was justified in feeling immediate concern that the prose is awkward, unlovely, and try-hard, with outbreaks of horrendous juvenile alliteration.

PROSECUTOR: Objection! The opening section is clearly narrated by a precocious child genius, making the tone entirely appropriate.

JUDGE: Sustained.

WARWICK: That’s true. And I was definitely willing to go along with that. The problem is that as the book goes on, you start to realise that basically all his narrators sound pretty much the same – they’re all variants on the same depressive, overeducated outsider, speaking in these jagged, straining, uncomfortable sentences. On the few occasions when he attempts social dialects beyond his own – including a few passages of extremely ill-advised colloquial Ebonics – it sounds more like a grotesque parody than any serious attempt at a socially inclusive writing style. Besides, is it really an excuse for a writer to say ‘My characters all happen to talk like malfunctioning robots, so you’re just going to have to put up with it’?

PROSECUTOR: ‘Overeducated’? Really? That may apply to the Incandenza family, but it’s hardly something you could accuse the residents of Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery Center of. Isn’t it, in fact, the case that Wallace’s daring new amalgam of contemporary patois and technical jargon simply went over your head?

WARWICK: Objection. Beyond the scope.

JUDGE: How is that beyond the scope?

WARWICK: I don’t know, it’s just one of those things they always say on The Good Wife.

JUDGE: Overruled. Answer the question.

WARWICK: All right, I don’t think it’s going over my head, no. The writing style is certainly innovative, but mainly in the sense that he sounds stilted and infelicitous in ways that no one has come up with before. His pile-ups of noun-phrases are particularly awkward, the nouns’ plurals’ genitives’ apostrophes so aggressively correct that they actually manage to look wrong. I hate the sloppy attempt in general to use exaggerated colloquialisms as a deliberate style – this habit he has of rambling vaguely around a topic for several paragraphs in the hope that one of his phrases will hit home. I like writers who craft and refine their thoughts before typing them out, not during. Overall I just felt there was a horrible uncertainty of tone, the narrative voice channel-hopping compulsively from slangy to highly mannered to jargonistic, often within the same sentence. It doesn’t cohere, but more to the point it doesn’t feel like DFW is in any control.

PROSECUTOR: Does it not occur to you that this might be done for deliberate effect? Or were you perhaps just put off by all the long words? (laughter from the jury)

WARWICK: Well...I’m reasonably sure it’s not that. I love complicated books with gigantic, exuberant vocabularies. It’s just that here, because of the general sense of bloated free-fall, it all just seems so purposeless, so gratuitous. To me he comes across less as an artist with a fat vocabulary than a hack with a fat thesaurus.

(Woman in gallery faints)

MAN IN GALLERY: You monster!

WARWICK: Defence Exhibit B, m’lud – a description of a character’s smile, which is said to be ‘empty of all affect’:

as if someone had contracted her circumorals with a thigmotactic electrode.

PROSECUTOR: Of course, one of those smiles. I can picture it perfectly.

WARWICK: You bloody can’t! It’s complete bollocks! ‘Circumoral’ isn’t even a noun, is it? And a lot of the time this kind of thing is stretched into full paragraphs – have a look at this single sentence, Exhibit C, which is in no way unrepresentative:

And as InterLace’s eventual outright purchase of the Networks’ production talent and facilities, of two major home-computer conglomerates, of the cutting-edge Foxx 2100 CD-ROM licenses of Aapps Inc., of RCA’s D.S.S. orbiters and hardware-patents, and of the digital-compatible patents to the still-needing-to-come-down-in-price-a-little technology of HDTV’s visually enhanced color monitor with microprocessed circuitry and 2(√area)! more lines of optical resolution – as these acquisitions allowed Noreen Lace-Forché’s cartridge-dissemination network to achieve vertical integration and economies of scale, viewers’ pulse-reception- and cartridge-fees went down markedly; and then the further increased revenues from consequent increases in order- and rental-volume were plowed presciently back into more fiber-optic-InterGrid-cable-laying, into outright purchase of three of the five Baby Bells InterNet’d started with, into extremely attractive rebate-offers on special new InterLace-designed R.I.S.C.-grade High-Def-screen PCs with mimetic-resolution cartridge-view motherboards (recognizably renamed by Veals’s boys in Recognition ‘Teleputers’ or ‘TPs’), into fiber-only modems, and, of course, into exrtemely high-quality entertainments that viewers would freely desire to choose even more.

WARWICK: This passage also contains three endnotes, which I will not go into for the sake of all our sanity. And don’t even get me started on Wallace’s Latin, which he persistently misunderstands. One footnote reads ‘Q.v. note 304 sub’, which is borderline illiterate – ‘q.v.’ is used after the thing you want to reference, and ‘sub’ is a preposition, not an adverb. What he apparently means is ‘Cf. note 304 infra.’ I couldn’t normally care less about this sort of thing, except that in this book it coexists with a laboured subplot about militant ‘prescriptive grammarians’, for whom DFW clearly has much misguided sympathy.

PROSECUTOR: Your honour, surely it’s now clear that the defendant is trying to build a case based on trivial inconsequentialities of personal style.

WARWICK: I know it seems like nit-picking, but the thing is these little mis-steps here and there all contribute to a general sense that you are not in safe hands. It’s like his proliferation of initialisms – why are E.T.A. and A.F.R. and U.S.A. written with dots but MDMA and WETA and AA without them? There’s no answer except general inconsistency, which fans will no doubt tell me is intentional but which is no less annoying for that. The same goes for Wallace’s pseudo-encyclopaedic knowledge base. Hal Incandenza is supposed to be an etymology expert who grew up memorising the OED. But every time we see this put into practice, it’s hopelessly wrong. E.g.: “There are, by the O.E.D. VI’s count, nineteen nonarchaic synonyms for unresponsive” – which makes no sense, because OED 3 won’t be completed for another 25 years or so so there’s no chance of getting to “VI” by the near-future of the novel’s setting; and anyway the OED doesn’t even list synonyms because it’s a dictionary, not a thesaurus. He traces the word anonymous back to Greek but the Greek is horribly misspelled; he traces acceptance back to “14th-century langue-d’oc French” but this phrase is both oxymoronic and flat-out wrong. Where is the research here? All through the book there is a profound feeling that David Foster Wallace did not really understand the things he was looking up in order to seem clever.

PROSECUTOR: Need we remind you that this is a work of fiction and not an academic thesis?

WARWICK: Again, it’s about confidence in your author. Mine quickly evaporated. I’m concentrating on language stuff only because it’s an area where I have an admittedly very dilettantish but somewhat active interest. People who know more about these things than me tell me his maths is equally dodgy. Now contrast all this with a writer like Nabokov or Pynchon, to whom Wallace is sometimes cavalierly compared. When I read Pynchon I can spend hours chasing up throwaway references to some obscure language, some astronomical phenomenon, a paragraph of Argentine politics or an obsolete scientific theory – it’s part of the fun of these big encyclopedic books that you can research all the related knowledge that lies just outside the margins. The references hold up and they enrich the reading experience. When I try and do the same thing with DFW, I always seem to come away with the conviction that he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.

PROSECUTOR (with heavy sarcasm): How unfortunate that so many people overlooked this and mistakenly found his writing moving and powerful.

WARWICK: Oh come on, don’t be like that. I am delighted that some people love his style, it’s just not for me. I totally admit that this is personal preference. I, personally, like writers who craft beautiful sentences. In my opinion, Wallace is just not very good at the level of the sentence, or even of the paragraph. But he can be great over longer distances – at the level of the chapter or long passage. There are several extended sequences of Infinite Jest that have a kind of cumulative power and excitement to them that I admired very much indeed. They were just padded out with far too many passages of inexcusable tedium.

VOICES FROM CROWD: Boo! Hanging’s too good for him!

JUDGE (banging gavel): Order! Order! (to the prosecution) Cross-examination?

PROSECUTOR: Extremely cross, your honour!

JUDGE: No, I mean do you want to cross-examine the witness.

PROSECUTOR: Oh. Yes! Or rather – (consulting papers) prosecution chooses to call a new witness, your honour – the defendant’s wife.

WARWICK: What?! You can’t—

Enter HANNAH, looking emotional.

PROSECUTOR: You are the defendant’s wife, are you not?

HANNAH (biting lip): I am.

PROSECUTOR: And isn’t it the case, ma’am, that on more than one occasion over the past few weeks, you witnessed the defendant audibly chuckling over what he was reading?

HANNAH: I...I might have done.

PROSECUTOR: Moreover on several occasions did you not see him underlining passages he thought particularly admirable?

HANNAH (fighting back emotion): I...yes. Yes, I did.

PROSECUTOR: And is it not true that those passages included, but were not limited to, the description of Poor Tony Krause having a seizure; the fight outside Ennet House; and Don Gately’s fever-dream sequences?

HANNAH (bursting into tears): It’s true! He said one of them was the...the best thing he’d read all year. He recited bits of it out to me in bed and everything.

PROSECUTOR: And can you see the man who said these things anywhere in this courtroom?

HANNAH (pointing at defendant): There! That’s him! That’s the man! Gaargh!

PROSECUTOR: No further questions, your honour.

HANNAH is led out in tears.

WARWICK: I – what?! This is ridiculous! Objection!

JUDGE: What is the nature of your objection?

WARWICK: The nature of it? Um...what’s that one about badgers, again?

Pause.

JUDGE: …Badgering the witness?

WARWICK: That’s it! He was badgering her! She just got totally badgered!

JUDGE: Overruled.

WARWICK: Look, this is an eleven-hundred-page book. If a monkey throws a thousand darts at a dartboard, he’s going to score a couple of bullseyes. He’s also probably going to hit you in the eye a few times. And in the context of this metaphor, a monkey-inflicted dart-wound to the face can be taken as the equivalent of, say, an unforgivably tedious description of a geopolitical tennis game.

PROSECUTOR: The point remains, however, that you found yourself moved by parts of this book, didn’t you? Affected by the characters’ story?

WARWICK: Sure. Some characters worked better than others. I thought Don Gately in particular was a wonderful creation and I only wish he’d been in a tighter and better-controlled novel.

PROSECUTOR: You were moved, gripped, excited – even aroused at times.

WARWICK: Well, I wouldn’t go that far.

PROSECUTOR: Oh really? Isn’t it the case that, on one occasion last week, you found your mind, in an idle moment of alone time, returning to a certain cheerleader-based episode of mass knickerlessness...?

WARWICK (leaping out of seat): Ob-jection, your honour!! Surely this line of questioning can’t be appropriate!

JUDGE: Oh...go on then, sustained. I really don’t want to hear about it.

Sighs of relief from public gallery.

WARWICK: Although, thinking about it, the query does serve to highlight a certain strain of misogyny that bothered me about the book – where the narrator gives Avril Incandenza extra value by repeatedly telling us that she is particularly gorgeous ‘for a woman her age’, while the nearest thing we have to a female lead is known as ‘PGOAT’ – sorry, ‘P.G.O.A.T.’ – the ‘Prettiest Girl Of All Time’ – and is also defined by her physical attractiveness, or the possible marring thereof.

PROSECUTOR (rolling his eyes at jury): Oh that’s right, play the sexism card now. And I suppose you were equally unmoved by the gripping descriptions of social deprivation – an insight into a world that doubtless a middle-class bourgeois reader like you couldn’t hope to evaluate?

WARWICK: First of all, you should probably be careful what you assume about my background. Second of all, yes some of it worked really well. But again, there is a lack of authorial control. A lot of the violence and stories of drugged-out atrocities start off being genuinely disturbing, but end up going so far that they take on a Grand-Guignol aspect and become too ludicrous to take seriously. When one woman at an addiction meeting mentions her father’s late-night visits to the bedroom of her severely disabled sister, it’s very creepy and upsetting. But Wallace can’t stop himself going on to give us three full, unnecessary pages of detailed “incestuous diddling” (his phrase) which turns the whole thing from disturbing into cartoonish and silly.

PROSECUTOR: So there’s something ‘silly’ about sexual abuse, is there?

WARWICK: I’ll ignore that. Look, I agree that there were parts of this book that I enjoyed very much, of course there were. But I would draw your attention to the fact that during these moments of narrative brilliance, the footnotes and speech tics and other po-mo devices suddenly dry up: he doesn’t need them. This leads me to conclude that they really serve no purpose except to distract from the turgid flabbiness of other sections of the novel. Whose plot, by the way, goes absolutely nowhere – nothing is resolved and no questions are answered.

PROSECUTOR: Again, we would argue that this is deliberate, your honour – forcing the reader back to the text so that the book itself becomes an ‘infinite’ form of Entertainment like the one it describes.

WARWICK: Oh come on. This argument stretches ‘generosity to the author’ beyond the bounds of credibility.

PROSECUTOR: And yet somehow, reviewers who are actually paid to review books – unlike you – have described this novel as ‘profound’ and ‘a masterpiece’ and ‘brilliant and witty’ – refer to prosecution exhibits A through W.

WARWICK: Let’s not forget the London Review of Books review, Defence Exhibit D – and I quote:

[I]t is, in a word, terrible.... I would, in fact, go so far as to say that Infinite Jest is one of the very few novels for which the phrase ‘not worth the paper it’s written on’ has real meaning in at least an ecological sense.

Shouts of anger from public gallery.

JUDGE: You disgust me. Are we ready for sentencing?

WARWICK: Wait! Wait! I have one more witness to call!

JUDGE: Very well. Who?

WARWICK: I call... (dramatic pause) … David Foster Wallace!

[For reasons of space, the trial concludes here.]

"Todos estamos en la misma cadena alimenticia. Todos nosotros. Es un deporte individual. Bienvenidos al significado de la palabra -individual-. Aquí todos estamos profundamente solos. Es lo que tenemos en común, la soledad."

No sé si los lectores somos seres solitarios, lo que si está claro es que la lectura es una experiencia muy solitaria porque nos encontramos solos frente a una historia creada por otro ser humano (a veces hasta tienes la sensación de que la ha creado solo para ti) y mientras andamos sumergidos en ella, es casi imposible conectar fuera de esta experiencia, a menos que luego compartas tu experiencia con otra gente. En mi caso concreto, la lectura de La Broma Infinita ha sido una experiencia mucho menos solitaria porque la he leído en lectura conjunta, compartiendo comentarios semanales a medida que iba avanzando y no puedo estar más contenta por haber vivido esta experiencia comunitaria lectora. La Broma Infinita no es un libro difícil, o especialmente inaccesible, no, pero si es una novela muy absorbente, de muchas capas donde DFW exige mucho al lector y lo sumerge en una especie de historia/puzzle de más de mil paginas donde hay cientos de piezas que hay que ir encajando. Estas piezas están formadas por personajes que el autor se va sacando como de una chistera y a su vez vienen acompañados de sus propias historias que van conformando un ecosistema alrededor de las lineas argumentales principales. Quizá sola me hubiera supuesto una experiencia mucho más árida a la hora de disfrutarla, pero la lectura conjunta ha sido un disfrute total porque sabías que no estabas completamente sola frente a una obra tan inmensa y categórica. Y sí, David Foster Wallace fue un genio.

"La película poseía una cierta cualidad, según informes oficiales y secretos, por la cual el espectador no quería ver nada más en la vida que volver a verla una y otra vez..."

Es casi imposible hablar del argumento de esta novela, y mucho menos de lo emocionantes (conmovedores dentro de su desolación) que son sus personajes, todos y cada uno de ellos con su propia melancolía a cuestas, con su propia tristeza, algunos a los que les resulta muy difícil gestionar el mundo que nos ha tocado vivir, porque aunque es una novela noventera, es una historia de estos tiempos y en muchos de los hechos que cuenta DFW, se adelantó a lo que se nos venía encima viviendo en un mundo extremadamente superficial, materialista, donde el placer y el entretenimiento vienen a ser el centro del universo.

"...al parecer la cosa empieza con una toma fascinante y de alta calidad cinematográfica de una mujer velada que pasa por las puertas giratorias de una gran edificio y echa una mirada a alguien en dichas puertas, alguien cuya visión hace que su velo se hinche..."

En general, La Broma Infinita sigue dos lineas argumentales principales:

- por una parte tenemos la historia de Hal Incandenza, un adolescente de diecisiete años que estudia en una prestigiosa academia de tenis, fundada por su padre, que a su vez es un tenista de talento. Esta linea argumental explora no solo el personaje de Hal, sino el de sus amigos, hermanos, y de alguna forma también el de James O Incandenza, su padre, auténtico centro de la novela, porque aunque está fallecido, durante estas más de mil páginas es quizás el personaje más presente, más esencial en torno al cual gira todo. El padre de Hal fue un destacado cineasta, director de una obra titulada La Broma Infinita. Una película que a su vez ejerce un poder hechizante sobre sus espectadores porque les causa tanto placer su visión que adquieren un estado catatónico.

"...conocen de primera mano que hay más de un tipo de la llamada -depresión-. Uno es de grado inferior y a veces se denomina anhedonia o melancolía simple. Es una especie de sopor espiritual por el cual se pierde la capaciad de sentir placer o cariño por cosas que antaño eran importantes."

- la otra linea argumental, con sus respectivas historias colaterales es la que se refiere a Don Gately, un paciente de un centro de rehabilitación para drogodependientes, y exceptuando su problema con las drogas y con el alcohol (empezó a beber a los doce años en un intento de que su madre dejara a su vez de beber, un pasado que le obsesiona) Don es un tipo muy generoso y sensible en su relación con los demás. Su historia aunque está paralelamente separada a la de Hal Incandenza va confluyendo a través de más personajes y más historias, y a medida que la novela avanza, se van acercando.

"-Eres mucho más inteligente de lo que crees, Gately, aunque dudo mucho que nada ni nadie pueda entrar en ese lugar escabroso donde temes ser torpe y aburrido."

Se puede decir que La Broma Infinita es una distopia sobre una Norteamérica en pleno descenso a los infiernos y en la que los años se cuentan por el mejor postor. Los años han sido comprados por marcas publicitarias y cada uno lleva el nombre del patrocinador que más ha pagado; la mayor parte de la trama de esta novela transcurre en el “Año De La Ropa Interior Para Adultos Depend”. En esta Norteamérica unificada pero fragmentada donde Hal Incandenza y Don Gately se las ven y las desean para conservar una cierta paz mental sobre todo debido al consumo de drogas y a una infelicidad latente, los temas principales que aborda David Foster Wallace con una visíon del mundo totalmente única tienen que ver sobre todo con la competividad extrema, los lazos familiares (donde la influencia de los padres marcará de por vida a sus hijos), la adicción no solo a las drogas sino al placer, al entretenimiento en un mundo bombardeado por la publicidad y por el cine comercial. Es una novela que a lo largo de sus cientos de páginas DFW consigue que te preocupes por sus personajes, que te encariñes con ellos, que te conmuevan… imposible describir hasta que punto dejan un vacio estos personajes una vez esta novela está acabada.

"Que si se abandona la mierda del machismo, el llanto masculino en público no solo es muy masculino, sino que también sienta bien (dicen)."

Aunque esta novela es todo un desafío, por lo menos para mí lo ha sido, también tengo que decir que después de terminarla y una vez buceas en la vida de su autor, sabes que él se ha dejado la piel en ella y que ha dejado parte de sí mismo, imposible no captarlo, y la estructura circular y/o abierta de la novela casi que te hace reconocer que La Broma Infinita es la vida misma matizada de pequeñas historias, son muchos libros dentro de uno. Una novela que define a la perfección los tiempos que vivimos y después de dos décadas, sigue estando más actual que nunca. Grande David Foster Wallace.

Nota: Después de terminarla me enganché a las “Conversaciones con David Foster Wallace” (Editorial Pálido Fuego) y es la guinda perfecta para terminar de redondear la experiencia que ha supuesto La Broma Infinita.

"Entramos en una pubertad espiritual en la que descubrimos el hecho de que el gran horror trascendental es la soledad, el enjaulamiento en el propio ser. Una vez alcanzamos esa edad, damos o recibimos lo que sea y usamos cualquier máscara para encajar, para no Estar Solos, nosotros, los jóvenes."

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