This is a book you really have to finish. Through much of it, I enjoyed it well enough. There are funny moments, though the humor tends to be dark (at times very dark). The depictions of addiction, depression, obsessive-compulsions, phobias, and hyper-competitiveness are insightful and at times have a searing, painful realism. But I felt a lot of the time that in a way it was aimed at a slightly different demographic from me. I could think of a lot of people I’ve known who would be all over this (though I don’t know anyone in real life who has read it). A definable demographic: U.S. males, middle to upper middle class, intelligent, educated, nerdy, probably born sometime between 1965-1985. Don’t get me wrong, I know and love that demographic. As a reader, though, I initially felt like this book was aiming near me, but not quite at me. More important than which group Infinite Jest targeted was the fact that targeting any group at all made it smaller and less universal. A Good book, but not a Great book. Four stars, not five stars.

This is a novel with many flashes of brilliance as well as sustained passages of great writing, but there are also ugly moments. Some were necessary to the story, but at other times I felt like DFW was exorcising his own repellent, obsessive thoughts (the family dying one by one by cyanide poisoning, the details of Lenz killing cats and dogs) by inflicting them onto me. Darkly humorous or not, the more he did it, the less I appreciated it. There were gratuitous cheap horror show tricks and gags that dragged out longer than necessary.

But somewhere around 600 pages or so, I was finally sucked in. Wallace gradually gathers the threads of his myriad story lines together, letting the reader experience epiphany after epiphany as the pieces of the puzzle start to slide into place. It’s a fun feeling when we are finally allowed to step back from a large canvas that we’ve been looking at too closely, to see that the beautifully detailed scenes he has created eventually make sense as parts of a whole.

Then the story starts to get stranger, but proportionally more intriguing. Gately, lying in his hospital bed, dreams/hallucinates/is haunted by memories that only Hal or J.O. Incandenza, people he has never met, could know. Even stranger, the painfully sober Hal thinks Gately’s thoughts (“he hunches, she hunches”), and then Gately thinks in ALL CAPS words that the O.E.D.-obsessed Hal would know (“LISLE,” “EMBRASURE”), but Gately wouldn’t. It’s wild, initially subtle but gradually more obvious, and leaves plenty of questions. Incredibly, at the end of more than 1,000 pages, the natural instinct is to turn back to the beginning to try to figure it all out, in a recursive loop of a story it’s hard to turn away from. That says a lot for a writer who has challenged his readers with frustration, ugliness, and mirrored roadblocks.

Comments on the ending (I am spoiler-tagging this):
I read a quote from an interview with DFW on the ending: "There is an ending as far as I'm concerned. Certain kinds of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an 'end' can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book's failed for you." I get this, and, while I want to go back and read certain sections again, I do think the clues are all there to let us know what happened. But somehow I still wish DFW were the one telling it, because I know it would be a great story. I see where he is refusing to allow us the passive entertainment of the blockbuster finish, but I still wish we had it. And yet, I think the book is better for his not giving it to us. If that makes any sense.

ETA, 5 Sept. 13: To say I've been thinking about this book all summer would be a lie, as I have been thinking about this book since I finished it in February. Obsessively. A novel hasn't stuck with me and invaded my thoughts like I gave it a key to the place since Gravity's Rainbow. And I can honestly say, with nary a trace of exaggeration, that it has absolutely changed how I look at people, all for the better. Where was that fifth star? It was waiting for me to realize how deeply IJ's characters, passages and ideas burrowed under my skin and into my brain and will continue to badger me until I finally give in and spend another three months getting lost in the jagged beauty of DFW's intricately crafted universe. Well done, sir.




By the time I hit third grade and had still demonstrated absolutely no inclination toward athletic pursuits, my parents forced me into the township's local softball league. Because that's what you do when your bookworm daughter begs to take art lessons and possesses a nigh prodigious talent for falling up stairs, right? My first year of being a young ball player was punctuated by lots of praying for rain, daydreaming in the outfield and swinging at every pitch just because I liked how it felt: Somehow, despite my staggering disinterest and vast physical ineptitude, my team won the championship that season, heralding another god-awful year of my father's rabid commitment to an array of drills that still have phrases like "loosey goosey," "call for the ball" and "keep your HEAD in the GAME!" providing the hellishly looping soundtrack to my nightmares.

Miraculously still, I landed a spot on the all-star team my second year, which only led to more rigorous and more time-consuming practices after school, on the weekends, before games, after games, whenever there was even half an hour to spare in the pursuit of athletic greatness -- time I would have preferred to spend with my nose in a book. Any book. By my third year, I was pretty much self-sabotaging myself at every step of the game, eventually sacrificing the only thing I cared about: my beloved spot at second base. By the time I was a sullen eighth-grader and limply going through the motions I’d had mercilessly drilled into my rote memory for nearly five years, I made it pretty clear that my parents were wasting their time and money on misguided wishes that I’d conform to whatever young-athlete ideal they had mistakenly thought could be pinned on me. This was only a viable exit strategy because the one thing they hated more than relinquishing control over their children was throwing money at hopeless endeavors that would just end in (their, not my) public embarrassment.

But my doomed-to-fruitlessness years spent toiling at the batting cages and the local baseball diamonds and the front- and backyard were not why this book resonated deeply with and brutalized me as severely as it did. Though being forced into the arduous efforts of participating in a sport I didn't much care about save for the way it occasionally diverted the otherwise endless torrent of parental disappointment sure endeared Enfield Tennis Academy's students to me in a way I didn't see coming.

It's incidental that I gave up smoking pot about a month into the nearly three I spent reading this gargantuan tome. It's a cold-turkey move that was a long time coming, as I realized quite some time ago that my affinity for herbal refreshment stopped being an occasional comfort and grew to a full-blown, all-consuming vice. I won't go so far as to call it an addiction, as it was a habit I dropped with surprising ease. And I sure as hell didn't have half the troubles as I learned (thanks to this book, which I'm pretty sure the completion of is the equivalent of a master's degree in twelve-step programs) true addicts do. But when my coping method of choice in unwinding after a thoroughly demoralizing day at work, the thing I compulsively relied on to comfortably pass time and the way I eased myself into unfamiliar social situations started to look awfully similar, I couldn’t help but acknowledge the unfortunate reality that I was on the precipice of becoming a career stoner, sacrificing the pursuits and interests and friendships that I value far more that leaving my mind behind for a while instead of facing my trubles head-on.

For as easy and as shockingly non-disruptive my sudden cessation of a years-long habit was, you're goddamn right there were moments when my resolve almost caved -- not of weakness, really, but just because, meh, why not? That's about when I realized that the ritual of the vice was just as comforting as the substance itself. So I focused on the distance I put between myself and my last toke: One week without a visit from Mary Jane. Two weeks. One month. Now almost two months. And every time someone would pass me the bowl or the bong or a joint out of habit before apologizing profusely and sincerely whenever I declined (it’s weird, the odd deference I found myself receiving –- unknowing echoes of the very things I’d once said to those who abandoned the herb before me -- just for trying to kick a deeply ingrained habit: “Oh, man, you’re cleaning out? That’s awesome, congrats. I could never do that.”), it got a little easier to stay on the wagon.

Pardon the descent into clichéd territory for a second, but every journey of 1,000 miles begins with just one step: My attempt to shake a years-long bad habit began with one day of sticking to my guns. Just like conquering the beast that is “Infinite Jest” began with the turning of a single page. Both had their moments of me wondering just what the hell I’d signed up for but, even with their lesser moments, both efforts have been more than worth their comparatively few and fleeting pains.

I’ve made it abundantly clear before that I don’t give a leaping, prancing fuck about tennis but DFW sure made it interesting in the two essays he devoted to the sport in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” Coming into this having read even one collection of his non-fiction ruined IJ for me from the beginning, as it is the man's non-judgmental but deeply, quietly observant presence in his writing that draws me to him the most. But it also made me realize that the guy could have rewritten the phone book and I would have vomited praise all over everything because he’s that good at honest storytelling.

There are truths pouring from every page in IJ, which do lend a certain familiar presence reminiscent of DFW's non-fiction: The AA meetings, the depression, the internal conflicts, the biggest truths coming from the most inconsequential moments and, yes, even the tennis all resounded with real-life personal experience. Even the characters I absolutely hated (like that fucker Lenz) were crafted in a way that made them so human and multidimensional that it was obvious they were intended to be victims of circumstance who demanded more than black-and-white consideration.

The ways DFW blurs the lines and draws parallels between seemingly at-odds concepts show how polar opposites aren’t even as far removed from each other as we like to tell ourselves, that perspective, motivation or a simple name are all that separate, say, physically brutal athletic training and mindlessly indulgent entertainment, as the former is shown to be just another means for an individual to deliver the latter to the many. Similarly, an elite tennis academy really isn’t that far removed from a rehabilitation program: It becomes screamingly clear that both house addicts of some kind when you’re forced to examine what really lies at the heart of each institution. Even, obviously, sexual encounters and the family of one's childhood are complicit in one's effect on the other, as seen in Orin’s tendency to seduce mothers and how his own mother, in turn, carries on an affair with a boy young enough to be her son and who is wearing a disturbingly familiar football uniform when their tryst is brought to the reader’s full awareness. Because, really: Is the path to learned, painstakingly accrued greatness not all that different from a seizuring, pants-shitting junkie in the realm of addiction? Filling a void with finely honed talent that will one day destroy the body is revealed to not be entirely unlike filling that same void with a destructive substance that, too, renders the addicted vessel to a ticking time bomb of physical and mental ruin.

But in a time when one can no longer be certain of what the future holds -- the country is run by an increasingly unstable president, when something as indelible as a country’s topographical familiarity is eliminated, when one can’t even rely on the unfailing numerical certainty of what to call the next and all subsequent years -- is it any surprise that extremes are no longer separated by distinct boundaries and that the sweet escapist nectar of entertainment has ascended to such obsessive, pervasive heights? All people can be sure of is that the television show or movie that provides comforting relief from the unflagging instability of the real world is never more than an always-available cartridge away. In this regard, DFW presents a strange sort of dystopia where any addiction or superficial sense of microcosmic control is necessary to cope with a world whose only constant is perpetual upheaval.

It is that very instability that dominates the end of this book, as demonstrated by characters being (sometimes violently) uprooted from the surroundings that the reader has spent the length of three normal-sized novels relegating them to and replanted in wholly surprising locales: Hal is taken from the strictly regimented ETA where children are turned into perfectly performing machines and thrust into a regressive support group where adult men are encouraged to embrace their inner infants; the imperturbable Remy descends from his southwestern heights to the rock-hard bottom of Ennet House’s desperate pursuit of getting life back on track; poor Gately is ripped from his more-or-less secure life of sober, middling authority to being completely dependent upon machines to keep him alive, where he is at constant odds with his rational mind to avoid all addictive substances no matter what necessary relief they bring while battling unimaginable physical pain; the less said about Orin's upturned world the better; even the long-deceased JOI returns to the mortal coil in a sense –- by the way, I could have happily read nothing but the interfacing between Gately and Himself the friendly wraith for 1,079 pages and been as happy as an addict on a weekend drug binge.

Life is not always interesting or without its flaws and, honestly, neither was this book. For me, IJ wasn’t a perfect novel, nor was it the absolute best thing I’ve read. But it was the most human, the most humbling and the most honest: As far as I’m concerned, those are much more difficult and far more noble superlatives to reach for, especially with a piece of fiction that manages to resonate with more desperate sincerity than some people can ever hope to manage.

Da oggi in poi, se qualcuno mi chiederà se io abbia mai scalato l'Everest, risponderò di sì.

I have no thoughts as of yet. Only questions. And a vague sense of fatigue.