Customer Reviews

Infinite Jest: A Novel

5 star:		(163)
4 star:		(40)
3 star:		(26)
2 star:		(25)
1 star:		(39)

 

 

Say farewell, at least for a month or so, to your family, friends, and other hobbies. Figure out a way to fortify your fingers, wrists, and arms so you can hold this book up for hours at a time over a period of weeks. Reconfigure the lighting arrangement in your reading area for maximum glow. Find two sturdy bookmarks. Take a deep breath, let it out real slow, and you are ready to begin the monumental task of reading David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest." It took me three solid weeks to navigate a path through the byzantine structures of Wallace's magnum opus, three weeks of reading at least twenty pages a day (often more than that, of course) to get through the nearly 1,000 pages of text and the ninety plus pages of endnotes that make up this novel. If you have heard of Wallace before, and you probably have if you are checking out reviews for the book, you know "Infinite Jest" has quite a reputation in the literary world. You will see stuffed shirts tossing around words like "post post-modernism" and other academic jargon while referring to Wallace's oeuvre. Don't let these old fogies get you down; "Infinite Jest" is an immensely readable, hypnotically fascinating novel chock full of great humor, great sadness, and thought provoking themes.

The novel takes place in Enfield, Massachusetts in the near future. In the story, Canada, the United States, and Mexico formed a federation called the Organization of North American Nations (known as O.N.A.N.). The citizens of this confederation spend their time watching entertainment cartridges playable on their "teleputers," devices that came about when broadcast television went bankrupt. Advertisers predictably had a cow over the loss of television, so the government allowed companies to purchase calendar years and rename them. Hence, we have years called "The Year of Glad," and "The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment." Not everyone is happy with the O.N.A.N. arrangement; Quebecois revolutionaries continue to seek an independent homeland from their Canadian masters, only now they have to deal with the United States as well. In a devious bid for independence, a group of terrorists known as "The Wheelchair Assassins" (!) are seeking a film cartridge that supposedly kills anyone who watches it by turning them into pleasure seeking zombies. Moreover, a new energy system called annular fusion requires the confederation to dump its toxic waste into a place called "The Great Concavity," an abandoned area encompassing most of Maine and other northeastern regions. The concavity borders Quebec, and the toxins flung there with giant catapults (!!) have leeched into surrounding areas, thus causing thousands of people to develop life-threatening deformities.

Wallace introduces dozens of oddball characters in the course of his narrative, with special emphasis placed on the students at the Enfield Tennis Academy and the addicts populating a drug rehab right down the hill called Ennet House. The primary character at Enfield is one Hal Incandenza, a genius and a tennis star with a growing addiction to marijuana. Living with Hal are his horribly disfigured brother Mario, his promiscuous but hyper intelligent mother Avril, and several fellow students who redefine our conceptions of the bizarre. Hal has difficulties dealing with his family due to, among other issues, the horrific suicide via microwave oven of his father James. Dad was a scientist who helped develop annular fusion before going into experimental filmmaking. It was, in fact, James Incandenza who made the fatal entertainment cartridge that is causing so many headaches. In opposition to the madhouse that is Enfield is the madhouse that is Ennet House, where drug addict Don Gately attempts to take things one day at a time. Gately lived a life of desperate abandon, burglarizing homes in order to pay for his addictions. The only thing harder than living on drugs is kicking the habit, and Wallace describes in minute detail the hard sought sobriety of Don Gately and his fellow addicts. I know this summary stinks, I know I'm leaving tons of stuff out, but place the blame on Wallace for constructing such a complex novel.

Several themes thread their way through the novel. The most notable is the theme of addiction and recovery represented by Hal Incandenza and Don Gately. Another theme is the role of entertainment in American society, something Wallace sees as a calamity of epic proportions that will only end in death. If you tire of looking for deeper meaning in "Infinite Jest," don't worry. You can laugh yourself sick over the humorous aspects of the book or stare in open-mouthed awe at the numerous digressions from the main story. Wallace is a powerful writer, capable of infusing seemingly banal situations like filmmaking and sports with amazing energy. Check out the story about Hal's brother Orin punting in his first football game, or the Eschaton disaster at the academy, or James Incandenza's filmography in one of the endnotes for proof of this assertion. I especially loved the filmography and the endnote explaining the origins of the Wheelchair Assassins, two of the funniest, most wildly inventive things I have ever read. Most of the book is as equally brilliant even as it veers off in a dozen different directions.

"Infinite Jest" is intricate, with its multitude of subplots, OED inspired vocabulary, and tragic characters, yet the book still entertains because Wallace knows how to drape a compelling, easily understood story over all of the complexities. I'm under no illusions that I picked up on more than a fraction of the many things Wallace was attempting to say, but who cares? I had a heckuva a ride through this book, and hopefully you will too. Remember, take your time, breathe easy, and don't worry too much about carpal tunnel syndrome.

P.S. Allston Rules.

I will not go on about how great this book is. Every positive review you see is true. To the potential buyer I want to offer some tips for enjoyment:
1. Keep a dictionary near-by. Yes, you ARE smart, but some words are....well you will see.
2. Thumb through the foot-notes (yes, foot-notes) BEFORE reading and write down the numbers of the indices that appear to be important; i.e. are of significant length, have diagrams, etc.. Certain important footnotes are indicated as such by the author in the novel itself. I discovered this helped me absorb most of the importance of the foot-notes without interrupting the flow of the book.
Enjoy!

Having just finished Infinite Jest (not five minutes ago) I would say that this isn't really a book, but more of an alternate dimension that you happen to fall into when you open the covers. Or maybe like some strange hallucinatory drug that is administered each time you touch it. Reading ceased to be reading and was more like living in a different place for awhile, like a vacation that was sometimes horrible and sometimes hiliarious, but always interesting.

This book is huge. Sprawling. Epic. Etc. The characters stories are picked up, dropped off, picked back up (or not), never finished, wildly tangential, and inter-woven. I had heard that you needed to keep notes in order to keep everything straight in your head, but never felt I needed this. I did need to look up numerous words in the dictionary, however. Don't read this book thinking that you will have everything tied up in a nice little package at the end. Things do come together, they almost touch near the end, but not quite. If you focus so much on needing a sure ending then you will come away disappointed.

What surprised me about Infinite Jest is how sad and breathtakingly grotesque it can be. I have never read a book that made me feel so viscerally ill and uncomfortable before at parts. But there are also scenes that are hilarious, making me laugh out loud with the absurdity of the situation and the world that DFW has created. It really is a book that encompasses the entire wide swing of emotions that are available to humans and DFW manages to nail each of these emotions so well that you actually begin to feel them too as you're reading.

Dedicate a part of your life to reading this, as you will not be disappointed.

Rarely do I put a book down, no matter how bad it may be. This one I found myself thinking not about what I was reading, but rather how much more of it I had to read. When I got to page 230 (still over 750 pages to go), I couldn't take anymore. Flashy vocabulary and overly technical drug references are amusing for awhile, but when I found myself dreading picking up the book again, I knew it was time to stop. Easily one of the five worst books I've ever read.

"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy..."
-from Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

In this gargantuan novel, Infinite Jest is the title of a movie so enthralling it leaves viewers mesmerized, unwilling to wrest their gaze from the screen. Audiences don't care about anything else, and literally die of pleasure (the descendant of Monty Python's Killing Joke, perhaps?).

Infinite Jest (the novel) is set approximately two decades in the future, and deals with a society obsessed with entertainment and amusement. The former NAFTA states have been reorganized as the Organization of North American Nations, or ONAN. The President of the United States, the titular leader of ONAN, is a somnambulant ex-crooner named Johnny Gentle, who's most original idea is to offer large corporations sponsorship opportunities-thus, each year is now named for a commercial product, resulting in the Year of the Whopper, the Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar, and the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, during which most of the novel is set.

ONAN is under siege from wheelchair bound Quebecois terrorists, who are pissed that their province is now used as a toxic waste dump (the waste is hurled there from Massachusetts by giant catapults). Their master plan: obtain a copy of the lethal movie (code named "the Entertainment"), and make it available for the mass consumption of the largely lethargic American populace.

Searching for the master copy of the film, the terrorists focus on the sons of the film's deceased autuer, J. O. Incandenza, Jr. (who committed suicide by sticking his head in a specially rigged microwave oven shortly after completing the film). Icandenza's progeny are Orin, a skirt chasing professional football player, Mario, mentally deficient and physically deformed, and Hal, a brainy tennis star at the Enfield Tennis Academy, an institution his father founded before embarking on his film career.

The majority of the action in the novel takes place at the Enfield Academy and at Ennet House, a rehab center located just down the block from the tennis school. These institutions yield dozens of humorous asides and a plethora of quirky, memorable characters. Enfield provides opportunities to comment on celebrity and obsession, while Ennet House gives Wallace a chance to hold forth on addiction, self control, and Alcoholics Anonymous.

Wallace's primary theme is that America is slowly amusing itself to death. Obsessed with entertainment and self gratification, America is sliding into the abyss. Are there answers to this dilemma? Wallace seems to think so, constantly emphasizing the need to balance freedom with authority (his admiration for AA is obvious). Yet, he demonstrates that no answer is perfect: witness Lenz, in rehab to kick a drug habit, responding to the rigid structure of AA by killing domestic animals (you'll never hear the word "There" again without thinking of him).

Reading Infinite Jest is an ambitious undertaking. Don't be intimidated by its size (the hardcover weighed in at 3.3 pounds)-just be sure to set aside a few weeks to get through the thing. An unabridged dictionary and Physician's Desk Reference will also come in handy, as five dollar vocabulary words and pharmacological references abound. (And I haven't even mentioned the footnotes.) The original manuscript was reportedly some 300-500 pages longer and in need of severe editing, which may explain why the narrative just seems to end. The abrupt ending need not discourage you, however, as obsessive readers have reported that the novel is recursive, appropriate in light of its title.

Witty and deep, Infinite Jest is science fiction in the vein of John Barth's Giles Goat Boy or Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, a massive showcase for Wallace's writing talent, intelligence, and oddball sense of humor. Is it the great American Novel? Beats me. Some critics compare it to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but they say that about any book over 600 pages that you actually have to think about (I find it ironic that critics cite a book few have read to explain a book that even fewer will have the patience to read). Is it funny, erudite? Yes. Is it worthy of your attention? Most definitely. But be warned, Wallace's writing is as addictive as the movie Infinite Jest-- you may experience withdrawal pains upon finishing.

It is no secret or should be no secret that the book has no resolution. This is misleading because it certainly aims toward a conclusion, hints and foreshadows one that the author has in mind but stops short of it as though Wallace had to hurry up and publish what he'd written so far to pay the rent. The book becomes wildly addictive as the reader gets 500+ pages into it and--as the book is about addiction--that is the point (and the big joke or infinite jest) that the reader becomes addicted and then can't continue on, has to stop suddenly, should join a 12-step IJ group, presumably. As long as it is, a lot of the questions the reader has at the beginning are, in fact, answered and you do get an idea of what is on the addictive movie cartridge but it stops as it hurls toward a conclusion that could probably fill another 1000 page book. Almost every subplot is left unresolved and hanging as though the author forgot about them completely.

As it turns out, the comment on the hardcover flap about "a breathtaking, heartbraking, unforgettable conclusion" is a complete falsehood and purposely written as part of the later joke on the reader that there is no conclusion, which feels almost as clever as it is sour.

I thought the book was an interesting experiment and I enjoyed the feeling that I was a part of the whole experiment in writing and being ingulfed in his (clearly) vast and diverse knowledge. So post-post-modernist. I felt like it never fused as a story, though. That's not necessarily an indictment, but I fault the book because I think that it could have been all brought together and been more valuable because of it. But, again, I'm sure Wallace is pleased with his product and doesn't want us to feel satisfied in the least. So, it's worth a read, but don't expect to feel changed after all of the hours you spend with it.

Look, I enjoy experimental fiction. When authors trust their readers enough to challenge them, I cheer. I do not, however, enjoy books that break promises, and like it or not that's exactly what Infinite Jest does.

Unlike other unconventional novels, such as the works of the oft-mentioned Thomas Pynchon, this one seems to prefer nasty tricks to genuine communication - it implies it's going to tell a complete if complicated story and doesn't deliver. That's the sort of thing well-educated showoffs do. It's one thing to subvert expectations, quite another to waste someone's time. Infinite Jest is nothing more than a shaggy-dog story.

Consider this: At the beginning of this book we meet a gifted young tennis player at an admissions interview for a prestigious college. Something is seriously wrong with him - his handlers desperately try to keep him quiet, but it's no use, he tries to speak for himself and babbles insanely. Cut to Chapter 2, one year earlier, and this same young man functions beautifully, quite in his right mind. Clearly, the novel intends to explain what happened to him, right? Well, close to a thousand pages later we not only don't know what happened to him, we don't even have him in the narrative anymore. That's worse than a mistake, it's a cheat.

Don't get me wrong, David Foster Wallace has plenty of great ideas and a skillful way with the language, but it doesn't add up to anything - that's the frustration. For instance, in addition to the young tennis star, we meet dozens of other brilliantly-conceived characters and learn the fates of exactly none of them. The settings are elegantly detailed, from a tennis high school full of secret passages to the train-station restroom home of a dying junkie, and none of them have any impact on any character from the first page to the last. The time period described, a few years into the world's future, includes several intriguing postulations from our current society, all of them dead ends. There's a cult for ugly people, a cross-dressing federal agent, a group of terrorists in wheelchairs, a lost movie that captures the minds of all who view it, and couple hundred more ingenious devices, not one of which changes a damn thing. Wallace's famous footnotes are more engaging than his story.

In all fairness, this author probably set himself an impossible task; he has tried, like many another writer, to encompass an entire world in his pages. Unlike others, he doesn't know when to shut up. Infinite Jest reads as though he wrote until he got bored, then stopped and foisted the results off on the world. If he couldn't finish what he started, the least he could do is keep it to himself.

Some have said that those who don't like Infinite Jest should stick to pulp romances, but the issue is not comprehensibility; it's the covenant with the reader, which says that a book should deliver what it promises. Infinite Jest, I repeat, doesn't do that. I'm delighted that so many have gotten so much pleasure out of this doorstop of a book - at least all those trees died for some useful purpose - but that doesn't excuse David Foster Wallace, who by the evidence of this work seems to believe that mere cleverness is enough to produce good writing. He's wrong.

Benshlomo says, Don't make promises you can't keep.

I'm going to compare this with my favorite book, "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon, because that's the closest comparison I can think of, and it also happens to be a comparison that's being tossed around in the media (that's why I read it). Without going into great detail, I would say that this book has about 75% the _depth_ of "GR" (which is pretty damn good), and it is about 5 times more entertaining to read. It's amazingly entertaining. It is so entertaining that it literally became a proble

There is a tendency these days to regard long books as some sort of affront to the reader. I have seen so many review of "Infinite Jest" that review the length, rather than the depth. Yes, this book requires a serious committment from the reader. Yes, we all lead busy lives and want to get on with the next thing. I readily admit it took me several months to plow through this book, but it was well worth it.

I understand that incredibly dense, yet rewarding text, filled with oblique references that only become truly clear once you're 300 pages further into the novel, isn't to everyone's tastes. But I think the effort is really worth it. The book blew my mind. It's not all style; there is a real core of emotional truth here. Try it, you may like it.