Infinite Jest (Goodreads review)

David Foster Wallace is my favorite writer, yet his greatest work, this 484,000-word monstrosity, is somehow independent of that fact (or it had been, anyway, until I finally finished reading it). Infinite Jest is a big, rambly mess. (Intentionally so, from what I've read, so I don't consider this impression to be accidental.) It is intermittently profound, intermittently funny, frequently digressive.

Digression. Do I need to know, for instance, all the details of the weirdly unique lighting system that James Incandenza installed in the Enfield Tennis Academy buildings? No. It makes the world DFW has so carefully constructed more real, but (to extend the metaphor) at the same time I felt like he was showing me the struts and the girders and the rebar of his construction, rather than simply allowing those building materials to bear the weight of the characters and the story invisibly. I was reminded of my time as an editor of comic books, back in the '90s, when a kid pitched me his idea for an incredibly detailed fantasy world, in which he had written out all the histories of his various races, the lineages of all his characters going back hundreds of years, and had practically identified the placement of each tree, rock, and blade of grass. I asked him, "OK, so what's the story?" His response was to look at me somewhat blankly.

This is not to say that DFW and some world-building fantasy nut have anything in common. On the contrary, DFW's Bowellism style of construction (to stretch my earlier building metaphor somewhat poorly) oftentimes made the book the special thing that it is. The mathematical footnote to the Eschaton match, which I didn't take the time to truly understand (which is to say I didn't sit down with a piece of paper, a pencil, and a protractor to do the calculations on my own), nonetheless made the Eschaton match that followed all that much more real to me. But Infinite Jest contains so much of this detail that, as the pages continued to slip by, it drowned out a lot of the stuff I wanted to retain.

Of course the acceptable response to this complaint (if you can call it a complaint--honestly I'm offering it merely as a personal observation) is that Infinite Jest needs to be read twice, at least, to fully grasp its contents. Fine. But I will not be reading Infinite Jest again. Not from start to finish, anyway. Perhaps this means I'm the wrong audience for the book, but even Michael Pietsch didn't want to reread the seemingly endless mountaintop conversation between Marathe and Steeply. Besides, I did enjoy, say, 80 percent of the book.

Still, trying to sum up my thoughts on Infinite Jest is like trying to sum up my thoughts on life, the universe, and everything. The book's sheer scope and inclusiveness is difficult to parse in retrospect. Having read it is like having woken up from a great dream, the details of which are already fading from my memory--but the impression it left behind remains strong and difficult to shake, even if I can't quite remember why. I even highlighted lines in the book (something I haven't done since college), which helped to keep characters and important events in my head, but so much of it continued to leak out.

All of the above seems like preface, however. Let me try to be more specific.

Considered in pieces, the most compelling sections to me were those that starred former addict and Ennet House resident counselor Don Gately. He is a sympathetic, if deeply flawed, protagonist. Those sections alone would have resulted in one of the best books I've ever read. As part of this larger thing that DFW has written, their power is by no means muted.

The Enfield Tennis Academy sections were less important to me. Hal, arguably the book's protagonist, left me cold. For the first 17 pages of the book, I was fully on board the Hal train. And his "professional conversation" with his dad, a few pages later, kept me on that train. But then the story goes back one year in time (ostensibly to answer the question uttered on page 17, "So yo then man what's your story?") where we meet Hal the secret pot "addict" who lives and plays tennis at his family's tennis academy. And this boy is empty. He's the Hamlet of the book, bothered by the suicide of his father four years earlier, perhaps bothered by his mother's indiscreet promiscuousness (with academy student John "No Relation" Wayne, with her half(?) and/or adoptive brother, Charles Tavis, with who knows who else) or perhaps not. Bothered also by his "addiction" to pot (or at least by the fact that the academy's mandatory drug tests make his "addiction" problematic), and by his waning love of the game of tennis. I think. I don't know, maybe not. But he's a boy who is primarily defined by his lack of definition. He wanders around generally bummed out the whole time.

But his presence at the academy seems, storywise, to serve primarily as a generally uninteresting satellite around which the other characters in his vicinity orbit. There's his mother ("the Moms"), his brother (sweet Mario--the one member of the Incandenza family that I enjoyed reading about), his best friend (Michael Pemulis, whose character is more well-defined than the rest of the Enfield kids), his other friend (Ortho "The Darkness" Stice, who is interesting only near the end, when he's being visited by, presumably, James Incandenza's ghost, for reasons unknown), the aforementioned John Wayne, and a handful of other kids who were completely interchangeable and unmemorable in my mind. The frequent group scenes featuring these kids are now a blur to me, and were a blur even when I was reading them. "Struck is putting on his socks in a particular way, Schacht tapes up his knee, Chu cries about something or other," so on and so forth. White noise to me. Though I did enjoy Jim Troeltsch, who reminded me of Yuji Okumoto, the Japanese drag racer who parroted Howard Cosell in the movie Better Off Dead.

Oh yeah, and I hate tennis. Hate it. I hate most sports, actually, but tennis has to be one of the worst. I think I like golf better than tennis. I played tennis (not competitively) during high school at my parents' insistence, and oh my god what a boring sport. So all the tennis mumbo-jumbo in this book (and there is a lot of it!) was very hard for me to get through.

The Remy Marathe/Hugh Steeply conversations in Arizona weren't too bad, actually (despite Michael Pietsch's apparent dislike of them). They contain one of the book's best sections: Steeply's account of his father's terrifying obsession with the TV show M*A*S*H. This section is pure DFW, and a section I will revisit many times, I'm sure. But even beyond that, I found the Marathe/Steeply conversations to be very illuminating. DFW uses them to lay out his thoughts on our culture of entertainment in the most explicit way. There's another scene, where Lyle (the Enfield locker room guru) explains to one of the younger academy students (Chu, maybe? Not that it matters) the pitfalls of chasing fame, but Marathe and Steeply are the primary debaters of American culture and our almost universal worship of entertainment.

However, I found the detail of Steeply cross-dressing as a woman to be a bit eye-rolling. It's funny, but in a pretty dumb way. And later, when "Helen" Steeply interviews Hal's asshole brother Orin, the joke strains believability one step past absurdity into stupidity. Orin, the inveterate ladies' man, would have to be blind to be sexually attracted to such a clearly unattractive and mannish-looking "woman." Likewise, hardly anyone at Enfield or Ennet House realizes "Helen" is a man (though there are notable exceptions--but the exceptions seem intended to be seen as incredibly astute, whereas, from DFW's own description of "Helen," only an idiot could be fooled). So "Helen"'s non-Marathe scenes were not as successful for me.

Likewise, Marathe's non-Steeply scenes were frustrating, if only because they tended to be the scenes that drove the book's plot (i.e., the AFR's search for the master version of James Incandenza's murderously entertaining film, Infinite Jest), which is never resolved, hence somewhat beside the point of the book, hence somewhat pointless, hence yawn. The film itself is tantalizingly described in a secondhand way (as it has to be, since anyone who's watched the film has been transformed immediately into a drooling vegetable), but the search for the film is just an excuse to follow a bunch of paraplegic French-Canadian separatists rolling around ominously in their wheelchairs and "technical(ly) interview(ing)" and/or murdering various incidental characters in gruesome ways.

Here's the aspect of the plot that irritates me the most: The beginning of the book takes place a year after the climax of the book, where the AFR operatives, disguised as the Quebecois juniors tennis team, are in the process of descending upon Boston in the middle of a blizzard to perform "technical interview"s on James's immediate family in an effort to locate the master copy of the film. Either (a) the AFR got stuck in the blizzard or (b) they didn't. If they didn't, how are Hal and CT still alive? If they did, why didn't they continue the mission after the blizzard was over? I understand the plot is extraneous, but Hal and CT's survival, one year later, seems impossible--unless the AFR somehow figures out where James is buried before "interviewing" Hal et al. Furthermore, while I'm on the subject of the credibility of the book's beginning, what on earth led CT and the Moms to believe that Hal, who at that point must have been pretty near the bottom of a year's steady decline, was in any way prepared for college life 3000 miles away from home?

But that's more digression. Where was I? Oh, yes. I was considering Infinite Jest in pieces, since it is a book composed intentionally of pieces. Bottom line, I loved many of this book's pieces: James Incandenza and his father struggling to move his father's mattress out into the hallway; Erdedy's endless, bug-infested wait for his pot dealer; the M*A*S*H sequence; the Eschaton sequence; pretty much all of Gately's fever-dream flashbacks; etc. But that's how I have to approach this book: in pieces. It's not your traditional beginning, middle, end-type of book, which leaves me, ultimately, unsatisfied. But that's fine; it was DFW's intention, I suppose (he originally wanted the novel's subtitle to be "A Failed Entertainment"). And I'm still giving it 5 stars. It's a masterpiece, truly. I had to stop a few times (first around page 321, and then again around page 560) to take long breaks and read some other books in between, but both times I came back to Infinite Jest with a feeling of excitement. I'm just glad that I finally read DFW's greatest work, after having failed to do so back in the year 2000, when I only got through the first 150 pages. As a devoted fan of DFW's nonfiction at the time, IJ wasn't what I was expecting. I wasn't ready for it.

In the spirit of the novel, I could go on and on. This barely scratches the surface, but Goodreads isn't really the forum for endless rambling. I'll post a more thorough breakdown, in another location, later. In the meantime, I'll wrap this up with one question for the other DFW fans out there: Why does everyone talk about how important page 223 is? Perhaps this is part of the whole "must read the book twice" phenomenon, but from what I recall, 90 percent of the book takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (i.e., 2009 probably). The first 20 pages or so take place in the Year of Glad (2010). Some sections reference other Subsidized Time years, but not in any grand revelatory way. The book's timeline is certainly fragmented, but not to the point where a reader must refer back to the Subsidized Time years with any frequency. What am I missing? An honest question. Anyway, that's it for now.