I Read David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest.’
For years, this novel has hovered above the horizon, one of those massive and daunting challenges that listed as a nondescript smudge on the lens, a name that came up often, mostly in the context of a pretentious, reaching stretch of a badge you wear more than a story you can enjoy. Most of what is said about this book falls a bit on the negative side. It’s been a totem of toxic masculinity, about The Type of Guy That Mansplains, an overambitious echo chamber, and more. But I always wanted to know. Then a couple of years ago, I watched The End of the Tour, a film where Jason Segel plays David Foster Wallace, the author in question here, and he was far different than I had expected him to be. And that goaded me into checking out his commencement speech from 2005, a speech so singular in its style and in its delivery that I bought a few copies (one for myself and one for a few people who came to mind that I wanted to share this with as not only just some link that will disappear in the SMS ether).
I knew I wanted to read this book, and its absence acted almost as more of a beacon to it than actually having it sitting on a shelf. I finally received this book as a gift this past Christmas and its pull was almost too strong to avoid. I went through Rilke and Orwell and Crouch with a thirst that was made even more insatiable by the big charge that I knew I was going to have to endure when its number was finally called.
I have heard this book be described as one that is impossible to actually summarize. I think I get that. The plot itself is a lemniscate of a pocket of human life, a cross-section that illustrates the austerity of life, no matter how well-lived, no matter how well-arranged. Infinite Jest shows a philosophy of the ever-contracting light on the maps of us all. There are fixed points in all of our lives, events or people or highs [and/]or conversations, that signify the point that we examine the rest of our lives through. And with over 100 characters in the book, I would say anywhere from 20–30 that we really sit with, the prism reflects light of almost all colors onto the far surface in nearly the same shades and shapes of color.
I try not to summarize or give plots of the books that I’m reading as I like to think if you boil down any Work by an author into a plot summary, especially when trying to explain if you did or did not like something, is sort of defeating the purpose of reading the actual piece anyway. Though I will say if you have it in you to read this, leave your taste for plot at the door. I think there’s a lot of entendre and bureaucratic metaphor and parallels about the government and The American People here, but most of that I can throw out the window. I’m sure it’s super clever, and I’m glad of it. The highest esteem I have for this book and the way it was written is that the characters, the characters that we ride along with, that we really dig into, are observed and examined to a degree where I am hard-pressed to believe that I didn’t spend literal months with them, whether through a reality show premise or a working internship alongside them. Wallace’s strength was extending microscopic and hyper-temporal events moments and thoughts into interminable and cosmic tones. I have never read passages that so replicated the frozen moments of reflection that we experience when reliving events that we believe shifted our lives. And he does this hundreds, thousands of times over the course of this book, granting us an omniscience, yet one so obtusely focused.
Tolkienien isn’t maybe the right word for all of this book, but there are certainly timelines and ripples throughout the universe he’s written that can absolutely be described in such a way.
Reading this book is like spinning the dial on the radio of God, diving deeply into the moments and visions and memories of All of Us, free from destiny and free from judgment. These are the natural forms of the spores of Our Being and here we are, reading them as if we aren’t living them just the same. [Big Ol’] Don Gately treats each clean and sober day like a dutiful bound into a festering cavity that he is lucky to be alive in, yanking up as many other people who have fallen with him onto the precipice of honest and boring sobriety. Through Gately, we explore three or four rock bottoms, each a different season. Through flashbacks, fever dreams, coma visions and real-time, we spend the most time “inside” him. The childhood is raw from the cradle, dark as it stands, rotten as it walks and somehow its the slowest and most banal retribution story that we get to examine.
The next most exploration we do is alongside Hal Incandenza, a student in his later years of a High School which is mostly focused on training its students to be on track to make it to the pro tennis circuit. Through this character, we get more adolescent observations of The Youth. There’s a lot more “dark comedy” moments as the lives of these kids seem to hold their own bubble world within the school itself, along with the pageant-child world of endless training, endless eating, and the way that they hope to shape their free time around them. While other characters lead darker lives and lean closer in towards a savage American fury, the kids who go here have a sadness, that melds with a sweaty anxiety about them which feels more authentic to the more popular experience of human life. And yet the ending of this story’s ribboned loop is a collapse that while we don’t get to sit through for as long a time, feels a bit more terminal.
Reading this is like slowly being pulled into a lukewarm fugue, observing humanity in a time-lapse as it toils in an ant farm. The drugs, the harrowing sadness, the sound of cars passing. The sense of the book playing out over a thousand pages (footnotes included) gives the feeling that you may not know when it’s going to come to an end, so the sensation of Floating On takes hold.
End of the day, while I don’t think I liked the story, I adored the writing. While I’m often heavily impressed by minimalism and its ability to sharpen brevity to a fine razor, I am inherently a maximalist, and to see this absolute volume of verbiage before me, illustrating and ruminating on all that lies below the stars of North America while also hyperbolizing the way a quadruple agent’s leg hair protrudes through the pantyhose he is wearing in 4k HDR, while also giving me a full breakdown of how he is thinking back on an ex he spent time with and one of her involuntary mannerisms and the way that it began to make him love her less, I am very deeply invested in this.
Know this: this is not a quirky read. This isn’t “a great dark laugh.” This is stretches of open road that take some endurance, take some attrition to get through. I don’t think I’d recommend this one unless you come upon a copy for super cheap and want to give it a try. This was a book that I’ve long wanted to dive into, and while I don’t think I loved it, I love that I spent every minute that I did with it.
