Leonard Gaya's Reviews > Infinite Jest

Reading Infinite Jest feels a bit like when you’ve had some friends over for dinner, you’ve all had a jolly good time, it’s getting a bit late though, the guests are leaving one after the other, and but there is this one guy, a brilliant guy, a bit of a show-off, to be honest, a kind of beefy guy you wouldn’t want to mess up with too much, and, above all, a horrifyingly garrulous guy. And he is lying there on your couch, slowly but steadily draining your liquor cabinet, and droning on and on, and oh! but it’s already 4 a.m., and everyone else is long gone, and he is still there telling all sorts of rambling anecdotes you can’t make head nor tail of, so but then at some point your eyes start itching like real bad and he’s babbling and pouring himself another glass of Wild Turkey, and at length, you accidentally drift off and, as you suddenly jump back and open your eyes, the guy is still relentlessly talking, the tide in your drink cabinet is “way out”, and meanwhile, you realise rosy-fingered Dawn is rising across your dead-bottles-littered living room... And but then, right at that moment, out of the blue, in the middle of his sentence, that conversationalist from hell glances at his watch, mumbles something about it being already 1079h or some such, gets up, grabs his coat and leaves. And so but so you realise you really need a fucking shower.

Now in all earnestness, Infinite Jest is a pretty beefy beast. And it’s not just a matter of length (just about one thousand densely-laid-out pages + another thick, even tighter cushion of endnotes). The material, the style, the composition are a challenge to the reader as well. It is quite clear that David Foster Wallace is insanely talented and capable of pulling out all the stops literary-wise: a variety of styles and speech patterns and dialects, unearthly situations, deeply layered characters, several-pages-long sentences that still manage to make sense and remain grammatically sound, a blend of casual phrasing and hyper-scholarly pedantic jargon and neologisms, bits and bobs of French (in fact, French-sounding but laced with blunders and mostly borderline gibberish), sudden left turns from hilarious to grotesque to horrifying, and the list goes on.

On the other hand, Infinite Jest is in toto and quite literally a puzzling novel — a giant 1,000 piece jigsaw with missing bits. It seems as if DWF had been writing this monster haphazardly, throwing one scene after the next on paper, all over the map, introducing one character after another, without much consideration for any form of consistency or reason or storytelling technique or quite knowing what he was doing. As if he had been throwing stuff against the wall to see what would stick, and in the end, just left everything in (allegedly, he removed some 600 pages from the initial manuscript before publication, but still!). As a result, the book is rhapsodic, bloated, and seems to display a disjointed and sometimes irritating and gratuitous series of vignettes, anecdotes, dreams, hallucinations, esoteric digressions, silly acronyms and endnotes, winks to Homer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky and Joyce and Nabokov and Pynchon and Bazin and Deleuze and Scorsese and Lynch. In other words, a jumble of bits and pieces of attempts that, in some cases, would and, in others, wouldn’t adhere so much to the rest of the picture. In essence, perhaps, a “stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit” (p. 911)? This holds even to the very end, which doesn’t provide any sense of closure or resolution or Gestalt. The novel ends in medias res, as abruptly and randomly as it started. In other words, it doesn’t end.

So, for the most part, the readers of this sprawling and baroque novel are expected to hone their understanding and piece all this material together into something that might make some sense. As the narrator puts it at some point (talking about something else), Infinite Jest sometimes feels to have “no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience” (p. 740). But in the end, and as a result of the sheer length and complicated, disorderly structure, they might find that, although their patience has been tried to the nth degree, there is still a sort of power of accretion which, for want of producing a proper story, does indeed paint the picture of a whole epoch: our time.

Infinite Jest is an insane form of speculative fiction. The story takes place in some trippy dystopian alternate reality, where North America has become one single country, governed by a halfwitted show-business-celebrity president (rings a bell?), where mindless consumerism is rampant — even the Gregorian calendar and the Statue of Liberty have become ad spaces — and massive amounts of toxic rubbish and radioactive pollution are catapulted into a large chunk of territory to the N-E Appalachian Mountains, turned into a giant Chernobyl-like landfill. It is also a book featuring (among other things): the daily life of a bunch of kids at an upscale Tennis Academy, a multi-generational family saga (the Incandenzas — compare to, say, the Buendías in One Hundred Years of Solitude), a series of wrecks at a drug and alcohol rehab centre, and a group of French-Canadian terrorists.

Most characters in Infinite Jest seem utterly miserable, suicidal, damaged, depressed, obsessed, lonely, lost. The book is also, in a way, an existential study about the struggle of being human in our postmodern reality. But in my view, at the core, Infinite Jest is a book about addiction and its devastating effects. That is addiction in all imaginable forms and shapes: drugs, alcohol, sex, success, mindless entertainment, so on. One of the central and most fascinating threads in this novel is about a movie that is so very entertaining and compelling that anyone who starts watching it won’t be able to stop watching it again, on a loop, to death — the wild dream of any media and entertainment tycoon, no doubt. Incidentally, that movie is titled Infinite Jest.

In a way, Infinite Jest (the movie within the novel) illustrates the most extreme version of addiction. Infinite Jest (the book), on the other hand, is a stark satire of a society that has become the slave of cheap and mind-numbing, soul-destroying pleasures, force-fed to everyone by a capitalist system that pretends to bring happiness to humankind but is in actuality driven to endless consumerism only.

And so, Infinite Jest is ultimately a book about literature as a form of art and as an industry. Infinite Jest (the novel) is radically, obsessively antiformulaic, “anticonfluential” (to use one of the narrator’s terms); it doesn’t pretend, doesn’t try to provide, even denies the reader any form of low-grade, profit-oriented, passivity-inducing, addiction-inducing literary pleasure. In short, Infinite Jest (the novel) is the direct opposite of Infinite Jest (the movie within the novel).

Ironically though, the book’s publication was intensely marketed and hyped in the US (as a comedy, mind you, which cannot be further from the truth!); it has become, in most English-speaking countries, especially since DFW sadly “eliminated his own map”, a cult bestseller of sorts.