Tom Quinn's Reviews > Infinite Jest

Muffled thumping, light feedback. 'Mmmyellow, my name is Tom and I've read Infinite Jest eight times.'

Gasps, murmurs of sympathy mixed with disapproval. The chair nods. 'Step One is admitting the problem. We're glad you're here.'

'Problem? No no, see, I'm just here to borrow your PA system. New shit has come to light- if you'll turn to page 851 the first-person narrative resumes to answer page 17's "yo man what's your story"' speaking faster as several unexpectedly burly group members rise and advance toward the podium 'and you can tell Hal doesn't drop DMZ because' muffled thumps, sounds of struggle '--a series of people laying in bed! The ceilings always billow, all of them!' grunts, heavy breaths, microphone squeals '--everyone's story is pretty much like your own! They're all heroes of non-action! Re-read endnote twenty-fo--' mic is cut


*

I was going to make a cheeky post about how the best way to enjoy Infinite Jest is to be a white cishet American male born between maybe 1969 and 1989 with one or more diagnosable mental disorders plus personal experience with substance abuse and who remembers when VHS tape rewinders were peak technology. But in fact the best way to enjoy Infinite Jest is right there in the title: just read it over, and over, and over again...

(all that other stuff helps plenty, though)

SEVENTH READTHROUGH REVIEW:
(view spoiler)[ME2ME, A 5 A.M. CONVERSATION

-You're going to read it again?
-Ugh, I don't even want to. But yes.
-What the hell for?
-I was thinking: if I read it 8 times then an 8 is a sideways infinity and that's even in the book so, like, what a reference, what an homage, right?
-But this would be 7 times.
-Right. Well, then, just one more after that.
-...
-...
-...
-I need more Don Gately.
-...Yeah, me too. I'm in. (hide spoiler)]


Around halfway through endnote 90 (which itself is 4 pages long) Don Gately says: "It makes me feel good you think I'm decent to talk to. That's supposed to be why I'm here. I sure needed to talk, at the start. Can you remember where you were headed before I broke i— interrupted?" (1001)

This is arguably what passes for a joke in Infinite Jest.

See, Gately is a reformed thief who used to burglarize houses to support his drug habit. So when he starts to say "before I broke in" he catches himself and corrects it to "interrupted."

This quote-unquote joke I did not catch until my fifth reading of the monster that is Infinite Jest.

It's the kind of thing that could well polarize your readers.

5 stars out of 5. I'll talk your ear off about this one if given half a chance.


MY FIRST REVIEW, JANUARY 2016:
(view spoiler)[
There are books and then there are BOOKS.

Once I told a friend that my mom's favorite book was "Atlas Shrugged" and my friend said she was just trying to impress me with page count. Some might feel the same about "Infinite Jest", which boasts 1079 pages (981 of prose and the remaining 98 all footnotes). It's experimental, it's self-aware, and it's complex. Or it's not complex so much as detailed. Overdetailed. Hyperdetailed. But it's also apologetic, like the author knows he's got something really important to say and he's just so terribly sorry to bother you with it in this way. Maybe knowing that the writer later killed himself colors my opinion, but the whole book is infused with gravitas. There are scenes full of energy and others that are boring in their normalcy, yet it's all described in baroque intricacy that makes the mundane seem powerfully important.

"Infinite Jest" is the story of Hal Incandenza, a teenage tennis prodigy from an affluent Massachusetts family, who briefly visits an addicts' halfway house. It's also the story of Don Gately, a reformed thief who finds an unpleasant but effective recovery through the same house's 12-step programs and becomes a hero in the process. It's also also the story of a secret short film so addictively entertaining that anyone who watches it dies, slowly wasting away as they freeze catatonic and unable to turn it off. And it's also also also about all the context in between and around and behind all that, like the recent war that forced all the North American countries to merge, and the way Hal's father killed himself after filming the film in question, and the Canadian wheelchair assassin squad seeking to find the master copy so they can weaponize it.

"Infinite Jest" reminds us of what words can do, what books can be, what serious-literature-as-art looks like. I admit, I had to turn to the Internet early on to search for some clarification. But even that foray into cyberspace felt right, like the text was only enhanced as time moved us all ahead into a fully digital age. It's all part of the experience, and "Infinite Jest" is absolutely that: an experience. Anyone who has finished it seems to remember where they were when they did, sometimes if only because of all the other things they weren't able to do because they spent so much time reading it. My copy comes with an introduction by Dave Eggers who compares it to exercise, and that's a very apt comparison. Reading it is like flexing your brain muscles. It's not quite like lifting weights but rather more like posing in front of the mirror and thinking "I look good."

I admit also that I skimmed some sections. I skimmed much of the minutiae of the tennis academy routines. I skimmed the plodding Eschaton games. I skimmed the goofy puppet show film and the political farce of how O.N.A.N. got set up. These are worldbuilding scenes bloated out of control, methodical and tiresome and pretty damn boring. And the phone conversations between Hal and Orin? Please. Nobody talks like that.

On the other hand, I was riveted by the scenes in the addicts' house and at the Boston AA meetings. And I was transfixed by the delightful passages with Lyle, the locker room guru who maybe can hover and gives out sage advice to troubled teens at the tennis academy. And I laughed out loud when I read about the feral hamsters breeding in the nuclear wastes, among other things. The prose could surely benefit from a trim, a couple pages here or a dozen there to help speed the narrative along. And those footnotes aren't particularly illuminating; I stopped checking them very early on and my understanding didn't suffer any. Maybe this is all an artistic choice—if the book is truly about life in America and how we're all escapists trying to endlessly entertain ourselves to distract from the unpleasant thought of our inevitable death, as the critical consensus appears to be, then these long stretches of dull text must reflect a singular truth about living in reality: there's plenty of parts of life itself we'd love to skip over, right? But we can't. We are bound to continue on forwards one minute at a time.

So, in the end, what to say? Is it perfect? Well, no. But it is dramatic and perception-altering and significant. The depictions of addiction and depression resonate deeply. It is absolutely touching and Very Important. But it's not easy, and I don't know that it's very re-readable, even though a second reading is strongly encouraged as the ending loops right back around to the beginning a la "Finnegan's Wake". You could just keep reading through and starting over and jumping right back down the rabbit hole, as it were, which is very appropriate given the exploration of addiction and the symbolism of the mystery movie.

2 of 5 as a work of entertainment, 5 of 5 as a work of art, and thus 4 of 5 stars from me overall.

* * *

OK, OK! Amended six months later, on 5/9/2016. 

I've thought about this book more than any other. I've read critiques of it and watched movies based on it and speculated upon it and legitimately thought "If you want to 'get' me you've got to read 'Infinite Jest'."

It pops into my consciousness every couple of days or so, and if that isn't what makes a 5 star book then I don't know what does. 5 stars out of 5. It's something else!
(hide spoiler)]
SECOND READTHROUGH REVIEW:
(view spoiler)[
Infinite Jest is like a persistent earworm, a song that you just can't get out of your head. And but so I had to read it a second time, not even a full year after my first go-round.

In all honesty, I fear for the future of this book. Will it seem hopelessly dated in another few decades, with its quaint cartridge-based media and its 1990s "TV rots your brain" fears? I hope not. I think there's enough universal human truth to serve as a foundation upon which the rest can sit. But if hard-pressed, I would have to admit that IJ may not deserve a spot in the fabled Canon Of Great Works. Maybe it's not Great, maybe it's merely Very Very Good. And yet, it stands apart as unique, as an exceptionally well-crafted piece of art (I daresay even Art, with a capital A). Every detail is balanced and counterweighted with exacting precision and care. It's not just long for the hell of it.

This is DFW's great trick: to write a novel so lengthy that it encompasses and mimics several distinct experiences. There's the "everyday life" experience of finding great detail in the minutae of everyday living. There's the mimicry of the high-def films that JOI supposedly composed, with great depth of focus in each scene. There's the experience of the recovering addict, the "huge slabs of glacial time" that Gately now experiences, counting seconds as they tick by. There's the giddy thrill of occasional spurts of action, of a mystery that never quite comes together. And there's the dizzying array of seemingly endless interconnections between tragically lonely people who don't actually connect and yet whose narratives overlap and cascade in unforseeable ways.

So, were I to stand IJ up in relation to every other Great Western Novel, I'd get self-conscious and give it a 4. But this book has become a part of me, has articulated experiences and feelings that I've had in a way that is almost painfully beautiful, and challenges my way of thinking not only while reading but afterwards.

5 stars. (hide spoiler)]
FOURTH READTHROUGH REVIEW
(view spoiler)[

"...little more than an olla podrida of depressive conceits strung together with flashy lensmanship and perspectival novelty." (791)

"...the complete unfiguranted egalitarian aural realism was why party-line entertainment-critics always complained that the wraith's entertainments' public-area scenes were always incredibly dull and self-conscious and irritating, that they could never hear the really meaningful central narrative conversations for all the unfiltered babble of the peripheral crowd, which they assumed the babble(/babel) was some self-conscious viewer-hostile heavy-art directorial pose, instead of radical realism." (836)

This is my fourth reading of Infinite Jest and I'm very pleased to say I've come to a fuller and more satisfying understanding of both the key plot points and the thematic interrelation of the various strands and settings. I think I can satisfactorily say who the narrator is, who sent out the Entertainment cartridges and why, and what happened to Hal in the end that left him incapacitated in the opening section – although for each of these questions there is still a tantalizing ambiguity that obscures any real, firm answers. I think I can express how this is a modern retelling (and arguably inversion) of Hamlet. I think I can fully grok the parallels between competitive athleticism, political fanaticism, and drug addiction/recovery. I think I can appreciate how self-referential and sly winking jokes like Himself's filmography and Found Drama and annular fusion and endnotes within endnotes are both the ultimate manifestation of and the jumping-off point for moving past Postmodernism and its alleged toxic effect on meaningful human contact. To get to this point I had to read the text three times through, listen to it once as an audiobook, and spend hours and hours reading critical analyses and online community reader responses. But what's amazing is how much I enjoyed doing this, spending so much time with this book as a personal mission and a source of entertainment and a means of enlightenment through literary critique. I am not exaggerating when I say that Infinite Jest inspired me to be a better person, challenged me to identify areas of my life in which I had grown complacent, and turned me into a rabid convert who will evangelize its worth to anybody willing to listen.

But I think I understand why people dislike this book. Despite its reputation as a comedy, it's not especially funny, really, and in fact often seems designed to be joyless. The humor that is on display is what we'd call "gallows humor" and it's delivered in dense, maximalist prose. Everybody knows that brevity is the soul of wit and the best jokes are often one-liners or come in a quick setup/punchline delivery. Here we've got the opposite: long-winded, over-detailed, extremely analytical buildups to a punchline that's either passed by quickly or buried within a long explanation full of caveats, clarifications, and trivia. So you're not often going to laugh, really—maybe some smirks and at best a chortle but not a lot of knee-slapping.

And for all the really truly excellent passages (the history of videophony, "Tennis and the Feral Prodigy," the M*A*S*H-inspired downward spiral of Steepley's father, Clipperton's Glock, JOI's father's drunken rambling garage-set monologue, the redemption of Barry Loach) there are some really truly not excellent passages, too. Stuff that seems experimental in an unrefined college undergrad kind of way ("Here is a list of things that are blue," the wince-and-cringe faux-ebonics of "Wardine be cry," the too long and too cribbed-from-an-urban-legend email chain about a bricklayer's accident). Some of these post-modern-type experimental prose formats do not hang well together, and give the text a choppy feel. Supposedly this was DFW's intent—but we give him a lot of leeway on intent, I think, often apologizing for things that actually weren't 100% successful in their execution. The "yrstruly" section gets my vote for worst offender here.

Plus, there are a lot of shocking and backward-seeming tendencies on display that will doubtless ostracize non-white, non-straight, non-male readers. The casual use of "faggy" as an insult and the one-dimensionality of any of the gay characters, the "big man in unconvincing drag" running joke. The peppering of racial slurs and stereotyping. These are not enlightened views and they don't hold up under scrutiny as attempting to satirize or shock for the purpose of social change. I think DFW just thought that stuff was funny, in an immature way. And yeah, I'll give him a bit of slack since that really was the way people talked in the 90's and in particular in Boston which is hardly a hotbed of tolerance or acceptance. But I really think that these traits work against the book's reputation in the long-term and mark it as a period piece. I bet DFW would regret these race and gender elements in particular and revise them heavily, if not excise them completely, were he writing it today. Because for such an important message as how difficult it is to truly communicate and how valuable empathy is in human relations, you can't display such wanton ignorance and expect to get through to people. We've also got the troubling issue of Wallace's real-life actions being far from model behavior—he was at best an asshole and at worst a criminal stalker—and whether that undercuts his message here, especially since he seemed to be striving to pour himself into this work and shatter the standard literary critic's conception of the Intentional Fallacy as a sacred cow of sorts.

For me, this is still a 5 star book. But it emphasizes the "for me" aspect of any experience, and I can appreciate where it falls flat or fails to be accessible to contemporary audiences. For me, I'm extremely glad I've read it and chewed on it so aggressively. Maybe now, having wrestled and danced with it so long, I can put the book aside for a while and go out and do what it's really exhorting us to do: live life, don't just watch it.
(hide spoiler)]
SIXTH READTHROUGH REVIEW
(view spoiler)[
Never have I ever disliked so much a book I enjoy, nor for that matter so enjoyed such a dislikable book. (hide spoiler)]