Fabian's Reviews > Infinite Jest

Anybody who completes THE "Infinite Jest" automatically receives a medal! Really. Just read every single (fuh-cking!) word from beginning til the end, you get an award. & that's what THIS IS, basically. A badge of honor. Bragging rights. A Privilege. The experience which is so much like ogling the Mona Lisa live at the Louvre for the first time: you can already envision her in your mind. & you know what it is, even before you get to stand before it.

The literary equivalent of chasing the magic dragon. Just keeping at something--this being a very complex and cranial novel--like some zombie to get you absolutely nowhere. This is like a more insufferable Beckett in that at least Beckett's implaus-o-ramas have an ending. But here, get ready to get nowhere. Nowhere, not fast, but slowwwly. (Moments of "Eureka! I've found something concrete at last... Finally, a location upon which to hang"--it's all very brief [ha!] and ethereal to grasp. Like some interesting but fleeting aroma.) The main driving force for the reader is to traverse the plot like some intrepid trekker--here, that motivation is eradicated & what we are left with is one fat big juicy "?".

The premise? That we live in a systematic place where components are controlled (by family, substances, life). The back and forth between the school and the rehab embody a game of tennis (emblematic "system" used to symbolize coming-of-age as well as the myriad needlepoint philosophies that go with it). No patterns arise! Yet the reader has (always) his wants. That you don't matter in the enterprise is what ultimately spoils this experience for me. The writer has very consciously tried to build a sturdy monolithic castle from individual grains of dry sand. An impossible endeavor, but it must be witnessed. The things that stick out are the sordid details: the head in the microwave, the shot in the face; the molestation of little boys, of invalids; a hanging fetus.

If you say I.J. is the future of the novel, you definitely haven't read 1936's "Gone with the Wind." Almost a full century old, that tome really justifies its girth (like "Lonesome Dove" & "The Stand" do, like "Don Quixote" & "Les Miserables" eons ago). I understand the allure of this, really, I do, but HOW MANY DIFFERENT WAYS CAN YOU SAY THE EXACT SAME THING? Definitely not in 1088 pages! But maybe eighty-eight.

Bottom line: this novel really gave me a serious case of the "howling fantods."