Julie Ehlers's Reviews > Infinite Jest

It's now been more than two years since I began Infinite Jest and about 10 months since I finished it. In all that time, the scene that has stuck with me the most is one where a character, attempting to go to a 12-step meeting for a drug addiction, goes astray and ends up at what is actually a "men's movement" meeting. A relic of the 1990s, the men's movement was a chance for men to get together and show their sensitive sides to one another, or allow their inner warriors or their inner children to commune with each other, or some such thing—it was short-lived and I can't quite remember what its exact aim was. The joke is that it takes a while for the main character to figure out where he's ended up, but as the men take turns speaking, eventually the horror of the situation slowly dawns on him. Why this scene has stuck with me, I don't know—it's dated, it's trying way too hard to be funny, and it's got nothing to do with much of anything.

On the other hand, perhaps it's a perfect encapsulation of Infinite Jest itself, which, by and large, is dated, trying way too hard to be funny, and has nothing to do with much of anything.

As you may know, Infinite Jest has three storylines. One concerns a videotape (or "cartridge") that so addicts viewers that they can't stop watching it and, unable to do any of the things people normally do to stay alive, eventually perish. The master of this videotape is being sought by both U.S. government agencies and terrorist organizations. The second storyline concerns some kids at a tennis academy; the father of two of these kids, a famous filmmaker, is the creator of the aforementioned addictive cartridge. The third concerns a residential drug-rehab center near the tennis academy, one resident of which, Don Gately, could be considered the heart and soul of the book.

These three storylines do connect in some ways, and all of them have the potential to be interesting. But unfortunately, very little of the book lives up to this potential. Most of the scenes concerning the cartridge are tedious and repetitive. Most of the scenes concerning the tennis academy are tedious, although not quite as repetitive. Generally the only interesting scenes are the ones that involve Don Gately and the rehab center. Interspersed among all of these storylines are many, many tangents involving other minor characters; some of these scenes are interesting, most aren't, and all of them slow down the main stories. Also slowing down the main stories are the copious endnotes, which frequently force the narrative to come to a screeching halt, often for no good reason. In a way, it's a perfect book for people with no attention span, so perhaps DFW actually foresaw how the internet would lead to most of our reading being done in interruptive fragments. Unfortunately, this particular insight, if accurate, absolutely did not make the book any less exasperating to read.

The odd structure of Infinite Jest made me very curious about its editing process, so after I was finally done I picked up the DFW biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, where I learned that there was essentially no editing process for this book. DFW seemed to throw in every idea and bit of writing he'd ever had, adding up to hundreds and hundreds of pages, and his editor simply did his best to keep the book to a manageable length. Given that Infinite Jest is nearly 1100 pages including endnotes, I'd say the editor barely succeeded at that goal. What's more, the storylines don't really cohere and eventually—again, after many, many pages—just kind of fizzle out. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story attempted to explain the book's structure, such as it is, and I'm going to try to paraphrase as well as I can: Picture a map of a state with all the counties marked. One county is a particular scene in the book. The book next travels to an adjacent county/scene, which has some connection to the first but is its own separate thing. Then the book travels to another adjacent county/scene, and so on. So all the counties/scenes are connected to at least one additional county/scene, but obviously there's not only no linearity here; there's no cohesive narrative in any way. Most themes, characters, and situations don't go back and make any of the connections you might hope for. Which might be OK if every county was a worthwhile place to be in, but that's not the case. Out of nearly 1100 pages, I would say maybe 300 or 400 are worth reading. Do the math and figure out if you've got that kind of time.

As I mentioned, the best parts of the book, for me and, it seems, for many other readers, are the scenes with Don Gately in the rehab center. There is a lot of wisdom about addictions dispensed here, and it's mostly riveting stuff. I assumed this was DFW sharing what he'd learned when he himself was in a similar rehab, but I turned out to be wrong—per Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, Don Gately was actually based on someone DFW knew in rehab, and Gately's wisdom comes courtesy of this real person, who was none too pleased to learn that DFW had used him in this way. So some of the best parts of the book didn't really come from its author's own imagination or thought process, but rather from a powerless, disenfranchised, working-class person DFW cribbed off of. As you might imagine, learning this did little to increase my esteem for Infinite Jest.

This book is ambitious, for sure, but not ambitious enough. As other reviewers have noted, all of the characters, regardless of age, education, or background, sound pretty much the same. They sometimes use the same language, even when they've never met each other before—for a while everyone was saying "diddled," for example, and then later on everyone was saying "dickied," then, if I recall correctly, "kertwang." I have no idea if this was intentional or just lazy, but it certainly read as the latter to me. The language is also often exceedingly juvenile (the acronym "ONAN," for example, or a Japanese manufacturer called "Yushitu"). DFW also has a fondness for tweaking well-known expressions, so, for instance, "under the table" becomes "sub-table" and "upwardly mobile" becomes "mobilely upward." It's entirely possible this sort of thing seemed more clever back in the 1990s.

The upshot is that instead of a really good 400-page book that the author had worked hard on revising and improving, we have a behemoth that can't stay focused on anything long enough to make a true impact. Oddly, DFW seems to realize this: Several times he includes a telling line or two. When considering the famous filmmaker's oeuvre, one character muses, "Technically gorgeous.... But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness—no narrative movement toward a real story.... like a very smart person conversing with himself." Or this line, regarding a random character who appears for a moment: "the girl had a terrible time ever separating details from what was really important to a story." Or this one, about the filmmaker's work again: "is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film's audience... aroused for some theoretical aesthetic end, or is Himself [the filmmaker] simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff?"

Indeed. That DFW seems to recognize these shortcomings in his own work, and actually include them in the narrative, is kind of cute and clever, I guess. But what would have been really great is if he'd actually addressed those shortcomings and come up with a book that was worthy of both his own obvious talents AND the reader's time and investment. Instead what we have is a novelist who insists on getting in his own way over and over again, and a missed opportunity as gargantuan as is the novel itself.