Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
Like many postmodern works, IJ holds a rather liberal interpretation of "plot" and "narrative"; you'll start out fairly disoriented before things coalesce into a readable form. The story follows three main characters: Hal Incandenza, tennis prodigy at Enfield Tennis Academy and son of brilliant filmmaker Jim Incandenza; Don Gately, former criminal and opioid addict, who now staffs the Ennet House halfway home; and Rémy Marathe, member of the radical Quebecois separatists, the Wheelchair Assassins. They inhabit an America whose president is a germophobic lounge singer, the years are subsidized with corporate product names ("Year of the Whopper", for instance), and five border states have been ceded to Canada as a toxic-waste dump called "The Great Concavity". Into this comes an "Entertainment" of murky origins, a film so entertaining it reduces its watchers to drooling vegetables who only crave more and more.
All this has the potential to be a well of sarcasm, a fuel which expends itself pretty quickly in other novels and leaves its readers (or at least me) wrung-out and irritated. In my review of Gravity's Rainbow I mentioned my irritation with Kurt Vonnegut's later works, after the fire of his rage had burned out and he became comfortable and famous. Snark and smugness are the bugbears of postmodern literature; I was deeply afraid David Foster Wallace would also partake of this unfortunate habit.
Not only that, but Wallace was also famous for his discomfort with the modern entertainment-advertising complex, and this hobbyhorse is played out in Infinite Jest's dystopian future. His obsession with tennis is also a central theme (Wallace was a regionally-ranked junior tennis player as a youth), which seems original only if you hadn't known - as I had - that Wallace wrote about tennis over and over again, in essays of all kinds, all through his literary career. His struggles with drugs and alcohol also burn across the page, the depictions intimate, almost loving. With even a little knowledge of its creator's biography, Infinite Jest comes off a trifle unnerving, like watching Wallace trying to wrestle with himself and his life on paper.
But Wallace takes all these potentially toxic elements and, through a thoughtful, methodical, melancholy, lyrical kind of writing - much like a quiet composer - transforms them into something transcendent. Unlike Pynchon, whose work is a verbose ADHD torrent ultimately empty of meaning (as he no doubt intended it), Wallace is exact, crafting each phrase. You can tell he's a lover of language. His famous footnotes are banished to the back of the book, but are still as entertaining and enlightening as ever. For all his dry intellectuality, he still carries unbelievable compassion for the lowest of the low, inhabiting both the privileged Hal Incandenza and the rough-edged Don Gately. And behind all this there is some hint of a childhood spent in Illinois, an indefinable Midwesternness that haunts his writing. Wallace is no East Coast sophisticate, no matter how hard he tries.
The whole of Infinite Jest is centered around the obsession with entertainment, i.e. stimulation, as an end in itself. Hal, for instance, is a quasi-slave to his sport, a profession which has no inherent meaning other than amusing the masses. The drug addicts at Ennet House are slaves to the entertainment and release provided by their substance of choice. America, in turn, is addicted to its video entertainment, a quasi-Netflix system that predicted the rise of internet television by twenty years. This is framed by a government quite literally obsessed with sanitized experience, whose stated goal, to "Clean up America", involves moving its refuse elsewhere. Everything in this future world is hollow and corporate, a thin veneer covering the rot underneath as ancillary characters (substance abusers to a man) wade through life, always looking for the next big score. Their life-or-death mission is to break through this hollow shell, to find the meaning in life beyond mere entertainment. It's a cliché, yes. Wallace would be the first to admit this. But that was his whole point: cliché is merely truth repeated too often and too carelessly. Like the mantras of AA, they at first seem mindless and shallow, but with contemplation reveal themselves as handrails on the icy cliffside of life.
I speak as much about Wallace as I do his book, but if any novel is intertwined with its author, it's Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace was always a difficult character to pin down. In interviews, like his appearance on Charlie Rose, Wallace comes off as withdrawn and mumbly, his responses monosyllabic and abrupt. He appears both sullen and coy at the same time. His do-rag and shaggy appearance doesn't do him any favors. But then he comes up with the most brilliant, simple remark, and his coyness is transformed into a kind of wisdom. All of a sudden we are looking not at a young punk of a celebrity author, but a true mystic. It's no surprise this man, as a college literature instructor, had a fondness for teaching Dostoevsky - the Russian author's themes of "transcendence of the ordinary" and "salvation through suffering" resonate enormously in Infinite Jest. Everywhere in his life and work, there was a struggle between surface sophistication and deeper truth, the itchiness of a man whose first impulse is toward irony, but forces himself to head-butt his way through the ice of cliché into the depths below.
One of the most poignant features of Infinite Jest is Hal Incandenza, who is nothing if not autobiographical. His boredom, his drug use, his numbness toward his family, his habit (when younger) of loudly showing off his intelligence at the dinner table - it's the desperation of the prodigy. I knew something of this desperation, as a too-smart-for-my-own-good youngster; I recognized immediately the emotional retardation that occurs when a child becomes a trained monkey, spitting out factoids or performing cerebral feats for the entertainment of adults. Having only a fraction of Wallace's formidable intellect, I escaped the worst of the child-star syndrome. In Infinite Jest, Wallace speaks to us as a man who has come through that experience, first of being the wunderkind, then the adult wreck and drug addict, then the older and much wiser man.
(Unfortunately Wallace never shook off his alcohol and drug use, or the crippling depression that plagued him his whole life. He committed suicide in 2008. His last manuscript, The Pale King, was published in 2011).
Infinite Jest isn't perfect. There's an expositional sequence in the middle that simply drags on for much too long, despite its humorous elements. Similarly dragsome is the meeting between Rémy Marathe and secret agent Hugh Steeply, which carries on intermittently for several chapters (more exposition!) before we finally figure out what the hell they're doing. And honestly the background, or "world-building" as we call it in the comics world, seems fascinating for the author and not at all fascinating to the reader - it's a mish-mash of one-off jokes taken too seriously. Wallace should have stuck with getting inside his characters' heads instead of trying to crowbar them into his rather hastily-outlined world.
On the whole, however, Infinite Jest is a surprisingly deep and entertaining read. There were moments - rare for a novel of this type - where I was reduced to senseless guffaws, others that made my jaw drop. David Foster Wallace was a wonder, and will be sorely missed.
Final Verdict: Four out of Five.
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