I read an article the other day that summed up the novels of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo and other comparable writers as nothing but long form essays tagged as "stories". And meant it as a negative thing too. I'll admit I'm not good with making negative criticisms, especially with the form of something. Is the form of anything bad, or just different?
Infinite Jest, Wallace's 1000+ page behemoth (its reputation precedes it; I see no reason writing out its accolades) is the best realization of this story-essay form. It really feels like an essay when you're about half way through: the stories and characters aren't at all connected yet, few things make sense, but the themes Wallace is getting across are matching up, and the direction he's taking the whole thing is already clear even if the direction of the characters isn't.
It took me a little over two months to read
Infinite Jest. Time is precious and anything that takes up two months of someone who hopes he knows this is going to leave a lasting mark. If
Infinite Jest really is more like an essay - and an essay at its barest is a pondering; the reader discovering in the same way the writer did - then a simple good or bad review wouldn't work for it. The reason why every review I can find, despite nearly 20 years since the novel's release, either expresses awe or disappointed and very little else. I loved the book, maybe my favorite, but below isn't a case for that, it's simply an exploration of my scrambled thoughts after reading the novel:
The book opens (and the story chronologically ends) with Hal Incandenza sitting in an office room waiting for his university interview to begin. He's not far off adulthood; a tennis prodigy who grew up at a tennis academy founded by his mother and late father. The interview starts well, Hal's uncle and his coach talking him up to a board of administrators while he remains silent. Eventually these two are sent outside, the administrators wanting to hear from the boy himself. He starts to explain what an interesting guy he is, how he's so much more than a tennis champion; of all the beloved lines from this book, one of the most well known comes in this speech: 'I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it"'. He looks up to see a room of gaping mouthes. No one can understand him, they instead hear his speech as a horrible ear drum shattering noise, and his body appears to flake out like he's having an epileptic fit. He is rushed into a bathroom where an ambulance is called, while the uncle and the coach try to tell everybody he's fine. He too tries to tell everyone he's fine, but no-one can understand him. He's eventually put in an ambulance. The book then jumps back and the story begins.
I've seen people refer to this opening section as a "key" to the rest of the story. It's recommend you go back and read it after completing the novel. When I did just that it helped explain a few story details; this section doesn't suddenly become illuminated though. Nothing suddenly clicks. Like any good pondering, it asks you to ponder it yourself. Wallace is one of
those figures, like Kurt Cobain, who people create wild fandoms over, and worship, because in their work they tackled the dark, depressing depths that most don't go to. Their suicides provide a sort of deranged legitimacy that they were one of
us, one of the people who understood hardships. Yet such things are clear in sections like this too. The place and meaning of Infinite Jest's opening within its wider story is up for debate, the thematic, personal meaning you find in it is an open door for interpretation.
I responded to this section deeply. About having ideas and personality and possible brilliance in your head but not being able to communicate this to anyone else. I've spent conversations being amazed by how someone is so similar to me and yet unable to show that I share the traits I see in them.
IJ is set in the future in the same way
A Clockwork Orange is: it's an author's imagining of a fictional future, yet the year it's set in has already passed (around 2010) and things we left behind in the real 1996 (the book's release) are still in the fictional future (no sign of the internet; films stored on cartridges). But the culture and atmosphere the book is set in is recognizably ours - a culture of image where being knowledgeable or having a high IQ just isn't enough. You have to be able to show it too, and give it a neat presentation. I doubt Wallace was intending to invoke these things when writing, but in novels this ambitious - of which one must look to the Behemoth's Reading List of
Ulysses and
Gravity's Rainbow and
Underworld etc - that are such Smörgåsbords of different ideas, that they just become a kaleidoscope where what you take from the words is as valid and important as any intended meaning. There's a good story in this book, but then there's this other level which makes the story seem secondary: you just let the themes and the ideas wash over you.
IJ could be handed in as a philosophy thesis, but instead it's branded as entertainment (which it surely is).
IJ made me wish people would ask me what the book was about just so I could make some snobbish noise then tell them that it was just too complex to explain, in a voice that said it was more for their benefit than mine. I wouldn't attempt to give more than an outline here. There's three main story threads: Hal Incandenza's time at the tennis academy and his (somewhat complicated) family life, in the build up to the book's opening scene; ex-con Don Gately who, instead of a long jail sentence, has found himself the night manager at a half way house for recovering addicts (of which he is one) and the troubles that mount up from such a job; and two top agents from opposing governments who land in the desert to discuss the building hostility between their respective nations. What connects them together is the existence of a rare and banned video tape titled Infinite Jest that is so entertaining that the viewer doesn't wish to do anything else but keep watching to the point of lying dead in front of their TV screen. Although to say that these stories are connected would falsely advertise an
aha! moment where all characters meet up that never actually comes. Characters and events cross over between stories but everything doesn't slowly merge into one mass entity. One tip for reading the book (beyond the obvious recommendation of using two bookmarks to keep track of the mass of footnotes) is to stop filtering things into what's important to the story and what's not like in a usual novel, and just accept everything adds to what Wallace is trying to say. I've seen lots compare reading
IJ to working through a TV box set. Some episodes will stick out as favorites, some will suck. And you'll be with these characters so long that you'll get to know them in a way most books don't offer - they'll exist in a piece of your psyche after you've finished reading.
Like any good TV series, you'll have a favorite character too. Mine was Don Gately, who Wallace based on a real person he met during his own time in a halfway house and that he wrote to be the moral centre of the book. Following Gately's example, one only has to keep doing the right thing and striving for the right choice, and you'll have good done to you in return. This resonates so strong because going into Gately's backstory, we see what a flawed man he is and the mistakes he's made in the past. This is such a long book that Wallace has the time to go into the back story of everyone and everything. No one is a gleaming white knight the same way no one is pure, total, irredeemable evil. Like in real life. There's more picturesque views of making the right choices and striving to follow set moral codes within literature, just look at Atticus Finch from
To Kill A Mockingbird. Finch is a symbol of perfectness through and through. No wonder kids are taught that book in schools - schools want to give the impossible responsibility of being perfect all the time. Wallace, through Gately, shows this inner quest for goodness but shows how hard such a thing really is. Which probably makes
IJ sound as cold and unforgiving as its grand size and its efficient, precise use of language, although this ignores how gooey and romantic and sentimental Wallace can be. Wallace surely took a cynical view when he looked at the world around him, which only makes it more impressive he was a lot more hopeful than to leave all his characters in a dark, narcissistic void.
It's worth talking about the language - admire Wallace's style or not (I do) his writing is certainly unique. Wallace wrote with a wide vocabulary although never to the point of not being understandable - the famed "challenge" of
IJ comes from the density of the information you're being given. It wasn't until recently, when I was writing few thousand word essays for an English course that I realized how much Wallace mimics the style of academic essays. The clear explanations built on parenthetical after parenthetical; use of full names every time a character is mentioned; the over-informativeness of subject headings. Even Wallace's page long stream-of-conscious ruminations are all grammatically correct. Wallace obviously didn't invent this style but he struck on a private goldmine when he decided to apply it to fiction. And still no-one's imitated his style - because it's such a hard style to write and not make everything sound dry and stale (like every school assigned essay you never bothered to read). Wallace intersperses technical language with 90s American slang - sort of like an isolated intellectual trying to decode 'normal people speak', never making it sound jarring though. The real fun of Wallace's writing in
IJ is that the book is always one step ahead: you start a new section and you'll have to work out who's narrating or why it's important to the story. You're always catching up. Most famed writers prize shorter sentences, quoted lines being quick, snappy pearls of wisdom - Wallace is the opposite: his wisdom, and beauty, coming through in very long sections. This isn't like an insightful speech where you're hit with lots of short quotes that you'll remember and apply yourself, more like a one sided conversation with an old professor passing on wisdom, the general idea of what he's saying to you more important/memorable than the exact wording.
That's
IJ. Well, a really small part of it. It's so long you'll forget so much by the time you get to the end; repeated readings are recommended, and something I'd like to get around to despite the book's mammoth size. My copy of the book (the 10th anniversary edition) has a foreword by Dave Eggers, who says the book's size is part of what draws people to it. That, like other huge books, or bigger-than-usuals works of any medium,
Lawrence of Arabia for example, the interest stems from wanting to see how much a medium can be pushed. In this case, how much effort and creativity and skill a single author can put into a novel. This is true, and it's also true that the size and reputation of the book is why
IJ will likely always be a book that is more talked about than read. I'd rank it on any list of best books but I doubt I'll recommend it to anyone; it's a personal interest you either have or don't have. I almost feel like I could write about it forever: Wallace doesn't provide all the answers, only clues and hints, so you can really interpret and try and "figure out" the book forever, and still not quite have a complete whole. That's the "Infinite" of the title. The "Jest", the joke, is that it's all just entertainment. If you enjoy the book, then its function becomes the same addictive void filler that the killer video tape in the story is. But then again, I'm sure Wallace was the type who would like to think that three years of writing and unimaginable effort on his part creating the book was just one big joke, although anyone who's read it knows it's a lot more than that.
