Infinite Jest.

Today’s Klawchat was heavy on draft questions. I also have a new draft blog post up on UNC third baseman Colin Moran, and a post up on Wil Myers, Jake Odorizzi, and other Durham and Charlotte prospects.

It took just over two weeks, but I finished David Foster Wallace’s sprawling magnum opus Infinite Jest, all 1079 pages of its madness and hysteria. It’s a work of tremendous intelligence, a novel that wants to challenge you to follow its undulations and hairpin turns, and yet a work of great empathy as well with its well-considered meditations on subjects like mental illness or addiction recovery. I doubt I can do this book justice in a blog post, given its depth and breadth, and the sheer number of things I liked or disliked about it.

The plot itself is intricate, looped and non-linear, at times deliberately involuted and interrupted by footnotes that have, unfortunately, become one of the book’s hallmarks. The main plot threads involve Hal Incandenza, a tennis prodigy and heavy marijuana user who has lost the ability to feel emotions; Don Gately, a recovering drug addict and thief who is now one of the staffers at the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (yes, that’s the name); and a mysterious film made by Hal’s father that causes viewers to enter a catatonic state where they lose interest in anything else other than watching the film again. The film loosely ties the first two storylines together, although Wallace avoids any kind of full integration or catharsis, and I’ve read a very compelling argument by the late Aaron Swartz that the book’s actual end is in the beginning. (Smashing Pumpkins would approve.)

The plot strands themselves may not be the point, or at least not the ultimate point, of Infinite Jest, but as springboards for Wallace to provide us with lengthy ruminations on subjects as wide-ranging as depression, addiction, popular culture, environmentalism, and, of course, tennis. Hal lives and studies at the Enfield Tennis Academy founded by his father and his mother, highly dysfunctional individuals who had, until Hal’s father’s suicide, a highly dysfunctional marriage. Hal’s older brother, Orin, wasn’t so hot at tennis but found a calling as an NFL punter, and appears in several passages in which he starts to think he’s being followed by wheelchair-bound fans, unaware that they are in fact a group of wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists who are trying to find a master copy of Incandenza père‘s film. The tennis academy and the halfway house both contain assemblies of colorful side characters, fleshed out in impressive detail over the course of the book (so while the book is too damn long, at least most of the real estate is properly utilized), and are eventually connected by the woman who hosts a radio program at MIT while using the pseudonym “Madame Psychosis,” who also appeared in the mysterious film that the Quebecois separatists are after.

Why are Quebecois separatists so central to the book? Infinite Jest is set in the not-too-distant but clearly dystopian future, where the northern part of New England has become the continent’s garbage dump, about which the Quebecois are none too pleased. That and the seeimingly draconian terms under which Canada entered the new Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N., alluding to this guy) have spurred a number of separatist movements, including the ruthless, violent terrorists on wheels who are after James Incandenza’s film. It’s a bizarre sideplot in a strange book, although the presence of some shadowy force bent on mass destruction is necessary for the central gambit of the Entertainment, the nickname for the film the separatists are hunting.

Speaking of mass destruction, one of the book’s best scenes, filmed by friend of the dish Michael Schur in his video for The Decemberists’ “Calamity Song,” is the game of Eschaton played by the main characters at the tennis academy. Named for a formal term for the religious concept of the “end times,” the game simulates a worldwide military conflict where players represent various nuclear states and stage attacks by hitting tennis balls (lobs, to be specific) at opponents’ targets. The game played in the book devolves into a mess of recriminations and missiles fired at other players, with comically violent results.

The various digressions on more serious subjects, like mental illness and addiction, veer from what we traditionally want or expect in a novel, at least an American novel – it harkens more to the traditions of 19th-century Russian literature than anything more recent. His description of depression, starting on page 695, is absolutely remarkable, describing it as “a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it … a nausea of the cells and soul … lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed.” Much of what Wallace writes about addiction, both in discussion of the addict characters’ experiences and the mind-numbing effects of the mysterious film, foreshadowed more recent advances in our understanding of the neurology of addiction, and why addiction may be best treated as a physical disease rather than a mental or intellectual failure.

Wallace apparently had a prodigious vocabulary – I wrote down about 50 words that I didn’t know but that were common enough to appear in my Kindle’s dictionary (or that weren’t Wallace neologisms) – and also seemed to love wordplay and literary allusions. The book’s title comes from a line in Hamlet, during the title character’s eulogy for Yorick, and Hal is the novel’s Hamlet, the son of a father who took his own life and a faithless mother whose love for her son lacks any actual emotion. This might be a stretch, but I thought Hal’s name might also refer to the antipsychotic drug Haldol, used to treat schizophrenia, given Wallace’s deep knowledge of pharmaceuticals. The pun involved in O.N.A.N.’s name is obvious, as are James Orin Incandenza’s ironic initials (he was a depressive and alcoholic who took his own life). Madame Psychosis is a play on the Greek word “metempsychosis,” meaning transmigration of the soul, while her real name, Joelle van Dyne, sounds like a play on the word “anodyne,” meaning a painkiller or analgesic. Wallace shows an odd obsession with the curvature of characters’ spines, even naming a character Otis Lord (a play on “lordosis,” the inward curvature of the spine at the lower part of your back). He names a town in Arizona “Erythema,” which is actually a skin condition involving red patches on the skin. Many characters, especially the teenagers in the tennis academy, engage in wordplay in their dialogue*, and Wallace makes up his own words and phrases as he goes along, like “novocaine of the soul,” which I assume inspired the Eels song by that name. It doesn’t necessarily make the novel better, but as someone who just loves language and seeing others stretch it and bend it in unusual ways, I found this one of my favorite aspects of the book.

*My favorite is the prank call Hal receives, where another character says, “Mr. Incredenza, this is the Enfield Raw Sewage Commission, and quite frankly we’ve had enough shit out of you.”

Then there was my least favorite aspect, the footnotes, a clear exercise in intellectual masturbation that not only interrupts the novel’s minimal narrative linearity but serves far too often as a way for Wallace to show off. Footnotes can be used well for the sake of humor, as in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or the early Thursday Next novels (where literary characters communicated via footnoterphone), but here they are just Wallace wanking. You can’t get twenty pages into this book without realizing how brilliant Wallace must have been, so why would he try so hard to impress us with these abstruse or esoteric notes? Or, why didn’t anyone discourage him from doing so? Nearly 400 of these notes, some of them lasting several pages and often bearing notes of their own, occupied 12% of the pages in the electronic version I read. That’s an abuse of authorial privilege. The one footnote that was legitimately funny – J.O.I.’s filmography – went on far too long.

I also found Wallace’s vision of the future a distraction from the rest of the book. To raise revenues, the government of O.N.A.N. has sold off naming rights to the years, so we get the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment and the Year of Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems for Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic). Aside from the fact that I got a giggle from saying “Yushityu” in my head, this isn’t terribly funny the first time around, and gives little or nothing to the reader in the way of a forecast for or description of this future era. The characters’ quotidian lives are largely unchanged from today – Wallace’s vision of downloadable video content isn’t far off from how we view content via Netflix or iTunes right now – and much of this dystopian stuff is about as relevant to the plot as wallpaper. Again, Wallace shows off his creativity, but someone should have helped him edit this down to size.

Most of the book takes place in Boston, in the fictional town of Enfield that sounds a lot like Brighton, which means that current and former Boston residents get a few bonuses in the book. My favorite was the description of Bread & Circus, a high-end grocery chain bought some time ago by Whole Foods:

Bread & Circus is a socially hyperresponsible overpriced grocery full of the Cambridge Green Party granola-crunchers, and everything’s like microbiotic and fertilized only with organic genuine llama-shit, etc.

Other than Enfield itself, Wallace used real place names, street names, even a church in Brighton (St. Columbkill’s) that I used to pass every time I went to see a game at Boston College. It’s nice to know that even in his alternate-history version of Boston’s future, Storow Drive is still a nightmare.

Where Infinite Jest succeeded over Gravity’s Rainbow and The Recognitions, two fairly obvious influences, is in readability. As long as the book is, as long as Wallace’s paragraphs and sentences can be, there was never a point where I got bogged down in the prose or story, and never a point where I felt like I had to force myself to continue reading. The writing is bright if not crisp, the imagery is strong, there is a lot of humor within the book’s thousand pages, and the characters are so well-developed that even a tangential story will pull you along. I can’t think of another book that has so many characters crafted with this kind of care and given this kind of screen time to tell their backstories or to play a significant role in the novel’s plot. I was never as invested in either of those other two novels, which were similarly long, intelligent, and wilfully abstruse, as I was in Infinite Jest.

This also concludes my journey through the All-TIME 100 Novels list.

Next up: William Alexander’s bread-baking memoir: 52 Loaves: One Man’s Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust.

Comments

  1. Keith,

    I’m a little surprised you’ve dismissed the footnotes as a means for Wallace to show off how smart he is, especially given how many idiots have used this lazy ad hominem against you.

    Maybe it comes across differently in the e-book, but I found the footnotes put to good use here. When he’s giving the chemical name for a generic drug, he’s not trying to show that he “knows” that (any author with a pharmacist’s guide at his side could do the same thing). It’s a reinforcement of the chemical nature of the ailments these drugs are there to treat, and in general a useful punctuation when you’re slogging through a 1,200 age book – at least it felt that way tackling it in hard copy.

    I thought the footnote on the legless separatists’ history was one of the funnier parts of the book, too. Eschaton was definitely my favorite, though, and one of the funniest 20 pages in any novel I’ve ever read.

  2. Any intent in releasing a review of a book about (among many things)a heavy marijuana user on 4/20? Also I’ve attempted this book before and only gotten about 100 pages in. This review makes me want to start over and push through it.

  3. The biographical books that have been released since DFW’s suicide are fascinating. I found knowing more about who he was as a person added even more color to his work. I’m not sure how much you know about him, but there are brief interviews out there on the internet (Charlie Rose, etc.) that provide a decent picture.

  4. Keith,
    Any theory on why Hal went catatonic? Some suggest he watched the entertainment, others think his toothbrush was used to poison him.

  5. Nevermind, that Swartz article explains it really well.

  6. KLAW,

    DFW is on the record saying–somewhere I can’t put my hands on it–that the endnotes were meant to purposely disturb the reader’s flow through the story. As you can imagine, reading the print edition required two bookmarks, turning back and forth and constantly losing and finding your place. This tactile and sensory experience was supposed to play into and enhance the book’s already fractured narrative.

    Thanks!

    JPG

  7. The funniest prediction of the future in IJ is Wallace’s take on video chat. Nailed why we hate it.

  8. Gonna have to disagree that the endnotes are never entertaining or funny outside of the filmography. Two of my favorite extended passages in the whole book, Pemulis dictating mathematical theory to Hal and the long phone conversation between Hal and Orin, took place entirely in the endnotes. But of course a lot of this was Hal being by far my favorite character and my favorite parts of the book being him riffing off other people.

    I will agree that to some extent the flipping back and forth can grow tiresome, but it’s really not that bad if you have two bookmarks (and presumably is even easier on a e-reader, although I read the book before those were a thing), and I’m willing to buy DFW’s explanation that he was intentionally trying to make the novel feel more fractured.

  9. I’ve also heard that flipping back and forth is supposed to resemble the playing of a point in tennis–back and forth.

  10. said it on twitter but want to reiterate – re-reading the first 80ish pages after finishing the book totally changed my appreciation for it (just happened I finished it while on an airplane). The whole annular fusion thing is writ into the structure of the novel – cyclical – Don Gately appears in the first scene, digging up James Incadenza’s head, which makes no sense when you start but provides an interesting section of the loop. We’re still not ‘seeing’ parts of the plot – we can only see part of the cycle, but you begin to get an overall sketch. Gravity’s Rainbow similarly repeated thematic elements of the novel in its structure – the plot of GR actually replicates the parabola of the V2 rocket -we only see the elements of the parabola in the air, but it actually continues in two directions extending into infinity.

  11. I’ve seen the explanations that the back-and-forth is supposed to break up the linearity and resemble a tennis match. Those may be true but made the reading experience far less pleasant for me.

    @Dan: Yes, I saw that and it drove me to look online for some explanations. Much appreciated.

    @Ronaldo: I’m blanking on the separatists’ history footnote. I found them incredibly distracting to read, like I had to put one call on hold, then talk to someone else for 20 minutes, then go back to the original call like nothing had happened.

    @Sam: No intent there. I actually posted this late on the 19th anyway.

  12. Keith,

    I have this book in both physical copy and electronically on my kindle. Was it easy to just back and forth with the footnotes on the kindle?

  13. Keith, I also loved the Eschaton sequence. Although, in some ways, it encapsulated the things I hated then loved about this book. As the scene unfolded, I plodded through thinking OH MY GOD WHEN IS THIS GOING TO END IS THIS SERIOUSLY NECESSARY? I had the same caps lock thought during the first protracted description of Boston AA, and the annual screening of Mario’s Independence Day film. But I eventually forgot about how exasperated I was and soaked up Wallace’s world and loved these scenes so much (especially Eschaton and Mario’s film).

    I’m glad you mentioned Aaron Swartz’s synopsis of the book. The instant I finished reading IJ, I combed the internet for people’s impressions of the book. His was one of the most compelling, even if I didn’t fully comprehend or agree with it. But it was within a day or so of his death, and it was a sad bit of timing on my part. I know that Swartz’s life work went WAY beyond his review of this book (and he did WAY more important things), but it was particularly affecting to be reading his thesis, considering the themes explored by Wallace, and his own tragic story.

    Were you tempted to read the book again after finishing it (as insane as that would be)? I know I was, and certainly felt like the book itself was something like the Entertainment; an unending, fatal loop.

  14. James Hallock

    Hey Keith…excellent review. I do have to say that I was anxious to see what you had to say, as I have fairly similar feelings about the books you have reviewed (particularly Gravity’s Rainbow..and White Noise..the “post-modern stuff”. My anxiety stemmed from the fact that this is my favorite novel ever. I have read it twice (3rd time coming this fall!) and it moved in a way that I hadn’t been moved since reading LOTR as a 9 year old. (For different reasons obviously) I found it a little disappointing that you didn’t mention Hal’s brother Mario, who is not only one of the most beautiful Characters ever, but also a seems to be the positive side of his feelings on humanity, born ugly on the outside, but full of hope and possibility (of course he serves several other purposes and there plenty of other characters that represent the negative aspects of humanity…plus DFW in ALL his works seems to have a fetish for deformed outside/beautiful inside & beautiful outside/horrible inside people in his fiction). Have you noticed my love for parenthetical asides? Anyway, I think you gave the footnotes short shift, as I went from being annoyed by them, to looking forward to them in a short time. The story of how the Quebec assassins lost their legs was great, as was the interview with(Spoiler alert?) Helen/Hugh Steeply and Orin.
    On a different note I just wanted to let you know that you have had a major effect on me in the last 18 months or so. I believe I read you were from Smithtown NY. So am I, and having battled depression and suicidal thoughts for sometime (I am not in a dangerous place anymore) you, being around my age, and a huge baseball and lit fan have been someone who has brought a lot hope and joy to me. Just wanted to thank you for that. Keep doing what your doing, it means a lot to some of us :0)
    (Oh one question you don’t have to answer if it’s too personal….did you go to private or public school on the Island, and if so..which one [high school])?

  15. @James: Smithtown East, class of 1990. I was a year behind Jim Mecir, and two ahead of Frank Catalanotto, but whatever was in the water that produced big leaguers seemed to have skipped over my block. I’m very grateful to you for sharing your own experiences with me like that and am glad I was able to help in some small way. It sounds like you’ve gotten some kind of treatment and I’m happy to hear you’re in a better spot now.

  16. James Hallock

    Hey Keith, just wanted to thank you for taking the time to respond. Very nice gesture on your part. You graduated before the “Big Combining” of East & West huh? I was a Smithtown West kid until the schools combined in 92-93. Graduated in ’94. There was nothing in the water on that side of town producing MLB talent. (I grew up right by St. Patrick’s Church) Our sports teams were generally awful (with the exception of girls volleyball…we OWNED in that sport) Knowing your a food a guy, and growing up on LI, I imagine you ate a lot of pizza as a kid…. did you have a favorite pizza joint? Everyone loved Patio Pizza (which I liked), but Carlos was my fave. I know your busy, and if you don’t have time to answer no worries. Thanks again for doing what you do. I will be reading!

  17. Then you graduated with my sister. We grew up eating matt’s pizza in Nesconset, although I think patio was just as good.

  18. James Hallock

    Indeed I did! Never made that connection. Small world. Again, I just wanted to thank you for doing what you do. If your ever coming to a ’51’s game I would love to say hi and thank you as I attend a few games a year(I realize your probably working if your there so I don’t actually expect you to take me up on that). It was very cool of you to take the time to respond. One other thing before I stop bothering you… Did Gravity’s Rainbow sour you on Pynchon for good? I hated it as well, but really enjoyed V. If you are inclined to give him another shot, that is where I would go. Thanks again Keith.

  19. How was reading a book this footnote heavy on the Kindle? Did you read it on a Kindle proper or on the iPad app? I love my Kindle but I bought Infinite Jest to reread because I thought it would be a pain going back and forth to the footnotes on the Kindle.