Infinite Jest

My major reading project over my recent holiday was Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. This is a book I have been contemplating reading for many years, but always thought would be difficult and pretentious. Instead it kind of obsessed me.

This post has mostly been written while in transit while on my way home, an epic 26 hour journey conjuring somewhat the epicness of this reading experience. Sorry about the doubtless abundant typos.

The concept of this post has also changed. It began as just a general overview of what I thought the book was about etc, but it has come to my attention that people are really obsessed with this book, and that there are websites devoted to guiding you through it. See, for example Infinite Summer. Particularly crazy to me was this list of advice on how to read Infinite Jest, including reading it with a guide, and using sticky notes. I did neither.

So, to me, this whole process seems like not very much fun. In fact, I think that by not losing yourself in the labyrinth of the book, you lose something. Specifically – emotions of confusion and fear, the sense of being immersed in a sea of events and information and having that water gradually clear, and, finally, if you treat the whole book like a mind game your need to play ythe whole way through, you miss going back in after you finish. I was interested to see that a lot of people read this book after a period of not reading much at all, and I do wonder whether my attitude reflects the fact that I read more fiction than nonfiction, and I trust that understanding will come if you commit yourself to the book without highlighters and sticky notes and ‘guides’.

Therefore, I am not going to fill this blog post with theories about what happened, or tell you which pages to bookmark. Many sites do thid. Instead i am going to talk about the question – what was it about? To me, it was an incredibly sad book, about lonely people unable to communicate. It’s about people being unhappy, and alone, and messed up by family or drugs or the world. It’s about the US messing up other countries. It’s about sadness.

It uses a lot of endnotes, which I suppose is its most stylistically ‘experimental’ feature, but in the end I thought the stylistic stuff was not particularly central, and was certainly not what was most interesting about the book. In many ways the narrative/s was/were much more conventional than I was expecting. Other than the switching between stories and some temporal messing about, the writing was pretty readable and entertaining.

A lot of people are pretty confused by the ending, and it definitely took me be surprise. As in, I didn’t realise the ending was the ending until I turned the page. Then, to work out what had happened I had to go back and read some of the start of the novel again, and use the text search function on my ereader to piece a few plot points together. The book is so long, I think it’s hard to work out what happens without doing some revisiting, which does make the novel interesting, because it projects events which occur outside the bounds of the book, while turning you back into the book again. It makes it feel somewhat permeable. The structure also has an certain circularity, even if you need to fill in some of the circle yourself. It is this that makes the title seem appropriate, as the book has a quality of creating a loop of time. I guess this is why people get so obsessed with it, but I think you can probably cope with it without a guide and sticky notes.

The thing that made it saddest for me was that there was no pointing outside this infinite jest. The main character we see at the beginning if the book cannot communicate with the world. Can 12 step save the addicts from the grip of addiction? Or are we all trapped by our addictions and neuroses, unable to live without them? I’m not sure the book is hopeful about their ability to escape, even if aspects of the narrative, and particular characters, do struggle in that direction. It’s hard not to read some of this struggle in the context of the author’s own issues, as David Foster Wallace killed himself in 2008, and to feel therefore that there is no escape.

Sad is therefore my overwhelming feeling about this novel, not that it was crazy or experimental or postmodern. But it is wonderfully rambling, and very funny in parts.

Phillip K Dick would have probably told the story in a quarter of the time – I mention him because I think Infinite Jest deals with very similar themes to Dick – the nature of reality, addiction, lonely people unable to communicate, consumerist society taken to crazy extremes, sadness.  But I quite enjoyed the long journey in this case (as opposed to in an earlier post about books that are too long – this proves its not a universal rule).

There is a whole lot more in this book, and, regardless of how you read it, it’s worth the commitment. Also, one piece of advice, do brush up on your Hamlet….