Some people have read Infinite Jest
Some have conquered entire regions, I, myself, have started and finished “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace. After all, it is a book where 200 pages of endnotes have their own footnotes. I’ve spent four months with it.
Gargantuan, at times unbearable, fascinating, hilarious and ocassionally boring, David Foster Wallace is unquestionable scientist of language. It is impossible to elevator-pitch the plot, but in very broad strokes this book deals with addiction in various shapes and is a ferocious attempt at showing what language and novels are capable of in capable hands. Also, about 75 other things.
And as everyone said everything about the book, exhausting myriad of options on what IJ means and how it ends, I’d rather zoom in on a few things that I missed in other dissections.
1 IJ doesn’t begin and doesn’t end (“life is made entirely of the middle”, someone observed) and I think it is wonderful and I don’t see the point of trying to force it in linear, story arc mode. To make a point about hopelessness of addiction or passive injection of somebody else’s dream (i.e. entertainment) as a way to endure the life, you don’t need dramatic structure. It surely has connecting arteries, but having the ending is least of its points.
2 IJ is a book of ideas. Just like Robert Musil’s “Man Without Qualities”. In that sense it is on par with the greats. And it is a book about writing novels, streching the language and making it as current, as it is possible.
3 One of my big complaints were the dialogues. It seemed like most of them were spoken by the same person with mind-bogling vocabulary, despite having gazillion of chracters. Somehow, after the initial fascination, it gets tiresome, stale.
4 No matter how big/important a book is, it can never get bigger than the reader. It can push the reader, but my capacity to understand the book puts the lid on it, ties a muzzle to tame it. So of course, during the life with IJ, my mind wandered from time to time, sometimes I was even angry at it, was forcing myself to read on, I didn’t get some (a lot?) of the meta references. IJ was not an infinite pleasure.
5 The quote of the book which maybe can put it in a nutshell (if there’s such a vain need), to contextualize the abrupt ending of DWF’s life afterwards, is uttered by his protagonist Hal: “We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe”.
I’ve read IJ as a furious strive to simultaneously ask what the meaning of moving forward is, is there any meaning at all, and a grandiose creative act which is that ‘something’, as mentioned by Hal, in itself.
