Infinite Jest
How better to begin this blog than by exposing myself as a dreaded Wallace enjoyer?
(Image by https://karen-chen.weebly.com/)
Imagine you’ve just met someone great. They have the same music taste as you, they respire, and they tell you that the things you write about already universally acclaimed books on your iPhone aren’t that bad. They’re the full package. But then you ask them what their favourite book is. You see this glint in their eye, a speck of primordial ooze that tells you that the answer they’re about to give is hard-coded into their DNA. You have activated the reptile brain.
“You probably haven’t heard of it, but it’s this book called Infinite J-“
You bolt past the human-reptile hybrid that you’ve unleashed, leaving them in the fiction section of the Gower Street Waterstones, giving you precious time to vault back down to ground floor as they, by now accustomed to the cold, lonely feeling of intellectual superiority, browse the ‘modern classics’ section. Bursting on to the street, shoving old women onto the unforgiving concrete, there’s sweat pouring down your poorly-ventilated back (why did you wear that [admittedly cool] gilet, it’s like 25 degrees?), and the only conciliation is that you didn’t ask what their favourite album was (it’s Kid A by Radiohead). Close call, pal.
Three years later, you like to think you’ve matured. You wear more weather-appropriate clothing. You listen in that way where you know when to say ‘yep’ or ‘okay’ but your eyes are glazed over and Elton John’s ‘Bennie and the Jets’ is occupying most of your mental real estate. You don’t run at the first sound of insufferable pretentiousness. By this point, you’re pretty pretentious yourself. It’s with this metamorphosised sense of self that you return to Gower Street ‘Stones, armed with nothing but a bellyful of Roti King and a fully stamped Waterstones card. You make a bee line for the W shelf in Fiction and you pick up Infinite Jest, hands shaking, hoping that maybe, just maybe, this book will be worth the £1.99 (stamp card discount applied). The cashier, barely containing their laughter, scans it for you, barely managing the obligatory “oh, good choice” through a breaking voice. You have now become The Laughing Stock. The Human Reptile. The Infinite Jest Reader. You walk out, head hanging in shame as the entire store’s population points and laughs at you.
This has been a true story. My story.
I had super mixed feelings when I started the book. I didn’t like the first 200 pages at all. I was thrust into a world eerily close to our own, but with subsidised years such as ‘Year of the Whopper’ and countless unexplained acronyms that made me scour through previous pages, desperately looking for what it meant. Add to this 200 pages of lengthy, tangential endnotes that often serve as an info dump and an interruption to the already fractal plot, both in terms of them changing the subject and the physical need to flip between the bit you’re on and the end of the book. But it made sense. Gradually. That’s not to say that the plot made sense entirely, but I learnt how to read the book. I learnt to take these unexplained quirks in stride, confident that they would be explained somewhere, maybe 400 pages later or in an endnote that’s coming up.
The plot loosely revolves around a film, ‘Infinite Jest’, that entertains the viewer to the point that they forego bodily functions until they waste away. What’s great is that the plot is so loose and often mentioned in passing by characters about 300 pages too early that you don’t even notice it until you go back and read through it again. There’s even an endnote super early on that basically explains the entire plot and reveals most of the novel’s secrets, and when you finally realise this it’s like watching one of those movies that has a twist that you could’ve actually figured out if you just paid attention. But there’s so much stuff to pay attention to, and sentences are sometimes as large as paragraphs, that you’d be hard-pressed to find everything on the first read. I’m sure I’m definitely in the majority of people who immediately slammed ‘Infinite Jest ending’ into google after finishing the book and, after having it explained to me by people much smarter than I am, felt at ease, thinking ‘I finally understand it, all through my own close reading and genius.’
This, to me, is secondary, and it’s in the characters of the tennis academy and the halfway house for recovering alcoholics that the book shines. In the tennis academy, teenage drug abusers all struggle with the intensity of being the best at a sport whilst also getting top grades and being super ironic and looking like they don’t give a fuck. The halfway house is similarly full of addicts, but they are unfortunately forced to talk about their issues with sincerity if they want to get better. Don Gately, the reader’s main contact in the world of rehab and AA, tirelessly interfaces with these addicts who would rather be anywhere else, constantly assuring them that if they stick with it, one day they’ll look back on the seemingly pointless AA meetings, all the empathising and understanding one another, and realise that they’re slowly crawling towards recovery.
I’ve never been an addict myself, but I know how hard it is to communicate, especially when sincerity is often mistaken for weakness. Even adverts are painfully self-aware and ironic, and they resonate with people better than ever. It’s this false communication, this overuse of irony in every aspect of our lives, that makes us sincere only in desperation, when we are really falling off the rails. The book also deals with inter-familial communication, exploring how a seemingly healthy and successful family are never really listening or interfacing with each other in a meaningful way. Hal, arguable the main character, is afraid to tell his mother anything because her responses aren’t genuine, they are so accepting, so ‘I love my son so he can’t do anything wrong’ that it’s just weird and incredibly mind-fucky and off-putting. And his father, who for most of the novel is dead as a result of eliminating his own map in textbook fashion (head in microwave — think of a potato that you haven’t jabbed with a fork just rotating around one of those bad boys and it probably looked something like that), was so emotionally absent when he was alive that Hal has essentially nada in the parent department.
My father died when I was five, and this has made me painfully aware of how I communicate to others about my feelings. Even though I’m not sad about it, and my stepdad is the best dad I could ask for, I feel uncomfortable if I have to explain it to people. I’m sitting there, waiting for the inevitable ‘sorry to hear that’ from someone cursing the fact that they asked ‘Okay, but where’s your actual dad?’ and then the ensuing scramble for the wheel as the conversation car threatens to careen off a cliff edge. My personal favourite of this has been when one of my mum’s friends said I look a lot like my stepdad thinking he was my biological father, and upon hearing he was only my stepdad, proceeded to say that children often end up looking like their stepparents. I imagine this woman is Neo, dodging eggs to the face in slow motion and defiantly saying ‘I don’t really want to talk about that, but I’m the only prick that’ll actually make it apparent.’ And so but it’s this paradoxical emotional honesty that I love and try to seek out and emulate.
My point is that it’s hard to want to talk about this stuff. It’s hard to want to subject people to your shit. I think Hal feels the same way. He doesn’t want to feel anything. His father, pre-unjabbed potatoing, hallucinates that Hal is mute despite everyone else being able to hear him, but Hal’s father is referring to a spiritual muteness, nothing behind the hollow words that desperately try to convey normalcy. And I catch myself in this state, just talking exclusively in sarcasm about nothing, offering no value to a conversation, acting like I’m pretty nonplussed by this whole ‘life’ thing. That’s what’s so great about the halfway house sections. They show the worth of actually communicating, and that even though it’s cringe-inducing to the max, it’s so much better than ruining yourself and bottling emotions just to avoid literally like seven seconds of awkwardness in a conversation. I love this book for advocating genuineness and sincerity, and even though it’s probably one of the most miserable books I’ve ever read, it’s real.
They say don’t meet your heroes. But when I came home on the fateful day I was cast out of Waterstones like Adam from Eden, I looked in the mirror, and couldn’t help marvelling at my own bravery. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t shed a couple tears. And two weeks later, when I’d finished The Jest (as us true fans call it), I felt like a new person, someone who was going to try and be sincere in what I said, to be present and really listen to my friends and family. I returned to the mirror, met my eye, and saw that primordial itch I’d once fled from begging to be scratched, begging to tell the world that, yes, my favourite novel is Infinite Jest.
CH
