Infinite Jest, In Defiance of the Elevator Pitch of Plot
On Reddit, there was a thread where someone was about 200+ pages into Infinite Jest and wondering if they should continue on, as it wasn’t really pulling them in. As someone who went at IJ three times before finally settling in for a full read, I could certainly sympathize with this. Admittedly, I approached the book as a Joycean-scale conquest, digging up secondary reading and tearing through chapters obsessively and finishing it up in about a month.
Then I went back and actually read it. There’s a part later in the book that talks about addiction that lots of people seem to hone in on during their read. IMO it’s one of the keys to understanding IJ. I’m copping this from a different thread but it’s the excerpt I’m looking for:
She said “This was why I couldn’t get off and stay off. Just as the cliche warns. I literally wasn’t keeping it in the day. I was adding the clean days up in my head.” She cocked her head at him. “Did you ever hear of this fellow Evel Knievel? This motorcycle-jumper?”
Gately nods slightly… He actually has an old cutout action picture of the historical Evel Knievel, from an old Life magazine, in a white leather Elvisish suit, in the air, aloft, haloed in spotlights, upright on a bike, a row of well-waxed trucks below.
“At St. Collie only the Crocodiles’d heard of him. My own Daddy’d followed him, cut out pictures, as a boy.” Gately can tell she’s smiling under there. “But what I used to do, I’d throw away the pipe and shake my fist at the sky and say As God is my fucking witness NEVER AGAIN, as of this minute right here I QUIT FOR ALL TIME.” She also has this habit of absently patting the top of her head when she talks, where little barrettes and spongy clamps hold the veil in place. “And I’d bunker up all white-knuckled and stay straight. And count the days. I was proud of each day I stayed off. Each day seemed evidence of something, and I counted them. I’d add them up. Line them up end to end. You know?” Gately knows very well but doesn’t nod, lets her do this on just her own steam. She says “And soon it would get… improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear. One car, two cars. By the time I’d get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it would begin to seem like this staggering number. Jumping over 14 cars. And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them.” She left her head alone and cocked it. “Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?”
…
“And yet it wasn’t til that poor new pipe-fellow from home pointed at me and hauled me up there and I said it that I realized,” Joelle said. “I don’t have to do it that way. I get to choose how to do it and they’ll help me stick to the choice. I don’t think I’d realized before that I could — I can really do this. I can do this for one endless day. I can. Don.”
The look he was giving her was meant to like validate her breakthrough and say yes yes she could, she could as long as she continued to choose to. She was looking right at him, Gately could tell. But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering… It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real… He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over… He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.
This (the compounding of sober days) is I think how people tend to read. They try to package a book up as a neat little unit, with characters and themes and motifs that intertwine in understandable ways, where the author sort of lays it all out very symmetrically and you work from start to finish and, if someone asks you, “what was that book about,” you can deliver an elevator pitch. IJ defies this actively. This is the whole deal with the end notes and end notes to end notes, all the unreliable narration and changes in authorial voice and immense cast of characters who may or may not be relevant to some larger story. The larger story is in the smaller story, the connections between characters aren’t neon-lighted, they’re subtle and often never called out. Even the ending of IJ isn’t in the story; according to DFW it’s “just outside the right of the frame” [from memory, probably not the exact quote]. DFW wants you to just read what’s on the page, go in there and really read the thing, and know that everything that happens is happening on purpose, and not try to scaffold up the overarching plot of it as you go.
Books’ ends are a distraction; we see how many pages are left and we have expectations on where the story should be — how much longer does the author have to wrap this up? Is this all? The end notes partially defy this, they soften the end of the text so we’re really not certain how close we are to the end. There’s a lot of defiance in IJ that’s all pointed toward keeping you in the now, and not letting you try and step back to take in the story in total.
While I agree that it’s not for everyone, I think it’s absolutely a worthwhile ride for those who like the act of reading for its own sake, who are interested in a book not as a conquest but as a story. IJ is heartbreakingly sad, there are characters in the Gately and other addict storylines whose stories made me sick to my soul. Then there’s Eschaton and the later Enfield chapters that remind me of A Confederacy of Dunces, absolutely rollicking and laugh-out-loud funny. But these don’t come together like an Asimov novel, some narrative climax late in the story where the connection jumps off the page and you’re yelling “OH NOW I GET IT” at midnight, waking up the kids. This one will leave you sort of staring into space, wondering what you missed, until you go back to the first chapter and start picking out details you missed before. Then you start to find the story that was there in the background, the real story you were missing because you were trying to find it.
