Infinite Jest: The Best Book I'd Never Read (so far)

It's very hard to know where to start discussing Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace's (hereafter DFW) Macarthur award-winning magnum opus. To concur with the Macarthur people, to call it a work of "genius" is not to overstate the point. DFW manages to work a more sophisticated understanding of the vices that plague our society into his novel than one would find in a barrage of sociology texts. His basic contention is that we are all addicted to something: television, materialism, drugs, depression, and so on. Even the things with which we seek to replace our addictions--AA, for example--just offer another form of addiction.

To those who think that Infinite Jest is just a lot of postmodern gobbledygook, take heart. Although DFW grouped himself with Pynchon, et. al., he reads a heck of a lot less postmodern than, say, Joyce or Faulkner. Yes, the narrative is fractured--it is fractured because our lives are fractured--and DFW seems to be saying that there is a fundamental fracture in our society that makes it impossible to tell a story without a multivalent point of view. What he presents, then, is a series of narrative "threads," all loosely connected, that tell a couple of stories. There are basically four threads: the kids at the tennis academy on top of the hill, the addicts at the halfway house at the bottom, the wheelchair-bound Quebecois terrorists, and the transvestite junkies. Within the threads there are numerous characters, and yes, it takes a while to sort them all out, but after about 100 pages you feel like you've got your feet under you. (So no more excuses, all you haters!)

That said, if you are the kind of reader who prefers your 985-page novel to bring all the threads together and show you how they are more than tangentially connected...you might be disappointed. (I was.) My reaction, though, was basically a confirmation of the fact that I liked these characters; I wanted to know what happened to them, and I was mad at DFW for leading me on for almost a thousand pages and not offering me any resolution. But maybe that's the point...maybe I'm as addicted to resolution as the addicts are to crack. In fact, I'm sure that's the point, given that I would have happily subjected myself to a couple hundred more pages if I could have had some resolution.

Thanks, DFW. Point taken.