This morning I finished Infinite Jest, at what I suppose was a reasonably fast pace since many people are taking all summer to read it. However, those people are writing thoughtful blog posts and sometimes even staging theatrical productions based on the book. I've had to content myself with Facebook status updates and the very occasional post here.
Wikipedia's summary offers a decent, but not great, sense of what Infinite Jest is about. There is a plot buried within all the digressions and endnotes, but I always had a hard time articulating this when people asked me about it.
At the moment I'm not even going to try to summarize. Instead, I wish to note the great conundrum of this novel, which made me keep reading and is why it is definitely worth the effort:
Infinite Jest is hilarious line-by-line, but is extremely sad and touching in full.
It's quite a feat to take a story that touches upon drug addicted teenage tennis phenoms; Quebecois terrorist separatists; an extremely commercialized culture, in which the years are marked by homage to consumer goods; and the ravages of drug-addled adults, and make it all funny. (There--that was the plot summary.) But Wallace succeeds, without undercutting the seriousness of his themes.
His most effective humor technique is to use grand language to heighten absurdity. Just one example, towards the end: "Who, finally, can say the whys and whences of each man's true vocation?" (This to describe the conflict facing a man choosing between life as a priest or as an athletic trainer.) There is also the extremely detailed and uproarious accounting of people's professional outputs, as represented most fully in the exhaustive filmography of James O. Incandenza (endnote # 24 and still my favorite, of 388 possibilities.) Or the perverse technique of throwing content in endnotes that really should be in the body of the text--such as the 18 page conversation between brothers Hal and Orin Incandenza.
In high school English Mr. Queener introduced the concept of "suspension of disbelief"--the need to take the content of novels on faith sometimes, because they'd fail strict factual analysis. We were talking about the Scarlet Letter, but this principle certainly holds for Infinite Jest too. Much of what Wallace describes--we hope--will never come to pass (for example, I don't want the Northeastern US to become a giant hazardous waste dump known as the "Great Concavity" and I hope our government never creates an "Office of Unspecified Services.") And even if this future world comes to be, it's certainly possible to write about it more concisely.
But that's not what Wallace was going for, and to really enjoy Jest you have to willing to go along for the ride. There is a strange and prodigious genius at work here, who is concerned with the future of his country and its people more than with making us laugh.
And that's why you should read this book.
I am drawn to read the book after reading your take on it. Alas, I fear it may lean a bit too much toward reality of the demise of life as we have known it. Well written post Marcus.....
Posted by: psyche543@aol.com | August 02, 2009 at 01:00 PM
Really? Your high school English teacher's name was "Mr. Queener"? That's just the sort of name that would require me (if so named) to avoid working with adolescents at all costs!
Great post, though honestly, I found the first twenty or so pages extremely tiresome :)
Posted by: John Evans | August 04, 2009 at 05:05 PM