“I am in here.”
I turned the last page of Infinite Jest around two weeks ago. I hadn’t meant to get so ahead of the group’s schedule; up until the mid-500’s I think I was on target (or not far off anyway), but there comes a point in the book shortly after the big hoo-haa outside Ennett House, all guns and punches and stiletto heels, that’s like sitting in a homemade go-cart at the top of the steepest hill in your town, you haven’t got a clue what a mess you’ll be in when you get to the bottom of the hill but you know that one way or another you’ll definitely get there, and fast. It wasn’t long after the “Gately versus the angry Canadians” scenes that I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from whizzing down that hill and reading as much as I possibly could each night. I had to know how things would end…
…Of course, if you’ve also made it to the end of the book you’ll be painfully aware that it’s not the end of the story. Far from it.
I’ve seen lots of reviews of Infinite Jest that focus on the size of the book, the physical weight of carrying it around with you and the mental weight of it on your shoulders, like it’s something on your to-do list to be put off or worried about (spoiler: it’s really not). I don’t see the size or total page number as something to be intimidated by, rather as something to be soaked up and enjoyed. This isn’t a wham bam thank you ma’am one-nighter of a book, and it’s not a book that leaves you wanting at barely ten pm, waiting to be excited, waiting to be entertained. Infinite Jest is a book that consumes your thoughts, your time and a book that as a reader you have to physically interact with. It forces you to concentrate hard on the tiny 8-pt text, flip the leaves of paper back and forth from the point you’re reading to the back pages of over three-hundred footnotes, all the while keeping up in your mind with plot lines and narratives that, at least initially, don’t seem to have any connection to each other at all. Glimmers of links of chains of knowing start to appear, making attempts at forging connections, hidden between the lines of text and under the rocks of David Foster Wallace’s made-up words. Names not mentioned for tens of pages suddenly pop up once more; you realize that one of the residents in Ennet House is the same guy waiting for his dope drop near the beginning of the book. That mysterious woman who tells stories on the radio, with the voice that keeps Mario Incandenza company long into the night? She’s someone very special, keep a note of her. The housebreaker who accidentally suffocates the sick guy who owns the house he’s broken into? Why, he’s the fixed point all the other characters radiate from and towards – yes, even the closed-off troubled tennis prodigy from the first section. Even him.
It is suggested that James Incandenza made “Infinite Jest” (aka “the samizdat”, aka “the Entertainment”) as a way of drawing out the personality and feelings of his emotionally closed-off middle son, Hal. Hal’s passivity and detachment affects every aspect of his life, highlighted by the way he plays his tennis game. He forces whomever he plays into making costly mistakes on the court; Hal doesn’t win so much as his opponent loses. Himself saw this detachment in his son and felt desperate to crack Hal open and make him truly alive, and thought the Entertainment was the way to do so.
Finishing Infinite Jest raises almost as many questions as reading it answers. Who was the narrator? Where is the master copy of the Entertainment? Who does Orin mean when he screams “do it to her!”? Is CT Mario’s father? What the hell happened to Pemulis? For some of these questions, my own vague ideas are slowly beginning to form but I fully expect that it’ll take at least another full read to have any substantial answers.
At the beginning of our Summer of Jest someone whose writing I admire told me to relax and enjoy it, that Infinite Jest wasn’t a challenge to be won or lost but just an immensely readable and rewarding book. At that point I was one of those who saw the mountain ahead of me and didn’t have a clue how I would get to the top, never mind all the way to the other side. I saw it completely the wrong way, as something to cross off from a “things to read before you’re thirty” list, or maybe I saw it like a test to be beaten. Something to be achieved rather than something to be enjoyed. It was only once I put thoughts of “the challenge” to one side and really concentrated on the words in front of me that I began to immerse myself in the many stories contained on its pages and love the book as a whole. The experience I had reading Infinite Jest was unlike any other book I’ve read, and while I’m not sure that reading it for a second time will have the same effect I really can’t wait to go back to page one and find out.
(Originally posted on my scrappy, badly maintained blog).