In his (excellent) introduction, Wallace's contemporary Dave Eggers discusses the idea of whether students of literature (crucially rather than fans of reading in general, although I consider myself a member of both groups) should feel a duty to read Infinite Jest. His conclusion is that they should, if only to witness the limits to which the medium can be stretched, and as someone who has set aside the time to listen to the entirety of The Constructus Corporation's three-and-a-half hour electronic-sci-fi-rap masterpiece The Ziggurat and to watch the entirety of the three-and-a-half hour redux cut of Apocalypse Now, this was enough to sell it to me.
At the end of last year I decided that this would be the only book I had to read in full this year, and while I finished it long before the "deadline" I was glad I had given myself room to breathe. Wallace's prose is more often than not treacle-slow, and while the reading certainly got easier as it went on I found it a bit of a slog throughout. He is also fond of repetition, and while characters making what is essentially the same point in different ways for up to 20 pages at a time was surprisingly entertaining, I found it had an almost hypnotic effect on me on occasion - there being effectively no point to get to, and often no conclusion then being found as the narrative swerved off into a completely different plot thread. His syntax, too, can be absolutely brutal at times, with paragraph-long sentences often requiring three or more reads in order to work out what was actually happening. And though all of this may seem critical, the writing is redeemed by Wallace's spectacular range of vocabulary and expression. It reminded me at times of avant-garde rap lyrics, with alliteration, assonance and internal rhymes cropping up all over the place to keep the words oozing along. I consider Oscar Wilde to be just about the pinnacle of English-language usage, and while Infinite Jest is completely incomparable, it was the best-written book I have read in a very long time.
The plot, such as it is, revolves around a film. Specifically, one that is so absorbingly entertaining that anyone who watches it feels compelled to rewind and watch it again - and again and again until they expire from dehydration or starvation or the like. Meeting on a cliff in the American desert, a cross-dressing secret agent and a member of a wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatist movement discuss, in great depth, possible weaponisation of the film. At a tennis academy in Boston, the son of the producer of this film, since dead by his own hand, goes through the trials of becoming a world-class sportsman and of being a teenager in America. Next to that academy, the residents of a halfway house for recovering addicts of various kinds go through their recovery process. And as the novel goes on, these three main plots begin to intersect. The above is a massive oversimplification, of course - Wallace creates a world in this book to a depth I have never seen before and will likely never see again. Characters who, in shorter works, would have been inconsequential or not even mentioned at all - the tennis academy janitor or a shop owner murdered by the Quebecois separatists, for example - are given rich, detailed back stories and sometimes even chapters of their own, where it seems the narrative is going to follow them in the long term, only to be dropped and often never heard of again. The overlapping of the plots happens slowly, insidiously, often through singular allusions by characters or the narrative that might be easily missed - indeed, I'm sure I missed the majority, and a re-read will be essential to truly appreciate the patchwork of stories that grows and then shrinks in elliptical form as the book reaches its eventual end.
As for the main plots, I most enjoyed the scenes at the academy; I suppose as the easiest to relate to. Young Hal Incandenza, precocious, studious, and just really, really good at tennis, is arguably one of two characters in the book to receive a comprehensive profile from Wallace, and as such his journey is enjoyable to follow as he tries to juggle school work, an exhausting athletic schedule, a creeping drug dependency and the host of bizarre characters he calls friends and superiors at the academy, all overshadowed by the still-fresh memories of the death of his father. While some readers complain that the tennis match scenes are too in-depth, I actually found myself wishing that Wallace had taken more time to dwell on them. A former talent himself, he manages to hit upon the idiosyncrasies that make the game one of the hardest of all - the essential mental and physical control and discipline required simply not to crack while being exposed as an individual under the gaze of all in an arena where the margin for error is truly microscopic. He manages to draw out an almost zen-like quality to the sport, a counterpoint to an increasingly hyperactive society.
The other two main threads were still both enjoyable in their way, and likewise contained some real truths about the nature of life, society and the human condition. In particular the story of Don Gately, the other fully-formed character, formerly hopelessly addicted to alcohol and painkillers but now sober and working as a warden at the halfway house, I found genuinely inspiring in terms of how a combination of a good soul and a solid work ethic were able to help him overcome an abusive childhood and his subsequent, almost inevitable, spiral into addiction and reckless behaviour. Similarly some of the exchanges between the two men undercover suggested to me that Wallace really did have answers to some of humanity's biggest questions.
This is reflected, too, in the world in which he sets his book. The events take place some time around the mid-00s, i.e. the not-too-distant future at the time of writing, and some of his observations have been shown to be eerily accurate. The general connectedness of society, working-class America's opiate problem and the trend of the biggest companies buying out all conceivable rivals were arguably predictable for someone with their finger on the pulse in the 90s. While Donald Trump wasn't (officially) an independent candidate, his rise to power on the back of a wave of anti-establishment reactionary voting seems a lot like that of Johnny Gentle, famous crooner, who heads up the book's government of the new US-Canadian-Mexican supernation; but that had arguably been seen before with the likes of Reagan and Carter. Less easy to explain, however, are visions of on-demand video services threatening the livelihood of network television, and technology that essentially amounts to Skype and Snapchat. To repeat, this was written in 1996, and Wallace himself claimed to have never used the internet until after publication. But rather than saying he possessed psychic powers or some inside line into the future of technology, I think this is more down to his spectacular ability to dissect human nature - we have these things now not because they are possible, but because we wanted them. Certainly, I won't be surprised in future if we see the names of years being sold to the highest bidder, or America dealing with its waste problem by catapulting rubbish into a huge pit on the Canadian border (in one of the book's less subtle metaphors).
The entry so far may seem like gushing to a certain extent, but I would like to balance that by adding that Infinite Jest is not without some sizeable flaws. Do I think it would have benefited hugely from a more aggressive editing process? Absolutely. And, love or hate the book as a whole, I am sure that nearly everyone who has made it to the end will have felt hugely disappointed with the way it halts abruptly in the middle of all of its plotlines, leaving just about everything unresolved. In fact, the ending was enough to bump it down a spot to number three on my all-time list, but ultimately I can still say with confidence that this is one of the best books I have ever read. I feel a greater appreciation of literature, my vocabulary has been expanded and I'd even go as far as to say as my world view has been altered. The next one is definitely going to be a bit lighter, though.
5/5
And you have to laugh, because what other choice have you got?
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