Infinite Jest is a masterpiece of fiction. David Foster Wallace writes first and foremost from a human perspective1. More than any other fiction writer I’ve come across, Wallace has convinced me surely that if anyone else ever, was really truly a conscious human being, and not some robotic philosophical zombie, it was him; he passed a Turing test I didn’t even know I was administering. Wallace writes in a way which makes it impossible to feel alone, at least in the moment of reading, because how could you be alone when he is right there with you, sharing all of the gruesomely quotidian feelings about life which you have never even been confronted with the challenge of expressing before. The feelings which are so common and personal to you that you are not even sure you knew that you knew them.
The book itself is about semi-professional junior tennis, avant garde film making, Québécois Separatism, and perhaps most importantly, addiction. I will not explain here how all these disparate themes blend into one another, you’ll have to read the book for that. Aside from all of this the book serves as a warning, of many things. A few that stuck with me the most, being: That anything can be abused, that objects are not to be underestimated, and that who you are is what you give yourself away to, whether that is tennis, alcohol, your art, your god, your lover, or even grammar. And when you have nothing to give yourself away to, you tend to give yourself away to Nothing. The book nearly feels like cheating sometimes; often nuggets of wisdom in life are granted to you at a young age and even though you understand what is being said, you only know what was meant by them much later in life. Wallace allows you to comprehend, understand, and know, all at once, when he is delivering life lessons. This is due in large part I believe, to the reflexivity of the book: readers cannot not think about the themes being presented without explicitly trying to avoid it (or simply skipping sections of the book).
Another personally exciting aspect of the book is the symmetry and structure of the writing. Most books have structure where time flows along with the pages, not necessarily with a 1-1 correspondence, but as the pages flow so too does the timeline. Infinite jest opposes this tradition in several ways: the beginning of the book is far later in the plot than the meat of the book, chapters are routinely interrupted by time jumps and perspective shifts, and plot-heavy end-notes pervade the text. These are all to the books advantage however, as it gives Wallace the freedom to juxtapose themes and ideas seamlessly, in a way that while natural for Infinite Jest, would have a hard time not feeling ham-fisted in a linear novel.
When one begins the book, the use of end-notes appears egregious and down right self indulgent, I mean why have a single end-note explaining the initialism O.N.R2 if you only use it twice in the whole book, on the same page? Even more annoying as you progress is that every once in a while, an end-note is important and plot relevant, so you cannot ignore them. However as you progress Wallace shows off the benefit of the end-notes. Here is an example: at one point the (arguable) main protagonist, Hal Incandenza, recalls a conversation he had over the phone with his brother Orin. Instead of having had this conversation earlier in the book, or inserting it right there, Wallace puts this event entirely in a 17 page long end-note3, which itself has its own footnotes a through l. While at first a little inconvenient, when one finishes the end-note and heads back to page 310 (in this example), they are immediately confronted not only with what Hal was recalling (the phone call they just read), but the context once again in which he was recalling it, allowing the reader to feel as if they have just remembered the event and are now back with Hal. Without doing it this way, certainly one of these facets of the writing here would have been lost. All this is to say Wallace does not challenge the form simply to challenge the form, he uses this to its fullest wherever he can.
Furthermore the symmetry of the book is, if nothing else, aesthetically pleasing. Wallace himself has said he modelled the book after the above image3, and I believe, is the reason the first and final thirds of the book are so much more enjoyable than the middle. The written sections tend to alternate in length, just as the triangles in the image do as you progress through it, and so the middle of the book has the longest sections, with the most exposition and exploration of the world, while the beginning and end are filled out by crescendoing, alternating cascades of plot threads. Following this pattern certain ideas or themes show up nearly symmetrically throughout the book, examples being Byzantine erotica, the appearance of characters like Tony Krause, and flashbacks from James Incadenza’s childhood. Even the end-notes exhibit this symmetry, with many short drug specific end-notes only at the beginning and end, and longer ones in the middle.
Infinite Jest has been reviewed many times before, and so I tried not to waste anyone’s time here treading old ground. These are my most prominent and clear thoughts on the book; there is much more I’d like to go on about, the meta-fictional aspects, the plot and characters themselves and what they represent, but this is a review not an essay. This book is a masterful work of art, and I would recommend it to anyone who has the time and patience to read it (or in my case, the friends to berate them when they fall behind the reading schedule). Thank you both, Brandon and Lucas, for encouraging me to read this book, which is now I think, the most important work of fiction I have ever read, and will stick with me always.
Notes and Errata
1. I suppose, in contrast to fact and environment based story telling. The Narration is about 80% of the book, allowing for careful analysis of the characters inner thoughts, feelings, and emotional states.
2. Office of Naval Research, U.S.S.D.
3. Endnote 110
4. Known as the Sierpinski gasket
The Third Triumvirate 