Infinitely Entertaining

Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace

I don't want to try to summarize what I love about this novel. This is my favorite novel and so that would take a while and probably waste your time rehashing what other people have said better. Instead I'll try to address a few of the more common complaints I see here:

The first is that there is no closure. This is correct to some degree, since many of the storylines in the novel - Hal's addiction, Gately's and Pemulis' fates, the Quebecois insurgency, etc. - aren't explicitly resolved. There are hints of what happens if you'd like to sleuth these out (I was lucky enough to read it shortly before Infinite Summer, a sort of online book club for this, started, and luckily got to see the theories of cleverer people), but I'd argue that even those are unnecessary. The way I like to describe it is that Infinite Jest is too good to be constrained by a plot. Instead, these storylines are really just avenues for exploring some very interesting concepts: addiction, achievement, depression, loneliness. Moreover, these avenues are populated by some very well-drawn characters, some of whom are pretty repulsive but most of whom are so deftly fleshed-out that you can somehow empathize with them anyway. And momentarily inhabiting such realistic characters (narration is often limited-omniscient, albeit confined to a variety of different characters at different times) is such a rich experience that, to me at least, it more than makes up for a scant plot.

The second is that the book is hard to read. This is true in parts, and there are more than a few words in here whose meanings I still don't know. There are a lot of footnotes, a common theme in DFW's work, which can be bothersome but not horribly so. The beginning is especially slow going because the characters are unfamiliar and confusing and, especially if you haven't read any of DFW's work (I strongly suggest reading some of his essays before this), you may not have the reservoir of goodwill to get you through. But once you find your footing about a hundred pages almost all of the remainder is very readable. Sure, there are portions that can be pretty technical. There's an exposition of a Risk-like children's game that involves a jargon-packed discussion of nuclear warfare, for one, but I enjoy taking these digressions to learn a bit about the subject, and at any rate they're often skimmable if you so choose. More prevalent, to me, were sections of wicked humor. Infinite Jest has a lot of hilarious exchanges, events and descriptions. As an experiment, I looked for the funniest thing I could find in 10 seconds, and here that is: someone is selling sterile urine to beat a drug test, urine that's described as "warm pale innocent childish urine that's produced in needly little streams and the only G/M scan that it couldn't pass would be like an Ovaltine scan or something", and this sort of thing is all over the book (though it's a little more scarce toward the end). Real, laugh-out-loud humor. Sometimes broad, sometimes subtle. There's also a lot of exploration of how people think and behave, which is much more realistically felt and appreciated than I can describe, and which draws more empathy from me than any other novel I've read. At any rate, I think the best thing I can say about this book's readability is that I still pull it off the shelf occasionally, just to read a random section and either laugh or savor its ideas and prose, or all of those things. Not because I want to impress anyone; not because it's some book-medicine, required but unpleasant; but because it's really pleasurable to read.

So to summarize, if you want a novel that will introduce a problem, detail its solution, and tie up any loose ends (in other words, a conventional story), you may want to look elsewhere. But if you want descriptive prose, sharp humor and emotion, and a thoughtful exploration of a very wide variety of subjects and experiences and characters, give this a try.

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