Infinite Jest

Ran out of new books in my inbox, so I'm re-reading Infinite Jest. I read it ages ago, but I barely remember any of it: tennis, drugs, a video that melts your brain, The Year Of Glad - not much else. And, 50 or so pages into it, I'm realizing why...

David Foster Wallace was an awesome writer: unbelievably insightful and clever. Nearly every chapter has something brilliant in it. But, I'm dying to figure out WTF any of what I've read has to do with anything else. I've read at least a dozen chapters so far, but I still haven't found a plot. It's just sketch after sketch - each interesting in its own right, but almost completely disconnected from all the others. Asynchronous, non-linear. Things happen; but you don't know when anything happened in relation to anything else, or why you need to know about it. It's like a David Lynch movie, but with the scenes played in random order.

I realize most of it gets pulled-together by the end. But man, it's a tough read to start. Very hard to keep focused and enthused when he's doing everything he can to pull your attention in as many different ways as he can. Much tougher than Gravity's Rainbow. Probably not as tough as Ulysses (which I cannot get into, let alone through).

Spoiler?
Makes me doubt that the book itself could be eponymous The Entertainment.

12 thoughts on “Infinite Jest”

  1. The Modesto Kid

    I found it much tougher to finish than to start — the beginning pulls you in and engages you (if you’re me) but the last third or so is a fucking slog. I ought to reread it, I don’t think I got much out of the last third the first time through. Did you see the Decemerists’ Eschaton video?

  2. Bobby

    I have toyed with the idea of reading that tome since I read about DFW in Rolling Stone. But every time I pick it up and read a few pages I put it back down. I guess I’ll save it to when I have read everything else on my “to read list.” Right now I’ve starting reading the 4th book in “A Game Of Thrones” series. I just can’t get enough of that story.

  3. platosearwax

    Strangely, I guess, I have read and enjoyed just about everything DFW wrote except for Infinite Jest, which I started once, got 100 pages in and stopped and never picked it up again. It is always on my “to read” list but I never get around to it.

    That book and the difficulty many people have reading it, reminds me of Neal Stephenson. Cryptonomicon is one of the best books I ever read. Yet I have a hard time getting through much else he writes even as I absolutely adore his prose and writing voice. I have been working on the Baroque Cycle for about 6 years now and am not even done with the second volume!

    1. cleek

      i liked Cryptonomicon. i got through (but didn’t love) Anathem. i know i should read Snow Crash , but Anathem kindof turned me off to Stephenson.

      2. platosearwax

        I have a signed hardcover copy of Anathem I haven’t started yet. I happened to be in London at the Forbidden Planet bookstore there coincidentally when Stephenson was there signing copies of his books.

  4. Wag

    Jest was an occasionally funny book with some amazing vignettes, but in the end I felt like I was the butt of DFW’s inside joke.

    Never again.

  6. ohiocane

    Well said, Wag – I felt much the same after I tried to read it. I tried and tried to remain interested, but couldn’t quite piece the whole meaning of the thing together.

    Perhaps I’m too lowbrow – I didn’t get much out of Interviews with Hideous Men either.

    1. cleek

      but couldn’t quite piece the whole meaning of the thing together.

      and Wag’s: in the end I felt like I was the butt of DFW’s inside joke.

      i just hit a section where he’s talking about different approaches to tennis coaching. there’s the old fashioned way, where you drill and look at game stats and it’s all pretty “linear”; then there’s James Incandenza’s and tennis coach Schtitt’s way, which is far more abstract and embraces the chaos within the game. here’s a bit of it:

      [Schtitt knew] that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but — perversely — of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth — each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n2 possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self.

      felt to me like DFW is talking there, obliquely, about the process of writing a book like this. instead of doing a self-referential, tightly-contained po-mo book (ex, something like Cloud Atlas, where the structure is very strict and once you figure it out, it’s obvious how the story was crafted to fit the structure), he’s going the opposite way: spiraling outward. every character and setting he comes up with gives him a way to branch into other characters and settings (“each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n2 possible responses”, “metastatic” – which is kind of an awesome word, etymologically-speaking, in this context). so, endless tangents and 100 pages of endnotes. endlessly branching beyond the main plot: fork, fork, fork, fork. and, so the skill and talent then in writing this way is in keeping all those chaotic branches within the boundaries of what makes a novel.

      or whatever.

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