Took more than six months, but I've re-finished Infinite Jest.

I wish I could explain how the flash-forward first chapter happened. Can't. Something like 1100 pages? I can't tell you what caused the events of the first chapter. I can guess, but the answer isn't actually in the book. You just have to interpolate.

What a frustrating book. It's brilliant in the small details, and it's packed with small details. But the big picture is a sprawl - or, actually, just buried under those details. His writing is incredible. The descriptions, observations and insights astounding. But his plotting is apparently too subtle for my weak mind.

It's a deeply depressing book - Wallace suffered with depression himself and, as with everything else he turned his pen to, was superbly effective at rendering depression's feel and effects. And, there's far too much of a lot of things (AA, the back stories of minor characters) and far too little of others. But, again, his writing is so good that it carried me through - kindof. I eventually just started cynically thinking maybe it was two or three separate books that got mixed up in his word processor. But it's not. It's just a fractal: spiraling in all directions, rendering its themes of depression, addiction, the difficulties of communication, and description-vs-reality in situations large and small.

So, I read the words. And I thought I understood it. But no... I've been reading summaries and theses about it, and now it feels like I only got about 10% of it all - and this was my second time through. I missed the forest for the infinite trees.

But of course I was looking for a traditional plot. And Infinite Jest is absolutely not that kind of book. There's a story in there - many of them. And they all interact to one degree or another. But some of that interaction (most importantly, the action that would constitute the climax were this a traditional novel) happens outside the text; or maybe it doesn't happen at all. You can choose to believe that a single sentence at the beginning of the book (which is really the chronological end of the story, and happens a year after the action at the end of the text itself) coupled with a short end-of-book hallucination of a delusional gunshot victim loosely wrap up the main plot - even though their two accounts differ as to who takes part in the action. You can only guess at what ultimately happened from the clues he left scattered throughout the 1000+ pages. What is the titular object? Is it the book itself, which might have been written by a ghost, or maybe ghost-written by a ghost using by one of the two main characters? Who knows. It's impossible to say. People lie, hallucinate, misremember and tell second hand stories - so you can't always trust their accounts of events. And you can only guess at the identity of the narrator of the book itself. There are ambiguous clues to everything, everywhere, but to even find the clues, you have to pay close attention and file away everything he's said, even as Wallace goes off on what seem to be endless tangents. And this confusion and obfuscation is deliberate. Like a fractal, the book is recursive; to finish, you must start over - the little 3/4 circle glyph on the bottom corner of the last page suggests its circular construction (as well as pointing out that a big chunk of the story is, in fact, missing). So you go back to the beginning immediately, because that's the only way to really reconcile the opening with the ending, given that the opening happened so many words ago. And then you're back at the beginning, seeking answers which might not even be there.

It's just too much for my little brain.

I am defeated.