I had a ton of fun reading Infinite Jest, it took me two months of reading daily but after a while I couldn't wait to get home from work to read it (I didn't have a kid yet mind you). There are many things about it that are dissatisfying, frustrating even maddening. But there are so many points of brilliance it makes the whole thing worth it. The ambitiousness, audacity and shortcomings are part of it. I felt similarly about Pale King, DFW's posthumously published unfinished novel. Was it a great book? No. But there is about a 50 page section in the middle that makes the whole damn thing worth it.
Proust is a perfect analogy, but in 3k pages, proust’s illness becomes less nuanced while dfw’s relates brilliantly to obsession. it shaped the past 2 decades of tv. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2doZROwdte4
Seems the author is oftentimes taking whats meant to be a purposefully sardonic reflection of American culture to be an actual direct attempt at humor by DFW.
A good example of this is his point that the "level of humor" in the book is low because of a reference to "butt products". The joke isn't, "butts, haha", the joke is the satire that yea, that would be true... I mean, have you seen Instagram? Or SuperBowl ads?
"both, most importantly, work up an elaborate – and elaborately digressive – plot which deliberately ends as unsatisfactorily as possible."
I've only read about DFW's work, I haven't actually read them yet. But the quote above, in addition to your first sentence, sounds exactly like what DFW would be attempting to demonstrate an unspoken life parallel, or that it's about the journey not the destination, but even so, once the destination is reached the journey is pointless and forgotten.
There's definitely an unrealized expectation at the base of this review.
This is such an oversimplification of the book but I guess critics have to criticize. I imagine that DFW would probably say the book failed the author of this piece if this was his takeaway.
"Gore Vidal, who’s had his dick sucked more than a few times and been taken to task for it, has written far more persuasively that the novel as an art-form has become a cultural irrelevance, but you don’t hear him whingeing about ‘artistic invalidation’."
It's not too often that I see words like 'tentacular' and 'bathos' in the same article as phrases about metaphorical dick-sucking (see above).
More seriously, I've been getting more into literature and literary critique recently, and am a bit surprised about how personally affronted he seems by the book - is this sort of reaction common in literary criticism?
The problem with any big book is that, at the end, the author has you over a barrel: either you loved it and the author is a genius, or you hated it and you are a sucker. Lots of people claim to love long, ponderous books just to avoid being the sucker or for fear of appearing unsophisticated.
I prefer great authors who were serialized, e.g. dostoevsky. The works are brilliant, but the individual chapters read well, so you rarely feel like you have to just slog through the damned thing.
> The problem with any big book is that, at the end, the author has you over a barrel: either you loved it and the author is a genius, or you hated it and you are a sucker. Lots of people claim to love long, ponderous books just to avoid being the sucker or for fear of appearing unsophisticated.
I think this all the time. If you've made a huge commitment to something that turned out to be worthless, it's tough to admit that to yourself and others. So I'm a bit more skeptical when I hear positive reviews of long books, colleges, investors, religions, marriage, having kids, etc.
Ha. I have those two books back to back on my shelf. I've always thought there was some sort of connection between the two, other than thickness. Infinite Jest is a really amazing piece of work, and it's difficulty, it's obtruseness, it's long-winded pointlessness all contribute to that, in a way above the superficial 'wtf is he going on about wasting time for 30 pages?" picked up on by this article. It's a hard time, and not a book I'd really recommend to anyone at all, but it did strange things to me, and poked me in a way unlike any other writer ever. RIP DFW
The erudite of the LRB might never understand the simple and unexaggerated beauty of Mark Twain nor David Foster Wallace. Perhaps the only thing less appealing than a dissenting opinion is an op-ed to ride the coattails of success and make a name for oneself through dissension. Yeah Shakespeare sucks too, here's my card.
I will agree with the writers sentiment about Infinite Jest. I read about 1/3 before deciding I could not make it the whole way through. I think a good chunk of the reasons for the books popularity is the persona of DFW. His personality, physical looks, melancholic and thoughtful disposition make a him a quintessential writer. He looks the part very well, and produces this obscure monstrosity called Infinite Jest. My impression is that tons of people who read the book are never quite sure if its pure genius or complete non sense. His persona tips them over the edge.
It’s an enjoyable read mostly. It doesn’t claim to contain profound social commentary in every character and subplot. Of course his persona makes a difference because it’s a fiction born of his imagination. DFW did have a point though, about how we would become addicted to instant gratification, and you can see a grain of truth to this in the contemporary internet and the “attention economy”.
A real book "not worth the paper it's written on" simply falls out of print and is not reviewed; it does not generate twenty more pages of overpretentious literary diatribe decades later. Readers are advised to skip this article.
It's not a contemporary review. It's from "Vol. 18 No. 14 · 18 July 1996" of the London Review of Books, so it came out contemporaneously with Infinite Jest
I resent the length of my time the author spent, verbosely and banally, telling me that he resents the length of his time Wallace spent through banal verbosity in Infinite Jest.
They totally missed the mark on this one:
"What’s meant to distinguish Infinite Jest (the book) from various artefacts that precede it is the conflation of entertainment with drug addiction, and this notion is, I think, fundamentally flawed."
It's now pretty clear entertainment can be neurologically addictive, as evidenced by the social media companies and their abilities to predict improved engagement.
On top of that, we've now got an attention + an opioid addiction.
If anything, DFW was just very early at predicting the medium term state, complete with national secession movements.
Also I'm quite sure the idea of conflating entertainment with drug addiction precedes IJ, it can be traced back at least as far as the idea that religion is the opiate of the masses.
This is a more modern Pynchon, but this paragraph from Inherent Vice (set in the very early days of computer adoption) made me laugh:
> As usual these days, Fritz was back at the computer room, staring at data. He had that ask-me-if-I-give-a-shit look Doc had noted before in the newcomers to the groovy world of addictive behavior.
> Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
That is, "opium" here is references a painkiller; religion is viewed as a way to deaden pain and suffering. It's not about addiction.
The first time I tried reading Infinite Jest I felt that I was dealing with DFW's own personal trauma. I think I made it about 10% of the way through before putting it down.
The second time I picked up the book, I made it all the way through and thought it was absolutely brilliant. I see this in the same vein as Paul Beatty's _The Sellout_. There's a lot of stream of consciousness, there's a plethora of characters, and you have to really be paying attention to figure out exactly what's going on. These books aren't for everyone, but they're certainly important parts of American Literature.
"And herein is Infinite Jest’s (the book’s) major theme: the United States has become a culture addicted to entertainment, and like all addicts we pursue that entertainment to our detriment."
It seems like the reviewer dislikes the book because he disagrees with this notion, citing our attachment to entertainment is more of a choice than an addiction. I however find this very profound and will be finishing the book thanks to this review.
I think you will also like this quote/thought then:
> The theory is this: Infinite Jest is Wallace's attempt to both manifest and dramatize a revolutionary fiction style that he called for in his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." The style is one in which a new sincerity will overturn the ironic detachment that hollowed out contemporary fiction towards the end of the 20th century. Wallace was trying to write an antidote to the cynicism that had pervaded and saddened so much of American culture in his lifetime. He was trying to create an entertainment that would get us talking again.
here's a hack for reading infinite jest: use two bookmarks - one in the main story and one in the endnotes.
here's another hack that is tougher: read it in less than a week. you simply cannot appreciate the book if you do not have all of the different plots and characters fresh in your head (BTW I make the same recommendation for all long classics eg war and peace).
about the merit of the book: it is one of the few books that i've read that evoked a visceral reaction in me - i felt manic and strung out (like many of the characters) while reading it. social commentary aside i think that passes bar for worthwhile literature.
I shudder to imagine the experience of reading Infinite Jest in physical form. Having an ereader that could jump back-and-forth between the main text and the endnotes was invaluable.
Really? I first read it on a Kindle and it was totally infuriating. The jumping is not very convenient, certainly not anywhere near as fast as two bookmarks.
One thing about long books on e-readers is you don't have the psychological satisfaction of feeling like you're making it through the book (which you can feel by the number of pages that change hands with the paper book)
There's one footnote that ends up being a punchline, about five words long. The few seconds spent flipping from the page to the footnote lent it a certain comedic timing that would usually be impossible to portray in a book. That really stood out in my mind and I don't think it'd be quite the same by clicking a hyperlink.
Very interesting review. I read infinite jest once as a teenager, and once a couple of years ago - and yeah, on second reading, I could see it doesn't really deserve its hype.
The one weirdness of the review is kind of related to the main weirdness of Infinite Jest - why on earth is it related to Pynchon? I never really understood the similarity. Sure, they're both digressive writers - but so is everyone and their dog since Virginia Wolf. Why did Infinite Jest become the postmodern novel?
I think ultimately, what killed Infinite Jest to me is, on second read, it seemed dated. The driving concern - authenticity - seems to be one that sort of faded in relevance in the late oughts, then merged fairly seamlessly into a sort of teenage angst - a merger that's pretty well enacted by Infinite Jest, to be honest.
Infinite Jest is proof the Great American Hype Machine can work wonders
Funnily enough I think DFW would agree, in an interview somewhere (I think it was in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself) he talks about the surreal experience of seeing all the hype and raves about his book immediately after release, when he knew no one had actually had time to read it.
Not a very convincing criticism in my opinion. I liked the plot, but even if you don't like the plot or themes, I think the ideas, the sentences, the verbal invention and playfulness are the best things about the book. But, theme-wise, it's worth remembering that this basically pre-dates the modern internet:
>“The moment he recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and that he was potentially missing it. He realized that he would have plenty of time to enjoy all the cartridges, and realized intellectually that the feeling of deprived panic over missing something made no sense.”
People love to hate David Foster Wallace. The irony is palpable when reading critics of his writing; they at times perfectly channel Wallace in their very critique of him. Heck, I was accosted (well, maybe the recipient of a snide remark) on the subway in Boston while I was reading a DFW novel on my commute. The person said that only coddled, white suburban men read his work -- when I am none of those things and sitting right on front of the person. I immediately forgave the cynic, though, once I caught a peek of their Boston University sweater hidden inside the crevasse of a parka's open zipper. :)
David Foster Wallace is the embodiment of a particular 20th and 21st century zeitgeist, and one that if you read between the lines, predicts all the ailments we will be facing in the decades ahead.
Funny, I found this book over a decade after it was published, having been exposed to almost none of this "hype" whatsoever---and I still liked it. I don't buy his thesis that its success was due only to the "hype machine." I suppose I respect his opinion---or at least his right to having it---but I simply do not agree with it or with many of the things he says.
> The novel has moved some 60,000 copies and racked up a stack of glowing reviews as thick as it is.
As far as I know, it wasn't nominated for a single major literary award that year (at the very least, it didn't win any), and I wouldn't remotely agree that the reviews were "glowing." A quick search finds two at best ambivalent reviews: [^1] [^2]. Though their comments came later, Harold Bloom and James Wood were highly critical of Wallace, the former declaring him to have "no discernible talent." It feels terribly one-sided to mention only the stack of positive reviews. IJ was by no means a universal critical success.
> ... both [The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest], most importantly, work up an elaborate – and elaborately digressive – plot which deliberately ends as unsatisfactorily as possible.
While I can't speak for Broom. which I didn't finish, I can say that my reading of IJ's ending was that it was not at all deliberately unsatisfactory. In fact, I felt it was the opposite: it's beautiful, and it marks the moment when Gately finally gets out of his recursive cycle of addiction. I think it's where the book (whose structure is itself fascinating---a circle and/or a Sierpinski Gasket) ought to have ended, and while some could say it was unsatisfactory for them, I don't think they could claim it was deliberately so.
> There is first of all Hal Incandenza, a teenage tennis prodigy and marijuana addict who during the course of the book plays tennis and gets high a lot, and then tries to stop getting high – that’s his plot.
Isn't there a bit more to Hal's story? What about the struggle the ghost of his dead father makes to connect Hal to the world and to feelings? To exit his head, as it were? What about Hal's finding that same dad dead in the house up the hill from his school dorm? What about his recession into himself and his dislocation from language, his Kafkaesque inversion?
> Then there’s Don Gately, a former housebreaker and narcotics addict who goes straight before the book even opens and merely attempts to stay that way throughout the course of the novel – that’s his plot.
Nothing of his struggles to pray daily to a God he doesn't believe in, simply in an effort to stay sober for another 24 hours? Nothing of his role as a leader and mentor at the Ennet halfway house, or the scenes where he transcends his identity as a witless muscle-for-hire criminal upon whose head friends would close elevator doors for a laugh to connect with and care for his community? (The scene where he, in a joke apron and chef's hat, he makes pasta for the housemates brought me to tears.) Still nothing of his falling in love with Joelle? Nor of his fight in the resident's defense, his hospitalization, and his transition into a vivid memoryscape of his days as a junkie and crook?
> All of which, I suppose, is just a polite way of saying that if the author of Infinite Jest shut off his word-processor and actually went to a wine-and-cheese party he might find out what the word ‘reading’ really means
He wrote it longhand and was a recovering alcoholic/addict. No word processors or wine parties for him.
Yes, I have in certain ways fallen out of love with Infinite Jest, but I still refute the claim that there was nothing there in the first place. There was something in it for me when I read it alone in rural Thailand over a summer in 2013, and there's been something in it for many other readers I know, too. This wasn't just because we were told something was there, but because we fou...
"Nothing of his struggles to pray daily to a God he doesn't believe in, simply in an effort to stay sober for another 24 hours?"
One of the novels that affected me the most as a teen, and turned out to have even deeper meaning to me than I originally realized, I happened to look up on Amazon a decade or two on, and was startled that some reviewers said things like (paraphrasing) "this book sucks because all the characters are losers!"
Like many others in the comments, I loved Infinite Jest, for many reasons, but just to go into one in particular, I feel like David Foster Wallace’s viciously smart, sardonic, ironic, and often deeply depressing sense of humor is at its peak in IJ. There are so many things from the book that stick out to me as being memorably funny: the woman with an artificial heart who dies because a purse snatcher takes it, chasing the snatcher for several blocks while yelling, “Stop her, she’s stolen my heart!” while onlookers laugh and think it’s just some sort of couple’s tryst; the party for someone’s dissertation defense where a bunch of pretentious academics are all doing this kind of anti dance consisting of moving as little as possible so as to look like you’re not dancing, but with a kind of jerking rhythm; the description of the 90s TV special about a guy with paranoid schizophrenia afraid that the government wants to inject radioactive fluid into his brain and that he’s being chased by giant machines that will eventually catch him and consume him, who for science is injected with a radioactive solution for a PET scan and then stuck into the giant whirling scanner, a look of horror on his face as he sees his worst fears coming to life; the Canadian government minister who dies because he has a cold and cannot communicate with the person robbing his house that he cannot breathe through his nose; the teen tennis player who wears all black and is called The Darkness, meanwhile the other teen tennis player who tries to get people to call him The Viking but no one does; the whole thing with the wheelchair assassins and “to hear the squeak”; the absurdity of Helen Steeply and the even more ridiculous absurdity of Orin falling for him/her; Avril losing her shit and running around the yard with the mold her son ate held aloft, screaming for help; and so on.
Plus this all often leading into scenes that are just relentlessly tragic. Joelle freebasing way too much cocaine in the bathroom at that same party; Poor Tony winding up having a seizure and swallowing his tongue on the T; the viscerally accurate depiction throughout the book of addiction and depression; Joelle’s entire life story; Himself’s slide into madness and suicide while basically no one tried to help; the short bit of Himself talking to his alcoholic father when he was younger; and so on.
In a way it reminds me of the show Bojack Horseman, with the mix of high brow and low brow humor, unflinchingly dark narrative, and deeply flawed characters.
All of which is to say: it’s not always an easy book, but it’s definitely worth at least two reads, one to get the story and another to appreciate all of the interleaving of the various stories throughout the book.
Thank you for all the examples! I've read the book, but don't have all of it in active memory, so I appreciate your list as it helped me remember different parts. I have to look up the mold-eating part because I remember it as hilarious.
Three other more or less absurd parts of the book that I enjoyed was the (apparently true) concept of different sized arms of tennis players, subsidized time (Year of the Whopper, Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment), and how half a state in the US is turned into a giant landfill that waste is catapulted into.
The two things I remember vividly from reading the book is how funny it is, and how it would take me a page or two in the beginning of each session to get into the rhythm of the language. It's similar to Cormac McCarthy (I currently read Blood Meridian), where the special cadence of the language makes both IJ and BM very pleasurable to read.
You’re absolutely right. I can’t believe I forgot to list subsidized time and The Great Concavity (or Convexity, depending on whether the speaker is American or Canadian)! Thanks for the chuckle on my bus ride to work :)
It’s worthwhile comparing the criticism to other works such as James Joyce’s Ulyssess. Take this quote from a review in the NYT:
Few intuitive, sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend "Ulysses," James Joyce's new and mammoth volume, without going through a course of training or instruction, but the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it- even from careful perusal, one might properly say study, of it- save bewilderment and a sense of disgust. It should be companioned with a key and a glossary like the Berlitz books. Then the attentive and diligent reader would eventually get some comprehension of Mr. Joyce's message.
Such books may exist mainly for signalling status, signalling "I can afford to spend time on useless endeavors". Like a whole university degree in literature, only more condensed.
Presumably it works well because it really is extremely time consuming to read those books. The only question is how hard it is to fake having read them (how many details do you have to remember, how many details do other readers remember so that they question you about them).
Thinking about it, perhaps a degree in literature is actually an attempt to fake read all those supposedly important works (you may often only read summaries and learn to bullshit about literature).
I’m not sure I understand what you mean: Works written by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Javier Marías, Dante, Chaucer, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Montaigne, Kafka, Roberto Bolaño, Julio Cortázar, and even Shakespeare are read just for pomposity? Their content is not worth the effort in understanding them? It’s all just for putting on airs which anyone can easily do by reading a summary?
Claro que es muy fácil (Sure, it’s very easy). Quevedo is even damn easier ;-)
“Si no os picaderes más de saber más menear las negras que llevais que la lengua –dijo el otro estudiante–, vos lleváredes el primero en licencias como llevaste cola.”
Other than The Simpsons allusion, can you be more specific in how James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is “trash”? Quotes from the novel with your criticism are welcomed. I’m interested in knowing how you came to this conclusion. No need to be sorry. Thank you for the observation.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadCould you not read just the good part?
A good example of this is his point that the "level of humor" in the book is low because of a reference to "butt products". The joke isn't, "butts, haha", the joke is the satire that yea, that would be true... I mean, have you seen Instagram? Or SuperBowl ads?
I've only read about DFW's work, I haven't actually read them yet. But the quote above, in addition to your first sentence, sounds exactly like what DFW would be attempting to demonstrate an unspoken life parallel, or that it's about the journey not the destination, but even so, once the destination is reached the journey is pointless and forgotten.
There's definitely an unrealized expectation at the base of this review.
It's not too often that I see words like 'tentacular' and 'bathos' in the same article as phrases about metaphorical dick-sucking (see above).
More seriously, I've been getting more into literature and literary critique recently, and am a bit surprised about how personally affronted he seems by the book - is this sort of reaction common in literary criticism?
I prefer great authors who were serialized, e.g. dostoevsky. The works are brilliant, but the individual chapters read well, so you rarely feel like you have to just slog through the damned thing.
I think this all the time. If you've made a huge commitment to something that turned out to be worthless, it's tough to admit that to yourself and others. So I'm a bit more skeptical when I hear positive reviews of long books, colleges, investors, religions, marriage, having kids, etc.
My favorite book of all time and oddly prescient in many ways.
For instance, I'm aware of at least one startup developing the vid-chat masks Wallace wrote up with a straight face. See also snapchat filters.
“Infinite Jest is one of my fave books — but it’s still fun to read this vicious @LRB review from 1996.”
Tony O’Shaughnessy
It's now pretty clear entertainment can be neurologically addictive, as evidenced by the social media companies and their abilities to predict improved engagement.
On top of that, we've now got an attention + an opioid addiction.
If anything, DFW was just very early at predicting the medium term state, complete with national secession movements.
Not bad for a 'verbose' fiction writer.
> As usual these days, Fritz was back at the computer room, staring at data. He had that ask-me-if-I-give-a-shit look Doc had noted before in the newcomers to the groovy world of addictive behavior.
> Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
That is, "opium" here is references a painkiller; religion is viewed as a way to deaden pain and suffering. It's not about addiction.
The second time I picked up the book, I made it all the way through and thought it was absolutely brilliant. I see this in the same vein as Paul Beatty's _The Sellout_. There's a lot of stream of consciousness, there's a plethora of characters, and you have to really be paying attention to figure out exactly what's going on. These books aren't for everyone, but they're certainly important parts of American Literature.
It seems like the reviewer dislikes the book because he disagrees with this notion, citing our attachment to entertainment is more of a choice than an addiction. I however find this very profound and will be finishing the book thanks to this review.
> The theory is this: Infinite Jest is Wallace's attempt to both manifest and dramatize a revolutionary fiction style that he called for in his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." The style is one in which a new sincerity will overturn the ironic detachment that hollowed out contemporary fiction towards the end of the 20th century. Wallace was trying to write an antidote to the cynicism that had pervaded and saddened so much of American culture in his lifetime. He was trying to create an entertainment that would get us talking again.
- http://fictionadvocate.com/2012/09/19/the-infinite-jest-live...
about the merit of the book: it is one of the few books that i've read that evoked a visceral reaction in me - i felt manic and strung out (like many of the characters) while reading it. social commentary aside i think that passes bar for worthwhile literature.
The one weirdness of the review is kind of related to the main weirdness of Infinite Jest - why on earth is it related to Pynchon? I never really understood the similarity. Sure, they're both digressive writers - but so is everyone and their dog since Virginia Wolf. Why did Infinite Jest become the postmodern novel?
I think ultimately, what killed Infinite Jest to me is, on second read, it seemed dated. The driving concern - authenticity - seems to be one that sort of faded in relevance in the late oughts, then merged fairly seamlessly into a sort of teenage angst - a merger that's pretty well enacted by Infinite Jest, to be honest.
Funnily enough I think DFW would agree, in an interview somewhere (I think it was in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself) he talks about the surreal experience of seeing all the hype and raves about his book immediately after release, when he knew no one had actually had time to read it.
>“The moment he recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and that he was potentially missing it. He realized that he would have plenty of time to enjoy all the cartridges, and realized intellectually that the feeling of deprived panic over missing something made no sense.”
...ok dude. :)
David Foster Wallace is the embodiment of a particular 20th and 21st century zeitgeist, and one that if you read between the lines, predicts all the ailments we will be facing in the decades ahead.
> The novel has moved some 60,000 copies and racked up a stack of glowing reviews as thick as it is.
As far as I know, it wasn't nominated for a single major literary award that year (at the very least, it didn't win any), and I wouldn't remotely agree that the reviews were "glowing." A quick search finds two at best ambivalent reviews: [^1] [^2]. Though their comments came later, Harold Bloom and James Wood were highly critical of Wallace, the former declaring him to have "no discernible talent." It feels terribly one-sided to mention only the stack of positive reviews. IJ was by no means a universal critical success.
> ... both [The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest], most importantly, work up an elaborate – and elaborately digressive – plot which deliberately ends as unsatisfactorily as possible.
While I can't speak for Broom. which I didn't finish, I can say that my reading of IJ's ending was that it was not at all deliberately unsatisfactory. In fact, I felt it was the opposite: it's beautiful, and it marks the moment when Gately finally gets out of his recursive cycle of addiction. I think it's where the book (whose structure is itself fascinating---a circle and/or a Sierpinski Gasket) ought to have ended, and while some could say it was unsatisfactory for them, I don't think they could claim it was deliberately so.
> There is first of all Hal Incandenza, a teenage tennis prodigy and marijuana addict who during the course of the book plays tennis and gets high a lot, and then tries to stop getting high – that’s his plot.
Isn't there a bit more to Hal's story? What about the struggle the ghost of his dead father makes to connect Hal to the world and to feelings? To exit his head, as it were? What about Hal's finding that same dad dead in the house up the hill from his school dorm? What about his recession into himself and his dislocation from language, his Kafkaesque inversion?
> Then there’s Don Gately, a former housebreaker and narcotics addict who goes straight before the book even opens and merely attempts to stay that way throughout the course of the novel – that’s his plot.
Nothing of his struggles to pray daily to a God he doesn't believe in, simply in an effort to stay sober for another 24 hours? Nothing of his role as a leader and mentor at the Ennet halfway house, or the scenes where he transcends his identity as a witless muscle-for-hire criminal upon whose head friends would close elevator doors for a laugh to connect with and care for his community? (The scene where he, in a joke apron and chef's hat, he makes pasta for the housemates brought me to tears.) Still nothing of his falling in love with Joelle? Nor of his fight in the resident's defense, his hospitalization, and his transition into a vivid memoryscape of his days as a junkie and crook?
> All of which, I suppose, is just a polite way of saying that if the author of Infinite Jest shut off his word-processor and actually went to a wine-and-cheese party he might find out what the word ‘reading’ really means
He wrote it longhand and was a recovering alcoholic/addict. No word processors or wine parties for him.
Yes, I have in certain ways fallen out of love with Infinite Jest, but I still refute the claim that there was nothing there in the first place. There was something in it for me when I read it alone in rural Thailand over a summer in 2013, and there's been something in it for many other readers I know, too. This wasn't just because we were told something was there, but because we fou...
One of the novels that affected me the most as a teen, and turned out to have even deeper meaning to me than I originally realized, I happened to look up on Amazon a decade or two on, and was startled that some reviewers said things like (paraphrasing) "this book sucks because all the characters are losers!"
Plus this all often leading into scenes that are just relentlessly tragic. Joelle freebasing way too much cocaine in the bathroom at that same party; Poor Tony winding up having a seizure and swallowing his tongue on the T; the viscerally accurate depiction throughout the book of addiction and depression; Joelle’s entire life story; Himself’s slide into madness and suicide while basically no one tried to help; the short bit of Himself talking to his alcoholic father when he was younger; and so on.
In a way it reminds me of the show Bojack Horseman, with the mix of high brow and low brow humor, unflinchingly dark narrative, and deeply flawed characters.
All of which is to say: it’s not always an easy book, but it’s definitely worth at least two reads, one to get the story and another to appreciate all of the interleaving of the various stories throughout the book.
Three other more or less absurd parts of the book that I enjoyed was the (apparently true) concept of different sized arms of tennis players, subsidized time (Year of the Whopper, Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment), and how half a state in the US is turned into a giant landfill that waste is catapulted into.
The two things I remember vividly from reading the book is how funny it is, and how it would take me a page or two in the beginning of each session to get into the rhythm of the language. It's similar to Cormac McCarthy (I currently read Blood Meridian), where the special cadence of the language makes both IJ and BM very pleasurable to read.
https://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/in...
Few intuitive, sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend "Ulysses," James Joyce's new and mammoth volume, without going through a course of training or instruction, but the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it- even from careful perusal, one might properly say study, of it- save bewilderment and a sense of disgust. It should be companioned with a key and a glossary like the Berlitz books. Then the attentive and diligent reader would eventually get some comprehension of Mr. Joyce's message.
http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/the-very-first-reviews-of...
Presumably it works well because it really is extremely time consuming to read those books. The only question is how hard it is to fake having read them (how many details do you have to remember, how many details do other readers remember so that they question you about them).
Thinking about it, perhaps a degree in literature is actually an attempt to fake read all those supposedly important works (you may often only read summaries and learn to bullshit about literature).
“Si no os picaderes más de saber más menear las negras que llevais que la lengua –dijo el otro estudiante–, vos lleváredes el primero en licencias como llevaste cola.”
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha
No es tan remotamente complejo como para un inglés entendiendo a Shakespeare.
"Si no te jactases de saber menear la espada que llevas más que de la lengua, serías el primero en licenciarte en vez del último". O similar.
"Infinite Jest" is okay, but needs an editor badly.