Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

review by: Matthew Scrivner
Date: 10/18/02

This book addresses the Oprah world, addresses talk shows and television, media and pop-culture, most effectively of all on the list, both through a satire of it, and through a genuine compassion for those who are viewers of it, or participators, or, potential talk show guests. The title refers to a short independent film that pops up throughout all the other plots and chains several seemingly unrelated characters together. This film is allegedly so entertaining and enjoyable that anyone one who starts to view it, inevitably cannot stop watching it and begins, in turn, to starve to death as they watch it again and again and again.

The whole book is basically a hyperactive post-modern comic meditation on addiction and entertainment, on family relationships and how they resolve our cultural preferences, on sports obsessions (those of athletes and to some extent fans). It's set in a future where our government has sunk so low as to have subsidized everything to corporations, including the names of years.

No, really. In fact the book opens in the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarments.

So there is a lot of silliness here. And just plain old weirdness, and Wallace's narrative voice is so strangely self-aware and neurotic that after the first few hundred pages you find yourself talking and thinking in these grammatical grotesqueries. You'll sit down to write an email to grandma and out will come something like, "and but also therefore consequently however then yet anyhow I digress." I found this pretty funny and my guess is that this is intentional and not merely a by-product of some personal neurosis on Wallace's part. The book constantly references the Oxford English Diction and Ludwig Wittgenstein and in general seems to be language-obsessed on a level par with Ulysses. The difference between Infinite Jest and Ulysses is that at least Infinite Jest isn't taking itself so fucking seriously.

Here's the trick to this book, and I can't figure out if this is a strength or a weakness: what continually occurs is that the scope of attempted satire is so large that it really just ends up continually satirizing itself. It's a monster to carry around, and you sure as hell won't be able to whip it out on the subway-it's well over a thousand pages, and a good tenth of this is actually footnotes (in fact there are footnotes for the footnotes and footnotes for the footnotes of the footnotes, and there is a good deal of flipping back and forth between the front and the back of the book.)

But the payoff is worth it. For me, reading Infinite Jest was like watching an intelligent, strange, cartoon. The reality is just elastic enough, and the situations just wacky enough, and when it ended, I was sad, the world it exists in is built up on so many amazing and strange levels that for a bit, everything else just felt monochrome.

review by: Stephan Finch
Date: 12/1/02

David Foster Wallace created a deafening buzz in 1996 by publishing a book that was thicker than it was tall. That alone was a record. Wallace's book was aptly titled Infinite Jest. A few puzzled readers said the most remarkable thing about Infinite Jest was that it went on for 1,000 pages without making any point whatsoever.

But the problem wasn't that Infinite Jest lacked a point. Oh no. By page six, it was clear that David Foster Herbert Walker Wallace had a point. DFHWW wanted you to know that modern life, modern media and modern society is confusing, inhumane and unwelcoming to difference. Fine. (Just for the sake of simplicity, let's set aside the matter of this being very little more than what J.D. Salinger told us decades ago.) The problem was that by page 500, DFHWW had hammered that point home so relentlessly that readers began to wonder if maybe there was some other point besides the first point that they should be looking for. And by page 1,100, with DFHWW continuing to clobber the shit out of the the first point and showing no interest in making a second point, readers became so desperately numb, they forgot, or lost interest in, the original point.

But that's not where the problems stopped. The novel's biggest weakness was that it didn't have a plot. It didn't have a conflict. It didn't have a protagonist. It didn't have any of those perfectly useful little gimmicks that writers and storytellers and readers have come to expect. Why? Well, because David Foster Herbert Walker Wallace knew that, first, developing any of these things would have been hard work and, second, because the existence of any of them would have made Infinite Jest easier to understand. And that, my friends, is poison to self-anointed geniuses like DFHWW. Because shucks, it's not supposed to be easy to understand a genius.

So what did we get instead of a plot and a conflict? We got footnotes. Pages and pages of them. Oh, and tennis. We got more damn tennis than a decade of Sports Illustrated could give us. Oh, baby, did we ever get a lot of tennis. Tennis, tennis, tennis. But you know what? Some people were actually thrilled about this. They said it was genius. And get this: They weren't tennis fans. They were college grads.

Yep. Some of those same skinny bastards you used to see strolling across campus with Moliere or Dante or Homer tucked under their arms. Only now it was Infinite Jest. The calculus was simple. Back in college, great literature was usually a little hard to understand. So now, by golly, something that's hard to understand... Well, that must be great literature.

Um... Didn't anybody tell these guys that the overwhelming majority of great books were wildly popular in their day? Henry Fielding is considered difficult to read. But back in the 1700s, people loved to hear his stuff aloud. Jane Austen. Dickens. Hemmingway... all wrote best-sellers. They wanted desperately to be understood by their readers, to draw them in with the music of language and entertain them with a well-plotted story of a hero struggling to overcome a conflict.

Yes, great writers consistently challenge their readers by trying a new idea, even a distasteful one. Nabokov's Lolita comes to mind. Not a mediocre book. Beautifully written. And meant to be understood and enjoyed.