Guest Post - Infinite Jest, Take Two

Guest blogger (and son) Ernesto, who gave me this book to read, offers his take:
W/r/t my second complete reading of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest:

While I am baffled that I spent several months reading/lugging this humongous book everywhere (again!), it was all worthwhile. Like with any re-examination of something, I found that a lot was gained, more details observed, and the deeply interwoven world of the book came into full focus.

The main questions I am left with are:
Why does JOI [James O. Incandenza, as a ghost] choose to visit Gately of all people?
Why does Orin [JOI's eldest son] decide to unleash the Entertainment?
The ambiguities of the novel's end are numerous, but like any text so massive, many of the answers can be found within. The master copy of the entertainment which JOI had interred inside his cranium is missing when Hal [Incandenza], Joelle [Prettiest Girl of All Time aka PGOAT], Gately, and John Wayne unearth his remains. The imprisoned Orin cuts a deal with the AFR, giving them the location of the master. The shadow government of the ONAN is prepared to handle the onslaught of the paralyzing entertainment with PSAs and mass electrical outages.

The first time I finished, I was flabbergasted by the lack of closure even with these hints. However, a gimmick I discovered on the internet offered a more comfortable resolution: Flip to the start and read through the first section, ending on page 17. Doing so places the reader at the latest chronological point in the story, the last year of subsidized time. It also refreshes for us all of the poignant details of Hal's opening inner monologue. And since one has already sunken weeks of time into the book, clearly showing some obsession, it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to flip to the beginning and start over (ala the Entertainment or a Substance).

The use of style in the book is likewise infectious, giving the reader a repertoire of slang from across the Bostonian class spectrum. The colloquial writing makes the book even more digestible, at least once you get over the hump of the first 200 pages. The main narrative is colored with disturbing stories told both by individuals from and on their way into AA and nearly indecipherable nuggets of AAVE or phonetic Irish-English. These sections are so numerous and seemingly unconnected, but not a single character or tangent stands alone.

The twisted version of America (ONAN) from a dimension where things are just a shade worse is compelling as well. Not only is it futuristic in its predictions -- 1996 was a long time ago, technologically speaking -- but the technology itself moves people to be radically anti-social (see the section on videophones and the mask industry that comes about as a result). This deeply sad America is caught up in spontaneously disseminated entertainment (cough Netflix, cough cough Amazon Prime) and advertising agencies literally own time itself. The amalgamated TelePuter combines our society's favorite technological distractions into one (as we see rapidly occurring with video-streaming technology). The late Ray Bradbury often pointed out that science fiction's visions of our future serve best as a warning. Infinite Jest should be considered in the same way, something to admonish us and give us pause as we creep deeper into self-absorption and indulgence.

One of  the recurring points in DFW's writing, whether it's short stories, speeches, or in IJ is an urging for human beings to be compassionate; to strive to understand and love someone other than oneself. JOI's stated purpose for having made the entertainment was to get an emotional response out of Hal, to show beyond a doubt that he loved his son despite his own emotional distance and crippling alcoholism. In curbing his own addiction, Hal becomes (by all appearances) a rabid and horrifying animal, which adds to the dark irony of JOI's attempt to elicit emotions from his son.
It's easy to see that Wallace writes what he knows: depression (for which he received electro-shock therapy), addiction/recovery programs, and competitive junior tennis. Reading this 1079 page story for the second time I can't help but applaud David Foster Wallace for creating a world so simultaneously colorful and flawed and an opus so magnum.

Infinite Jest

I finished David Foster Wallace's massive novel today - whew. At this point I'm not sure whether he just ran out of steam, or reached what he considered an end-point - certainly some large issues are left unresolved.

By the end we know why Hal Incandenza, sighted at the beginning having a meltdown at a college interview, cannot produce words to back up whatever interest he's supposed to have in matriculating. And we can infer what happens to Don Gately, the live-in staffer of a halfway house for addicts whose story holds our attention for the last 40% of the book. But we don't find out about the Quebec Separatists - does their rebellion succeed, or do they remain in the shadows, waging guerrilla warfare on choice targets? Do they get their hands on a master (reproducible) tape of The Entertainment, a film so compelling that those who view it are reduced to an infantile state, incapable of any action except repeated viewings, so that through broad dissemination they can bring O.N.A.N. into helpless compliance?

Instead of answering these questions, Wallace introduces even more characters through recollection, only some of whose stories feel satisfactory (satisfactory in the sense of having a beginning, middle and end, with characters developing and changing as a consequence of the narrated events).

What can an editor say? He invests in certain plot-lines and devices, only to abandon them short of resolution. It is a novelist's prerogative to "throw in the kitchen sink," including whatever shows up during the writing - short stories are required to be to-the-point, with extraneous material cut. But whether we're talking Ulysses, Moby Dick or Anna Karenina, the longer form accommodates digressions. However, those books, in my experience, have cohesion in the sense that everything in them leads one, by varying paths, to a conclusion. Melville's hundreds of pages of riffs on whale behavior, the polycultural milieu of a whaling ship, and the obsessions of its crew, prepare us thoroughly for the grand finale in which the Pequod and the white whale have their fatal encounter.

I can't say this of Infinite Jest - some of its subplots, while fascinating, contribute nothing to the fate of the characters we have come to care about, and things we want to know are left hanging. Is this incompleteness an enticement to obsessives to dig deeper, through multiple readings and heated discussions, to some mystic level where it all meshes? I feel as though I have committed many hours to a particularly long and convoluted shaggy dog story.

Not that I wasted my time - Wallace was a gifted user of language, from such well-coined phrases as "advanced worry" and "windbagathon stories" to "gave him the howling fantods" - it is always a pleasure to read someone who can give us those Aha! moments when words mirror the world. And though he only uses first person with Hal Incandenza, episodes are frequently in the POV of a character, with that person's imprecision and self-interruption coloring the descriptions: "Gately has to monitor the like emotional barometer in the House and put a wet finger to the wind for potential conflicts and issues and rumors." If I have a criticism of this, it's that even in omniscient narrator mode, Wallace sprinkles "like" through the text, Valley-girl style, as though this cousin of "y'know" has a contribution to make.

When one invests a whole book in a mystery, the revelation had better be good. I admit to disappointment with discovering the content of The Entertainment - would that really render every viewer a semi-comatose drooling idiot? Perhaps Wallace's appeal is principally to obsessives, who can dig to their hearts' content through the minutiae he has provided.

I'm more drawn to the Douglas Adams school of revelation: a spectacularly egocentric character, Zaphod Beeblebrox, emerges unscathed from the Total Perspective Vortex: "When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."" (from Wikipedia quoting "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe") This reduces most people to babbling. But not Zaphod. "When it showed him the "You Are Here" marker, Zaphod correctly interpreted the Vortex as simply telling him that he was the most important being in the universe." (Wikipedia again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Total_Perspective_Vortex)

Infinite Jest, Round 1

My son Ernesto gave me a copy of David Foster Wallace's doorstop of a novel, Infinite Jest, a few months ago, and we agreed to read it together this summer. Alas, summer will be long gone before we finish. But on we trudge. I am now a third of the way into this exploration of obsession, addiction, waste and tennis in the near future.

Obsession and addiction are the same thing, experienced by different aspects of one's being. Obsession occurs when the mind is trapped in orbit around a particular object, behavior or interest. Addiction is the same stuckness, manifesting physically. One is hardly superior to the other: if you can't play your best competitive tennis without your special rituals, clothing and equipment, you're addicted no less than the person whose body has been invaded by need for a particular tickle: coke, 'drines, sex, alcohol, pot, etc., and will do whatever is necessary to obtain it. 

Either one diminishes the rest of the world.

Almost 400 pages into IJ, I've found a character who seems "normal", though that is a consequence of damage: Schacht is an "under-18" tennis player whose ranking is on the wane thanks to the one-two punch of Crohn's disease and a permanently injured knee. He can still play, but not at the champion level. Unlike his classmates who oscillate between obsessives' poles of tennis and recreational drugs, he accepts his lot. He's studying to become a dentist, and his game has reached a Zen zone with a high achievement-for-effort ratio because winning no longer matters. Likewise he can take or leave the drugs. He is free, and so far he's the only character I can think of able to make such a claim.

As for waste: as we learn the history of O.N.A.N. (Organization of North American Nations, which excludes the Concavity where separatist Quebec seethes), we begin to grasp that the consumption on which our economy has been built since the end of WWII has generated a waste stream so massive that we've run out of places to dump it. It appears that the waste zone for toxic North American residue is The Concavity, and from the Boston area, near its border, regular launches by the E.W.D. (Empire Waste Disposal) are shot skyward - though probably not into orbit (I haven't got there yet).

An obsessively notated book offering obsessive amounts of detail about its topics seems a natural spawning-ground for obsessives, and all you have to do is Google Infinite Jest to see that they are legion. DFW's end-notes expand in likewise obsessive fashion on the subject of mention, whether that is a game of chicken played by young men in Quebec, or the filmography of the Incandenza family patriarch, or a phone conversation between brothers which reveals a great deal about certain events in that family. You can no more skip the end-notes than you could skip dozens of pages in the body of the novel - they are part of the story. Whether much of the information offered in the almost 100 pages of end notes belongs there (as opposed to nested in the narrative), is a moot question. There it is, and there you'd better read it.

Still, he has a way with words. How can any writer fail to love a sentence like this:

[Schacht is] one of those people who don't need much, much less much more. ?

There are some very funny moments (which I won't relate here, since that would both pull them out of context and spoil the surprise of coming upon them) - not infinite, perhaps, but some good laughs. It has taken awhile, but somewhere between a quarter of the way in and a third, I have identified the outlines of a story I want to follow. What happens to these people? What happens to these nations? I'm sure those answers lie ahead.