Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, reviewed by Lucas
"Many things have been written about Infinite Jest, probably too many. But I am adding my two cents to the collection nonetheless.
Writing about this book is difficult: it is like trying to sum up a moment of my life, a passage of time, wherein so many things happened both within and without the book. This is something that anyone who perseveres and makes a little headway in this book
quickly realizes: any attempt at a summation of this book is necessarily incomplete, any reading of this book is predicated on the reader (try explaining this book to your seatmate on the bus when they ask: they will ask) – something that could be said of any book, but in the case of Infinite Jest, due to its sheer volume alone, carries with it new implications. Having said that, this is only one person’s understanding of the book.
The first thing that the reader confronts when starting this book is just how fucking huge it is; carting it around feels like tending to a small animal: don’t forget it somewhere or you will never see it again; be aware of it’s needs and priorities, because it rarely takes
yours into account; don’t neglect it for too long or it you might have to part with it for good. But once you have resigned yourself to never reading another book again – yeah, it feels like this sometimes – you are better off. The very process of reading such a book as this itself becomes the reason to read, no longer are you worried about getting to the end or hearing the conclusion of the tangle of plots that clutter these pages: you learn to take it page by page, not to get caught up in some vain desire to have already read it, some
conceit of accomplishment, but to just read, just to live with it.
And in some ways this is what the book is about. Ostensibly, it is a book about a boy, Hal Incandenza, who lives at Enfield Tennis Academy, and a man, Don Gately, who lives at the halfway house down the hill from ETA, although they never meet; it is about
Madame Psychosis, her radio show, and her drug habit; it is about Hal’s family, or the wacky near-future United States that gives much of New England to Canada in exchange for rights to use the land as a dumping ground that becomes infested with feral hamsters
and other fabled creatures, or the international intrigue surrounding a video that leaves its viewers catatonic, or drugs – mostly it’s about drugs. But no one ever tells you this when asked what the books is about; there is an undercurrent beneath all this: the book
is in many ways a book about how shitty life is, about coping with the fact that most everything sucks big time. It is also about how people deal with this fact, and how they in turn deal with the consequences of dealing with this fact poorly or in still shittier ways.
This makes it sound depressing; it isn’t. It is actually hilarious – I became that person who laughs uncontrollably in public for no discernable reason whatsoever while I was reading it. And it isn’t just “highbrow” humor (whatever that means): the jokes range
from biting social commentary to pure slapstick (a boy’s forehead gets stuck to a frozen window at one point and “hilarity ensues” as they say in bad movie trailers). The students of ETA play a game in the few spare moments afforded them called Eschaton, a
tennis-lob-based game complete with arcane mathematical calculations and geo-political considerations (only private school kids could conceive of such a game), the ultimate outcome of which being complete global annihilation (within the confines of the game,
of course). The absurdity-ad-infinitum throughout parodies the banality of much of what comprises our lives: endless lists of unpronounceable ailments; the President’s lack of interest in anything not directly related to cleanliness; the vanity of using video-chat technology.
The book, as I failed to make explicit above (maybe I didn’t?!), is about taking life one day at a time, dealing with things as they come to you – like they teach in AA – not to get ahead of yourself or worry inconsolably about what is just coming around the corner, not
to opt out of life because it seems easier (it isn’t) or fail to deal with the hard parts; just to live with it. The process is the point."
