Infinite Jest
By Juliana Jackson
Monday 19th October 2009
Monday 19th October 2009
It would truly take an infinite summer to read Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s monster of a novel. The Infinite Summer Project, created by “thinker-upper” Matthew Baldwin in memory of the author, who committed suicide last year, urged anyone and everyone to read the thousand-page novel, starting roughly around June 21st and finishing it sometime around September 22nd. There were deadlines for those who wanted them, but they weren’t required; at the end of each week, various guides posted reflections and/or analysis of that week’s reading on the project’s website, infinitesummer.org. I heard about the project when my favorite blogger, Mimi Smartypants, endorsed it on the grounds that she really, really loved the novel (if anyone is interested, the article that convinced me to read this novel can be found at http://infinitesummer.org/archives/106). Well, I thought, okay. I hadn't previously meant to ever read Infinite Jest, because who would voluntarily plow through a thousand pages of postmodernism on his or her summer break? That's the thing, I guess: very few people try this without some external motivation. It's daunting to start at page 1 of a book that looks big enough to eat you. But here was my motivation, so come June 21st, I started on my quest to finish Infinite Jest and all its endnotes.
To be honest, I was enamored with it at first. I read it during my lunch breaks and when I got home from work and on my family vacation. It is a fascinating book. Set in the near future, mostly in a tennis academy and a house for recovering drug addicts, Infinite Jest takes the reader into a world that appears, in day to day life, to be similar to our own but is in fact a vastly different political and media climate. David Foster Wallace throws you into this world without any explanation, and it is up to the reader to figure out just what the hell is going on. It's exciting. It's a literary mystery. I felt like a detective, unraveling Wallace's setting, marking clues with post-it notes and referring back to important events in the book when, finally, some new fact was unveiled and pulled together seemingly separate threads of the story or illuminating events that had previously seemed insignificant. For example, instead of denoting the years with numbers, they are referred to by subsidized products -- The Year of the Adult Depends Undergarment, etc. -- with the effect that it is hard to know, when the story jumps to a different year, exactly where in the timeline of events you are. This confusion is only cleared up a few hundred pages into the novel, when Wallace finally (finally!) writes out a chronological list of years. Even then, unless you want to memorize all the years in order, you must keep referring back to the list. It's things like this -- and other hidden bits of information that allow the reader to make sense of the story -- that makes the novel so exciting to read. Besides the exhilaration of working through Wallace’s literary technique, the novel is driven by the characters who are at once familiar and realistic (if somewhat odd) and impossible to figure out, and Wallace addresses issues and philosophies that are dear to my heart. Some of the core themes of the novel both deal with and exemplify in their execution the ways in which humans connect and communicate. And the first time that Wallace brought up self-transcendence, my heart pitter-pattered with existential lust.
How, then, could I give up just after I got used to flipping to the infinite endnotes and just before I hit page 500? Why, if I was enjoying myself so much, did I stop when I already had so much under my belt? Maybe I was getting fed up with the constant attention that Infinite Jest -- and the Infinite Summer deadline -- required or maybe I was just plain bored by the plot, which didn't seem to move at all for a hundred pages. I couldn't see where it was going. It was like a stale relationship -- I foresaw no future with this slow-going plot and I was only sticking by it because of our two-month history and for tenacity's sake. By August I was sneaking off with other, novella-length books on my lunch breaks, promising Infinite Jest that I would get back to it tomorrow, really. But I didn't. I let poor Infinite Jest languish on my coffee table until I left for Europe in late August, at which point I officially Gave Up and left my copy at home.
So here is the moral of my story and the point of my review: by all means, start Infinite Jest. Enjoy it. But don't feel obligated to finish it in one go. I didn't, and I'm certain that I'm happier this way. Someday I'd like to go back to it; there is certainly enough genius in its pages to draw me in again. However, there is just so much of the novel that it is perhaps too much a test of endurance. Although parts are brilliant, some of it drags on too long and loses the reader along the way. Not every chapter is interesting enough or well-written enough to hold the reader’s interest. Especially if you are reading it on a deadline, as in the Infinite Summer project, the novel can take up all of your free time and make you resent the work it takes to reads. If it gets to that stage, you’ve gone too far; put the book down and take a month-long (or six-month or year-long) break.
Still, I applaud the project’s ultimate aim, which is to get readers to finally tackle the books about which they’ve always said, “I keep meaning to read that”. This fall they’re taking on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which has, in fact, been on my reading list for years. If I can find the time, I will definitely try to keep up, and I urge everyone else to try it, too. But if you find yourself staring at the novel’s cover on your table, willing yourself to find the motivation to pick it up again, don’t.* Life is too short to read boring books.
*Author’s caveat: If you are unwilling to pick the book up again because the content is overwhelming or makes you uncomfortable, do it anyway. You may only give up on a book because you object to execution, not content.
To be honest, I was enamored with it at first. I read it during my lunch breaks and when I got home from work and on my family vacation. It is a fascinating book. Set in the near future, mostly in a tennis academy and a house for recovering drug addicts, Infinite Jest takes the reader into a world that appears, in day to day life, to be similar to our own but is in fact a vastly different political and media climate. David Foster Wallace throws you into this world without any explanation, and it is up to the reader to figure out just what the hell is going on. It's exciting. It's a literary mystery. I felt like a detective, unraveling Wallace's setting, marking clues with post-it notes and referring back to important events in the book when, finally, some new fact was unveiled and pulled together seemingly separate threads of the story or illuminating events that had previously seemed insignificant. For example, instead of denoting the years with numbers, they are referred to by subsidized products -- The Year of the Adult Depends Undergarment, etc. -- with the effect that it is hard to know, when the story jumps to a different year, exactly where in the timeline of events you are. This confusion is only cleared up a few hundred pages into the novel, when Wallace finally (finally!) writes out a chronological list of years. Even then, unless you want to memorize all the years in order, you must keep referring back to the list. It's things like this -- and other hidden bits of information that allow the reader to make sense of the story -- that makes the novel so exciting to read. Besides the exhilaration of working through Wallace’s literary technique, the novel is driven by the characters who are at once familiar and realistic (if somewhat odd) and impossible to figure out, and Wallace addresses issues and philosophies that are dear to my heart. Some of the core themes of the novel both deal with and exemplify in their execution the ways in which humans connect and communicate. And the first time that Wallace brought up self-transcendence, my heart pitter-pattered with existential lust.
How, then, could I give up just after I got used to flipping to the infinite endnotes and just before I hit page 500? Why, if I was enjoying myself so much, did I stop when I already had so much under my belt? Maybe I was getting fed up with the constant attention that Infinite Jest -- and the Infinite Summer deadline -- required or maybe I was just plain bored by the plot, which didn't seem to move at all for a hundred pages. I couldn't see where it was going. It was like a stale relationship -- I foresaw no future with this slow-going plot and I was only sticking by it because of our two-month history and for tenacity's sake. By August I was sneaking off with other, novella-length books on my lunch breaks, promising Infinite Jest that I would get back to it tomorrow, really. But I didn't. I let poor Infinite Jest languish on my coffee table until I left for Europe in late August, at which point I officially Gave Up and left my copy at home.
So here is the moral of my story and the point of my review: by all means, start Infinite Jest. Enjoy it. But don't feel obligated to finish it in one go. I didn't, and I'm certain that I'm happier this way. Someday I'd like to go back to it; there is certainly enough genius in its pages to draw me in again. However, there is just so much of the novel that it is perhaps too much a test of endurance. Although parts are brilliant, some of it drags on too long and loses the reader along the way. Not every chapter is interesting enough or well-written enough to hold the reader’s interest. Especially if you are reading it on a deadline, as in the Infinite Summer project, the novel can take up all of your free time and make you resent the work it takes to reads. If it gets to that stage, you’ve gone too far; put the book down and take a month-long (or six-month or year-long) break.
Still, I applaud the project’s ultimate aim, which is to get readers to finally tackle the books about which they’ve always said, “I keep meaning to read that”. This fall they’re taking on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which has, in fact, been on my reading list for years. If I can find the time, I will definitely try to keep up, and I urge everyone else to try it, too. But if you find yourself staring at the novel’s cover on your table, willing yourself to find the motivation to pick it up again, don’t.* Life is too short to read boring books.
*Author’s caveat: If you are unwilling to pick the book up again because the content is overwhelming or makes you uncomfortable, do it anyway. You may only give up on a book because you object to execution, not content.