Book Review

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Opening the cover of Infinite Jest and starting to read is like opening your eyes at the bottom of a rabbit hole several levels below Alice's rabbit hole without having Alice's advantage of knowing she fell down a rabbit hole. Where are you? You're in the O.N.A.N. When are you? It's the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment. Everything looks mostly familiar, but everything is, somehow, ... off.

Most authors follow the rules of Rhetoric 101; tell the reader what you are going to tell them, tell them, tell the reader what you just told them. David Foster Wallace does not follow the rules. Like waking up at the bottom of a rabbit hole, like life, you are left to learn the rules from contextual clues; obscure contextual clues. This is not an easy read. This requires you to actively participate, to willingly follow the rabbit down into the dark. And be left there.

SparkNotes had just started to build their Infinite Jest page when I started the book. There are a myriad of websites and blogs about the book. I found the Infinite Jest Wiki, infinitejest.wallacewiki.com, most helpful for guideposts along the way. Or you can just dive in head first and find your own way without the burden of anybody else's impressions. Either way offers rich intellectual, mind expanding rewards. And if that's your plan, if that's the approach you want to take, then go now and good luck. The rest of what I have to say will mar your virgin experience.

An early reviewer of Neil Gaiman's had dismissed a story of his as "facetious nonsense." Oh, but what delicious nonsense it is. Infinite Jest is kind of like that; satire that may leave you scratching your head wondering what's the point. But the trip is so much fun. The point is to enjoy the ride.

The Seattle Times described it as: "... most thorough dissection of America’s addiction to just about everything, including treatment itself .… a high-energy satire of ’90s America." Kirkus Reviews said it's: "a raucous Falstaffian, deadly serious vision of a cartwheeling culture in the selfpleasuring throes of self-destruction.…"

Taking place, in part, in a junior tennis academy it's part Zen guide to the sport:
"Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary."

Down the hill from the tennis academy is an addiction recovery and treatment center. Here we get long meditations on the nature of addiction, recovery, spiritualism, psychotic depression, and suicide. Having been a junior tennis prodigy, an addict, an addict in recovery, and a sufferer of depression that ultimately proved fatal, these glimpses of a world most of us will never see are told by an insider, by someone embedded with the troops on the front lines of trying to survive our society's failures.

On a hill, a cliff, outside Tucson two men spend the night discussing current events, acting like something of a Greek Chorus making comments on the sociopolitical environment, mocking intelligence agencies and covert operatives in the process.

In the middle of it all is a woman so beautiful she's Hideously Deformed making us realize that we treat extreme beauty not that much differently than we treat extreme ugliness; looking only at the surface without seeing past to what's within.

The narration is stream-of-consciousness and casts a wide net, but read it all, including the endnotes, because buried in all of it are the contextual clues you're going to need later. Have patience. Keep reading. It may take several hundred pages, but eventually it all gets explained. Along the way you'll get treated to some really delicious dialogue and prose, the author using the same syntax for the narration as his characters bringing the whole thing to breathing, heaving, throbbing life. Like his junior intellectuals, he free associates meanings, uses words in new contexts, uses obscure words, misspells words, and sometimes just makes stuff up.

Published in 1996 it takes place at some unspecified point in the near future. Best guesses are around 2008, but considering Canada has a handsome Prime Minister and the US has a celebrity president making a mess of things it feels very current. As speculative science-fiction, it's a bit like reading Orwell's 1984 in the '90s; if 1984 was satire. Good luck.



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