I finally finished Infinite Jest (and it wasn't that hard)
Yes, I'm going to do the footnotes thing...
Infinite Jest isn’t that difficult; writing about it certainly is
I’m kind of freaking out right now. Not a major panic attack. I don’t have enough Substack subscribers to warrant a major panic attack. I have nothing to maintain. But I have no idea what I’m going to say in this piece. Not a clue.
I liked Infinite Jest a lot. I thought I would suffer more than I did. Having some awareness of Wallace’s main ideas from his non-fiction work was a help. Did it change my life? I don’t think so. Whatever this piece will be, it won’t be “words cannot describe the overwhelming euphoria that swept over me when I turned the final page on this book”. IJ (I will be abbreviating from now on) is over 1,000 pages long, and as usually happens with books of this length, I’d moved on around page seven hundred or so.1 I had other things I wanted to do with my life all of a sudden. That’s not a criticism of IJ, that’s just the way it is.
Tell you what. Before we get to the review bit, if there is a review bit, I’ll give y’all some pointers on how to get into this supposedly impenetrable novel.
What You Need to Know
#1 - According to many online sources, IJ is set in the year 2009, which in 1996, was considered the future. I’m not sure how these experts know the book takes place in that year. From what I remember, 2009 is not mentioned once. I guess it’s a calculation based on the story’s unique calendar structure. Speaking of which:
#2 - Subsidized time. As in, big corporations get to name an entire year after their product. Imagine instead of 2024, we were in Year of Mitsubishi. Most of the action (if you can call it action) takes place in The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or Y.D.A.U
#3 - From Wikipedia: “in the novel's future world, the United States, Canada, and Mexico together compose a unified North American superstate known as the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N”
#4 - The U.S. president is an ex-crooner named Johnny Gentle, and yes, he does remind one of Donald Trump.
#5 - Also from Wikipedia: “much of what used to be the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada has become a giant hazardous waste dump, an area "given" to Canada and known as the "Great Concavity" by Americans due to the resulting displacement of the border”
#6 - The Incandenzas. Father James (or “himself), experimental filmmaker, opener of Enfield Tennis Academy. Commits suicide through microwave. Mother Avril. Herself. has a thing for the star player at the academy. Eldest brother Orin. Womanizer. Refers to women throughout as “subjects”. Middle brother Hal. One of two protagonists. Kind of bland in a Pip way. Youngest Mario. Mildly disabled. Into technology. Technical assistant to his father, then a producer for a campus radio program hosted by Madame Pscyhosis.
#7 - The other protagonist is one Don Gately. His arc from small-time crook to AA staff member is one of the more lucid. He is also probably Wallace’s mouthpiece, as the author himself spent time in rehab2 and learned to embrace clichés about living in the now and taking one day at a time.
#8 - And of course, the titular Infinite Jest, a film made by James Incandenza said to be so entertaining that it is both banned and weaponized by various factions.
Notable Minor Characters
Lyle. A fitness guru, bordering on life coach3 who seemingly lives in ETA’s gym.
Katie Gompert. Perennially suicidal AA member. We can’t help but think of Wallace’s own fate when reading of Gompert. There are three strands of autobiography, then: underage tennis, substance abuse, and unfortunately, suicide.
John Wayne. Best player in the academy. Fucks Avril Incandenza in her office. That was a spoiler. Sorry. You’re probably not going to read this book anyway so it doesn’t matter.
Madame Psychosis/Joelle Van Dyne. Could be considered a major character too, I suppose. Right on the border. Has a romance with both Orin and James Incandenza. So the Hamlet, Oedipal thing. Wears a veil for a reason I can’t remember. Stars in many of Himself’s films, Mia Farrow style.
Ortho “The Darkness” Stice. Another ETA member who, near the end when IJ suddenly turns into an episode of Scooby Doo, gets his tongue stuck to a frozen window. Can’t remember too much else about him.
Remy Marathe and Hugh Steeply. Lumping these two together because they are inextricably linked. They have the world’s longest conversation from April 30th into the 1st May. Hugh Steeply doubles as a female journalist named Helen (not the only thing that wouldn’t fly nowadays). Marathe is a double or triple agent or something selling secrets to pay to treat his wife’s illness. Rather than dumping the whole conversation in one go, the book returns to their conversation (which takes place on a cliff face) intermittently. It gets a bit tedious. Steeply brought my mind back to Denise Bryson from Twin Peaks. Not a stretch given that Wallace was a huge Lynch fan. 4
Fooling the Academics
The hero worship Wallace attracts is amusing to me, since he seems to take the piss a lot. Perhaps he is playing a Bob Dylan; knowing that people will take his every word to have profound meaning and throwing out some red herrings for the gullible. Or maybe there is a deeper meaning to everything. I dunno.
Take for example Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, or The Wheelchair Assassins, a Quebec rebel group who are after The Entertainment for leverage. 5 Now imagine you are writing an academic paper on why Wallace chose to place these deadly figures in wheelchairs. You may say he was trying to expose the ridiculousness of war by creating such silly soldiers. You may say he was making a point about the circularity of human destruction. You may see it as a comment on how excessive pleasure disables the thinking man. You cannot say that Wallace was just having a laugh. I think he was.
Play the same game with Ortho Stice. Tell me, PHD student, why did Wallace choose to end his novel with a fairly unimportant character nearly being de-tongued? You can’t say “Because the writer probably thought it was funny”. Go, write down your answer. Bring it to me at the end of class.
Then there’s Eschaton, the second-greatest fictional sport created in the nineties.6 According to Vocabulary.com, the word comes from the New Testament: “day at the end of time following Armageddon when God will decree the fates of all individual humans according to the good and evil of their earthly lives.” Not sure what that has to do with the IJ game. You know how when you are a kid, playing football with your friends, and you might pretend to be, I dunno, Lionel Messi or Thierry Henry? If you were an especially imaginative kid, you may have thrown in some more detailed game-state scenarios. Champions League Final. Barcelona are 3 - 0 down at half time. The manager decides to take Messi off and bring Jimmy McLoughlin on. Everybody thinks this is crazy, but Jimmy knows he can do it. Eschaton is like that, only more extreme. The tennis players act out fictional wars between states, resulting in real injuries among the young pros. Yes, there is a deeper point here about how over-immersed we all are in our entertainment consumption. It’s also an excuse for a gigantic set-piece.
Wallace likes puppets too. He shares this with Charlie Kaufmann. No wonder the New Yorker lumped the two of them together. Wallace may be the first author ever to lean on puppets for the purpose of exposition. Mario Incandenza performs a puppet show for his classmates on the history of O.N.AN. and Johnny Gentle, and this is how we, the reader, learn about it. Wallace is obviously not going to say on page 1, “Once upon a time, there was the United States, then that got broken off into etc, etc...” He needed to find a clever way of slipping that info in. Puppets it was.
The point I’m making is that, despite its reputation, IJ can be silly as hell.
Words words words
This is what you are all here for. Here are some highlights from IJ’s famously expansive vocabulary.
Scopophilia - sexual pleasure derived chiefly from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity
Sinciput - the front of the skull from the forehead to the crown
Stenographic (all “s” words so far, I dunno why)- the art or process of writing in shorthand
Restenosis (working back through the alphabet one by one) - the reoccurrence of stenosis in a blood vessel or heart valve after it has been treated with apparent success
Diglobular - I couldn’t find any definition for this one. Google it and what comes up is its use in IJ.
Strabismic (another “S”, wtf?) - cross-eyed.
And a few more from Vocabulary.com:
Adipose - composed of animal fat
Agaric - a saprophytic fungus of the order Agaricales having an umbrellalike cap with gills on the underside
Agnation - line of descent traced through the paternal side of the family
Agora - the marketplace in ancient Greece
Now most of us will never use these words in our lives. If we take the leap into creative writing, we probably still won’t use them. Wallace uses pointlessly big words, and so he should, for that is one of the defining features of his voice. 7 When you think of Elmore Leonard, you think Dialogue. When you think of DFW, you think Big Words.
It reminds me of an embarrassing anecdote. I have many of them. 80 per cent of this Substack is me ripping into my teenage self. Here I go again. I was seventeen and my English class was studying The Plough and the Stars by Seán O’ Casey. We were being called upon by our wonderful teacher, Ms Whelan, to read out our homework assignment, some question on an obnoxious neighbor character. I’d been on a DFW binge and was convinced that I was now the smartest person in the school. As I read back over the previous evening’s work, Whelan zig-zagging around the class, I slipped into a severe anxiety that I hope wasn’t too noticeable to the other students . I don’t have that night’s homework with me; the word “pleonastic” was definitely in there. Maybe “solipsistic” too. Probably went in for a bit of “inanition”. Whelan never called on me, thank God.
Yeah, Spencer, but is it any good or not?
Yes it is. But I can’t tell you why because I don’t know exactly what the book is going for so I don’t know if it achieved its aims. Early doors, with “the entertainment” spreading like a virus, I thought we were in for a parody of The Stand. That arc faded. As Don Gately learns to love the staff and clients of Ennet House, I thought we had our moral. Then there’s like a gazillion pages of other stuff. There’s lots of cool segments about father and sons. I couldn’t really say the book is about fathers and sons. Wallace does some things that could be classified as “bad writing”. Near the end, he dumps a ton of Gately’s back story on us, pre-redemption. Why this info comes on page nine-hundred and not the first time we meet Gately, I am not sure. Reading IJ requires a certain leap of faith. Most of us come to the book having heard of its reputation. We are willing to suffer in the hope of reward. We trust that Wallace must know what he is doing. If we think we see a flaw, it’s just because we’re too dumb to see the genius. We persevere with IJ in faith that Wallace is better than us.
One More Thing
I had no idea that the iconic “This is Water” speech comes from IJ. It’s delivered by a character named Bob Death (see what I mean about the silly thing?) to Don Gately. What I’m trying to get at with this article, I don’t know if I’m succeeding, is that IJ is a novel of bits and chunks. Even if you don’t think Wallace was an all-seeing genius, you can enjoy the book on a chunk-by-chunk basis. Isn’t this a lovely chunk?:
He leans in more toward Gately and shouts that the one he was talking about was: “The wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away. The young biker leans back and smiles at Gately and gives an affable shrug and blatts away, a halter top's tits mashed against his back.
Enjoy this piece on A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, as well writings on Alice Munro, Thomas Hardy and Michael Chabon.
Although, I was taken by the slightly dry closing chapter of War and Peace, which (spoiler alert) is a treatise on man’s free will, or lack thereof. After reading it, I went into Starbucks. I wanted a chocolate muffin but there were no chocolate muffins so I had to get a lemon muffin instead. As I digested the pastry, Tolstoy’s words haunted me. I was forced by circumstances out of my control into buying the lemon muffin. You may say, well you didn’t need to buy a muffin at all, but that’s not true, because I had muffins on the brain on the way to Starbucks because they usually have chocolate ones. You don’t say “Oh, they don’t have chocolate muffins, I’ll have a breakfast roll instead”. So no, it had to be a lemon muffin. That is the message of War and Peace.
I think this may have been for marijuana use.
Was that a term back in 1996?
See David Lynch Keeps his Head, from Consider The Lobster
I think. I could say that a lot about this book. I think that’s what happened.
Do I have to say what number one is?
Should I go past or present tense here?