Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Depending on which book you count as the first, Infinite Jest was number 11 in the Jacob-Katy book club. And it was a doozy. We've had our share of long, complicated ones (Ulysses, Bleak House), but this one was definitely the unwieldiest. Yet it may have been the most rewarding, in terms of sheer accomplishment. Between the two of us, we dragged the book across several continents (him), and on innumerable trains (me), took several months to read and reflect, and ultimately conquered the 1000+ pages (including 388 end notes).

And now, having read it and talked it over, I'm glad to have done it. It's an undeniable part of modern lit, and now that David Foster Wallace is gone, we'll never get anything quite like it again. Jacob has a much better plot overview than I was going to do, so here's the quick gist.

Basically, at an unidentified point in the near future, America is a mess. Large parts of the country are now wastelands. Technology and branding have pretty much taken over. We've absorbed Canada and Mexico--and French-Canadian separatists are especially pissed at the assimilation. Said French-Canadians are looking for a way to punish the Americans, and they've found out about a tape that's so addictive, anyone who views it is reduced to instant, irreversible mental mush. (Supposedly, what's on the tape is a veiled mother figure, bending down over the camera as though talking to a newborn infant, and saying, "I'm sorry.") But while the tape is the catalyst for the book, the plot is really about the tape's dead creator, and everyone/every place touched by him somehow. It's all loosely grouped into three main spheres, which rarely touch one another: the Canadian spies talking about the tape, the filmmaker's son and his friends at a ritzy Boston tennis academy, and the drug addicts at a rehab facility next door to the tennis academy.

But when I say things like "plot," I mean it in the loosest sense possible. 'Cause it's really just a thousand pages of David Foster Wallace including every detail that's ever crossed his mind, exploring issues he finds interesting (like tennis as war, addiction recovery as religion, or how easily Americans could be taken down by psychological porn). The language is good, though. There are literally hundreds of characters, and Wallace takes care to shift vocabulary and syntax accordingly. The sections which really shine are the ones where he pays equal attention to wonky detail and to description. Like in a scene where the kids in the tennis school play a game called Eschaton--essentially Risk on a tennis court--and end up going crazy, U.N.-style.

Also excellent are his descriptions of drug addiction and suicidal depression--they're terrifyingly vivid. And his passionate details about how and why someone would kill themselves are painful to read. Given that he'd clearly had mental health issues for a long time, part of me wonders if Infinite Jest was originally intended as a kind of suicide note--the serious writer's ultimate purge before he leaves the world. And it's all so scattered. I have no idea how he, let alone some poor schmuck of a development editor, could possibly keep track of the hundreds of characters, many plot threads, and erratic timeline enough to edit the manuscript. I have to assume that he cashed in his Famous Author Points, said, "Publish this as is," and that was pretty much it. But he's got enough bluster to pull it off, and even while you're struggling to read the book, you sense that there's something brilliant simmering underneath the extraneous crap.

And if you enjoy things like plot resolution and endings? Look elsewhere, friend.

I found it much easier to read once I started looking at the book as more of a collection of short stories, obliquely connected--kinda like Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Again, I'm glad to have read it. Now I can go back to reading Wallace's more straightforward (though still heavily footnoted) journalism without much guilt. And I'm also glad to have had a partner in crime, because I totally would have ditched the book after the first few chapters if I didn't know that Jacob was doing it too. All the same, I see the next book club selection being short and sweet. Something Seussian, perhaps?