In the summer of 2009, I settled in to the massive undertaking that is reading the late David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
It was mesmerizing and maddening. DFW’s extensive use of endnotes (a convention I found fascinating at first, but as I plodded through began to find unnecessarily pretentious) requires the use of two bookmarks and an irritating amount of page-flipping. Wallace’s language is hard language. He invents jargon and deploys his own sometimes too-long and not-always-intuitive acronyms at will. His sentences are grammatical wonders — true to preferred structure but strung out clause after clause until the idea started half a page ago becomes hopelessly lost. If I left the book unattended for a few days I would completely forget where I had been and have to read back at least twenty pages or so to find the narrative again. And at the conclusion of the entire endeavor, the story just stops. Smash cut to black. The end.
I wailed, and probably cursed, out loud on the living room couch when I hit that final page (I remember because my wife demanded an explanation), and I shelved the finished novel with heavily mixed emotions. Even now if I make reference to it in passing, my wife will ask "you mean that book you complained about for a month and a half?". And I can’t explain why I talk about it fondly and passionately, because she’s right — she watched me try to digest that beast for weeks.
This past Tuesday we had another one of those moments. She quoted the "I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest…" line from Hamlet and said "hey, you know… like that book" — to which I responded excitedly that yes, and did you know that Poor Yorick Entertainment is the name of James Incandenza’s production company, etcetera, etcetera… right back swept up in the never-finished plot. A night or two later, blog led to blog led to a link to an NPR story on the Decemberists’ Eschaton-inspired "Calamity Song" music video. God help me, I watched that thing like a child gazing into a candy store window.
What is it about this book that I cannot let go of? Why this annoyingly complex and unsatisfying novel out of so many worthy others? Then I listed, in my head, the books over my entire lifetime of reading that have that same quality — that my mind often connects present events to, whose scenes replay themselves in my private theatre, and whose language weaves its way into my own language (yes, even DFW’s acronyms make weird appearances in workplace emails… to be cringingly re-read after sending). There are five: Lolita, The Book of Disquiet, The Lord of the Rings, London Fields, and The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. Five out of so many. What qualities bind all five, or six, of these books together might be an exploration for another time. But for now: what is Infinite Jest doing on this list?
This is the best answer I can form: I love Wallace’s work because it demands you immerse yourself in it — and Jest more so than others. It is not a book for lounging absentmindedly with the television on. You become an active participant or it doesn’t work. The story is epic in its way, and alive. The world has its own mythology; its myriad inhabitants are fully-formed — tragic and complex, doomed from the start. DFW opens this brief window into an electric world, enough to give us a glimpse of the life within, enough to make their reality our reality while we turn its pages, and that’s it. And that is a massive amount of information. And that is enough. And for those of us who dwelt within the pages of Infinite Jest for our time, it is also and eternally never enough.
It may be that the best art is the art we carry with us, long after the precious time we spend with it is over and done.
To never know what happens to the denizens of Enfield Tennis Academy and Ennet House, to Hal Incandenza, Don Gately, Joelle Van Dyne, et. al., is a tremendously unsatisfying consequence of reading the novel; just as David Chase’s decision not to give us Tony’s fate at the end of The Sopranos seemed unfair to those of us who tuned in every Sunday night for the better part of a decade. But that dissatisfaction with Infinite Jest quietly melted away with time, while the immensely satisfying journey remains bizarrely lodged in my memory — its travelers sharing those inner spaces with Humbert Humbert, the Gaviero, Nicola Six, Frodo and Sam, Pessoa’s heteronyms, and Tony fucking Soprano.
If this blog is just a journal of the mind, then it ends here. But if it is a two-way conversation with those who stumble upon my humble corner of the web, then I suppose I should conclude with this directive: set aside some alone time and read Infinite Jest. It is worth the effort, and if you’re anything like me you will love it, you will loathe it, and you will love it all over again.
