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Infinitely Entertaining Feb 20, 2003 (63 of 70 found this helpful)
It is a daunting task to review this novel. The text is 981 pages long and the end notes close to 100 pages long. The book is also quite heavy. My almost continuous need to check these notes kept interrupting the flow of the novel, but necessarily filled in lots of the details of its characters' family backgrounds, historical facts and fictions, and Mr. Wallace's infinite knowledge of myriad pharmaceutical products mentioned in the novel. _Infinite Jest_ is as complex and dense as it is entertaining, funny, horrifying, painful, bizarre, and at times graphically nauseating and hallucinatory.
It is the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment. By the beginning of the 21st century time ceased to be designated chronologically, but began being named for well-known products on the market, e.g. Trial Size Dove Bar, etc. The setting is the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N. [ha, ha, ha]), no longer the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The big annual holiday celebration is Interdependence Day. From time to time the book is populated by wheelchair bound, legless Quebecois terrorists who want Quebec to break away from O.N.A.N. Their story, told in some detail, is extremely odd and mind boggling to say the least.
The cornerstone of the novel concerns the characters associated with Enfield Tennis Academy, a training school for young tennis prodigies. The head was formerly the late James O. Incandenza (called "Himself" and "The Stork" by his sons), who also dabbled in experimental film making, his wife Avril (called "The Moms" by her sons), and their three sons, Orin (football star), Mario (a gentle dwarf and like his father, a film maker), and Hal (the youngest, but extraordinarily brilliant and drug addicted). Some of Hal's descriptions of his late father's story are bizarre but incredibly funny!
In my opinion the hero of _Infinite Jest_ is Don Gately. He is a formerly heavily drug addicted, but currently seriously sober staff counselor at Ennet House, a residential home, near Boston, for individuals suffering from drug and alcohol problems. Here is a man who formerly financed his habit through robbery, burglary, and other illegal money making schemes, who is justly beloved by Ennet House occupants. Gately is the "Christ figure" of the book who suffers for the various transgressions of others. Toward the end of the book a "victim" of one of Gately's past shennanigans pays tribute to him.
_Infinite Jest_ can be a slow read (it took me several months to complete the book) because in addition to its length it is rarely told in a conventional narrative form. I also found myself at times zipping through all the strange, but delightfully recited situations and characterizations. To be enjoyed one must be patient with it and allow oneself to go with its relentless flow. If it is not already, _Infinite Jest_ is destined to become one of the world's great classics.
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Addicting Jun 1, 2000 (50 of 55 found this helpful)
When I picked up this book, I intended to read just the first few pages to see what it was about, and maybe finish some other time. 1100 pages later, I finally put it down. OK, I didn't read it all in one sitting, but the single mindedness you could call an addiction. Which is appropriate, because this book is about addiction in all sorts of forms: drugs, alcohol, athletics, entertainment, and so forth. The scope DFW attempts (and succeeds) is amazing: every page, every chapter is a constant surpise. DFW sets up his own kind of reality, and then stretches that reality to the breaking point. To try to summarize or encapsulate in a 1000 words is impossible. INFINITE JEST is comic and tragic, science fiction and mystery, socio-political commentary and literary fiction. Now for the bad news. Sometimes, the writing is....pretentious. The footnotes get to be a little much. It is as if DFW is showing off his virtuosity at wordplay for the sake of showing off. He actually addresses this criticism in a very good interview ................. INFINITE JEST is not an "easy read," but it is well worth the effort.
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Genius rewards the patient Dec 12, 2001 (55 of 61 found this helpful)
David Foster Wallace is a genius, and he knows it. But unlike other geniuses that you might know, he never tries to make you feel dumb. He just wants you to understand the same things that he does, so occasionally you'll feel out of your depth. But he's also a gifted writer, so odds are that you *will* come out understanding him. And what he's saying is brilliant, so you'll feel like a better person for it.
Wallace has been described as ``postmodern", a word that seems to get smacked onto anything written after World War II. I don't see it. To me, postmodernism involves a few things: 1) irony, in liberal doses (e.g., DeLillo's _White Noise_); 2) a continuous awareness that we're *reading a book* and that there's an author talking to us, and that the characters are under his control (e.g., anything by Kurt Vonnegut); 3) self-reference, sometimes to the point of disorienting involution (e.g., Wallace's story ``Westward The Course Of Empire Makes Its Way" from his book _Girl With Curious Hair_ - and that story is, notably, a spoof of postmodernism). This may be an overly conservative definition of postmodernism, but the word's overapplication justifies some conservatism.
_Infinite Jest_ is not postmodern; it's just a great story with beautifully constructed characters. It is a book about a movie that is so addictive that anyone who starts watching it has no choice but to keep watching it forever - foregoing food, water, and sleep, and suffering as much pain as is necessary to keep watching. The movie itself is, to paraphrase a friend, an uber-McGuffin (I'm never sure whether I've spelled that right) - an object that never gets clearly explained, but around which the plot coheres.
The movie itself is not the main point of the book. _Infinite Jest_ is a novel about American addictions: television, drugs, sex, fame, and indeed the American need to be addicted to something. An addiction to addictions. Wallace summarizes the book's mood well when he says,
``There's something particularly sad about it, something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whether it's unique to our generation I really don't know."
(...)
The main sign of Wallace's genius - and yes, I mean that word with all it entails, content in the knowledge that it is overused but that it fits here - is that he can make us feel this gut-level sadness without even appearing to work at it. Heavy use of irony can make you feel that there's some deeper, unseen, lurking gloominess about the world, and for that reason it's the easy way out. Ditto self-reference, which after a while is dizzying and confusing. Wallace is too brilliant a writer to take any of the easy postmodern routes. He's just written a great story with an unpleasant underlying mood. It's been a long time since I've read a book of such masterful subtlety.
It has all the classic aspects of a great novel: characters whom the reader *understands*, a compelling story that edges inexorably toward an uncertain ending, a gut-level mood, and a habit of dispensing brilliant toss-offs so suddenly that the reader can't help but gasp. For instance, see the attached text file containing Wallace's future-retrospective explanation of why videophones failed.
My first inclination was that this book - weighing in at over a thousand pages, including hundreds of footnotes (some of which have their own footnotes) - needed an editor. And it may, at points. But there's very little chaff amongst the wheat: the book's heft serves at least three purposes:
1) To build characters, slowly and methodically. One of Wallace's flaws is that his characters' dialogue - particularly that of his youthful protagonist and tennis prodigy, Hal Incandenza - doesn't sound genuine. It s
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Annular fiction Feb 27, 2001 (157 of 190 found this helpful)
Cleverness for it's own sake. Detail without depth. Literary onanism, as some other reviewers have pointed out. Still, Infinite Jest makes for a very good read, especially after you figure some things out. First, read the footnotes, as they advance and comment on the plot. Use two bookmarks. Second, have a dictionary handy at all times, the bigger the better. The OED would be optimal (Hal: "I'm an OED man, myself"), but a Webster's Unabridged will do in a pinch. This isn't one of those books where you can gloss over the big words or hope to pick them up from context. You need to know, for example, that "dipsomania" is another word for alcoholism. Third, be prepared for the lack of conclusion. Resign yourself to the fact that if you want to know what happens, you're going to have to read the book TWICE (or at least go back and read the first chapter again).
If I had known these things when I first read Infinite Jest three years ago, I would have been spared a great deal of anguish. After spending three weeks of my life night and day with this book, I felt personally betrayed that there was no conclusion. I was so angry I wanted to burn the book and send the ashes to the author accompanied by a nasty letter. It was months later when I finally found out that the beginning is the end. Of course, DFW gives the reader ample hints. I just didn't catch on the first time.
The footnote detailing JOI's (Hal's father's) filmography is really just a list of plot events in the main story; pretty much every subject that JOI makes a film about is really something that happens in the novel. This is a good place to go if you think that you missed something. Also important is the theoretical commentary on the nature of JOI's work. Don't forget that he pioneered a genre called "anticonfluential narrative" in which the separate strands of his subject's lives never converge into a satisfying conclusion (sound familiar?). Another hint to the book's structure is the prevalent discussion of annular fusion, a circular process that turns garbage into energy. The word annular (ring-shaped) is key.
The book gets four stars instead of five because the characters are mostly flat and because even though the book was written only five years ago, parts of it already seem dated (like "teleputers" and "film cartridges" - c'mon, we have the Internet and DVDs). But David Foster Wallace deserves credit for writing a thousand-page book on the themes of entertainment and addiction that itself manages to be very addictive and very entertaining. The hilariousness of the U.S. being at war with Canada is reason enough to read this book.
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You're in bizarro world now... Oct 11, 2003 (19 of 20 found this helpful)
With "Infinite Jest," David Foster Wallace has created an exhaustive, and exhausting, look at modern life. Set in a twisted but strangely recognizable near-future North American semi-dystopia, the book sets forth Wallace's own post-apocalyptic vision. Wallace's future hasn't been ravaged by nuclear war, but rather by Americans' increasing dependence on material possessions, controlled substances, and above all, entertainment. Although you have to navigate through Wallace's myriad (and often entertaining) rhetorical excesses to find them, this book is filled with profound statements on the nature of choice and the pull of addiction.
The radically non-linear plot is centered on a likably dysfunctional family named the Incandenzas. James Incandenza (aka Himself), a tennis-academy founder and wannabe film artiste, has killed himself by sticking his head in a microwave before the book's action, leaving his promiscuous wife and three sons: the emotionless tennis/lexicographal prodigy Hal, professional football punter Orin, and the deformed but endearing Mario. Their everyday problems may be removed from what most readers experience, but Wallace still manages to make the Incandenzas, including the late and eccentric Himself, into relatable characters in one way or another.
Himself has also left another legacy in the form of "Infinite Jest," an entertainment cartridge (the book takes place after conventional TV has given way to all-cartridge viewing) so addictive that it turns the viewer into a mindless zombie with no desire whatsoever to do anything but watch the film again. A group of murderous and legless Quebecois separists (the Wheelchair Assassins, who provided the inspiration for my reviewer name) are trying to get a hold of a master copy of this tape to distribute throughout the newly created Organization Of North American Nations. If this cartridge sounds like a metaphor, it's because it is. It isn't hard to guess that Wallace probably feels modern-day notions of entertainment are rotting our brains and free will even as we speak, albeit a lot more slowly and insidiously.
The plot isn't the main attraction here, though. It merely serves a springboard for some inspired weirdness. Not even Chuck Palahniuk displays such a gift for alternating between the profound and oddball as Wallace. In one scene, two characters are having a philosophical debate about the nature of choice in modern-day society. In another, Wallace is expounding on Orin Incandenza's gift for punting a football (as a raging football fan, I found this passage especially enthralling). In another, we get to see how the United States ceded its toxic waste-infested Northeast corner to Canada to form O.N.A.N. What do these three passages have to do with each other? Little to nothing, but they're all gripping just the same.
Wallace devotes long passages to the state of America life in his near future and how it got that way. His descriptions of the evolution of entertainment from TV to viewing cartridges displays a remarkable perception of how entertainment works and what people want from it. Wallace occasionally delves into winding, wordy descriptions of Himself's film work, which apparently straddled a fine line between profound and pretentious. Himself's films, with names like "Blood Sister: One Tough Nun," "Baby Pictures Of Famous Dictators" and "Good Looking Men In Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter Of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency," serve as catalysts for speculations on what people like Himself hope to achieve through film, how others view it, and what our views of entertainment say about us as individuals.
The book, as this site's editorial review mentions, contains an enormous cast befitting a work of such magnitude, and Wallace has a knack for creating flawed, but likeable, characters. Much of the action takes place at a tennis academy and drug addicts' halfway house in the fictional Massachusetts t