Infinite Jest

After about a month and a half of steady reading, I finished David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest . (900 pages, with over 100 pages of small-print end notes). Like most great novels, Infinite Jest is about human nature. Infinite Jest’s human nature angle is a pessimistic look at addiction and at the broken people who become addicts. There are plenty of ways for future addicts to be broken; Most of the addicts in Infinite Jest were broken in childhood; mostly by means of abuse or incest.

One of the protagonists, Hal Incandenza, is an exception to the abuse or incest rule; he is a top-ranked junior tennis pro who is apparently addicted to marijuana and kodiak (and, perhaps, to a more sinister hallucinogen that came from a household mold he ate as a child.) Hal is the son of a dead alcoholic (who lives in the novel via flashback) who was also a genius inventor and a cult filmmaker. Hal attends a top level tennis academy, populated by a cast of eccentric athletes who squeeze tennis balls and cheat on their urine tests.

Down the hill from the Tennis academy is Ennett House, a halfway house for drug addicts. We get to know eight or ten of the addicts pretty well, and their horrendous personal stories, and their lives of petty crime and cruelty and abuse. Some of the best scenes in the book take place in AA and NA meetings; which, in spite of their many absurdities, actually work pretty often. The principal addict character is Don Gately, a painkiller addict who is shot and horribly wounded and who cannot, of course, take any painkillers. Gately’s pain and hallucinations are incredibly vivid, and the stories of his pre-sobriety binges and criminal acts are some of the standout pieces in the book.

Oddly enough, the novel is set in a dystopian future, mostly in Boston, in which the US has annexed Mexico and Canada and turned the northeast into a waste dump. In order the raise funds, the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN) sells “naming rights” to years-- most of the book takes place in the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.” In a way, then, the book is “science fiction;” but it is science fiction in the way that early Vonnegut is science fiction-- part of the setting but in no way integral to the characters. Wallace sets the book in the future for three reasons; (he wrote it in 1996); one was a need to have an internet terminal in every home, capable of playing movies on high-def cartridges (It turns out that one of the cult filmmaker’s films is addictive, so addictive that a viewer will cut his or her own fingers off in order to watch it again), the second is the need to set in motion a plot by a group of anti-ONAN Canadian separatists; and the third is an underlying environmentalist theme; the giant wasteland (formerly New England) is continually refilled with giant catapulted dumpsters and (if rumors are true) giant hydrocephalic babies and bordered by deformed, mutated Nucks.

The book is huge and sprawling and aggravating. It has a million dead ends; some of them pay off and some of them don't. (Apparently Wallace and his editor cut 500 pages out of the manuscript.) I have always had trouble with these great sprawling books (I’ve started Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses 3 or 4 times each, never finishing either); and I am very pleased with my reading discipline in getting through this one. It was well worth it for the understanding I gained about drug addicts and AA. I’d say this is one of the very few books I've read that I will probably re-read.

Here is the Wikipedia entry for Infinite Jest. The web resources at the bottom of the wikipedia page are particularly good.