The Year of the Whopper

In David Foster Wallace's huge new novel, the calendar is sold to the highest corporate bidder.

INFINITE JEST
by David Foster Wallace
1,079 pp. Boston
Little, Brown & Company. $29.95

By Jay McInerney

Reading David Foster Wallace's latest novel, "Infinite Jest," I couldn't help thinking at times about
7-year-old Seymour Glass's book-length "letter" home from camp, published in The New Yorker in 1965 as "Hapworth 16, 1924." I felt a similar feeling of admiration alloyed with impatience veering toward strained credulity. (Do you suppose Seymour's parents actually READ the whole thing?) I had previously been a great admirer of Mr. Wallace's collection of stories, "Girl With Curious Hair," and, to a lesser extent, of the loose, baggy monster that was his debut novel, "The Broom of the System," which I confess to not finishing. If Mr. Wallace were less talented, you would be inclined to shoot him -- or possibly yourself -- somewhere right around page 480 of "Infinite Jest." In fact, you might anyway.

Alternately tedious and effulgent, "Infinite Jest" is set in the near future, specifically in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, which would seem to be about 18 years from now. The United States has become part of the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN), federated with Canada and Mexico; most of northern New England has been transformed into a huge toxic waste dump and palmed off on the Canadians. Québécois separatists, many of them in wheelchairs (les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents), prowl the lower, nontoxic states, performing terrorist acts, understandably more bilious than ever now that giant fans along the border blow Northeastern American waste products in their direction. President Limbaugh has been fairly recently assassinated, and the calendar has been sold to the highest corporate bidder, giving us the Year of the Whopper, the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad and so on.

All of this might -- and sometimes does -- feel cartoonish in the extreme. But this skeleton of satire is fleshed out with several domestically scaled narratives and masses of hyperrealistic quotidian detail. The overall effect is something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola. Mr. Wallace's earlier fiction revealed him as a student of literary post-modernists like John Barth and Robert Coover, flirting with metafictional tropes and self-referential narratives. Here, despite the "Gravity's Rainbow"-plus length and 'haute science' flourishes, Mr. Wallace plays it straight -- that is, almost realistically -- and seems to want to convince us of the authenticity of his vision by sheer weight of accumulated detail. The weight almost crushes the narrative at times -- as when, for example, we are treated to 10 dense pages about the disassembly of a bed, complete with diagrams.

The two overlapping microcosms of this nonlinear narrative are the Enfield Tennis Academy, a Boston-area institution founded by the mad genius James O. Incandenza, whose clan of athletic and academic prodigies still resides there, and Ennet House, a residence for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics just down the hill. James O., a former tennis prodigy, physicist specializing in optics and avant-garde film maker, has by the time the story opens killed himself by sticking his head in a microwave oven. Surviving him are his sons: Orin, a pro football kicker; Hal, a 17-year-old student at the academy who is as gifted mentally as he is physically; and Mario, who is severely deformed and mildly retarded.

The details of day-to-day life at the academy are rendered in something very close to real time, as are several matches between the junior athletes; Mr. Wallace knows his serve and volley from his baseline game: readers may feel qualified toward the end to march down to the court and challenge the club pro to a match.

The mechanics and rituals of the recovering addicts are also represented with mind-numbing fidelity. Central to this narrative is one Don Gately, a recovering burglar and Demerol man, the slogging Leopold Bloom to Hal Incandenza's Stephen Dedalus. Mr. Wallace's knowledge of pharmaceuticals and the psychology of addiction is encyclopedic; if not for the copious footnotes, which among other functions annotate the dozens of narcotics and psychedelics mentioned in the book, all but the most hard-core drug enthusiasts would need a copy of the Physician's Desk Reference just to keep track of who was up or down at any given moment.

Recovering at Ennett House from a serious freebase habit is one Joelle van Dyne, who was supposedly featured in a cartridge (i.e., film) made by James Incandenza before he died. This film is said to be so mesmerizing that anyone viewing it -- like the famous lab rat with the cocaine dispenser -- is rendered helpless and insensible to everything except the desire to keep watching it.

These plot lines eventually converge, although as a narrator Mr. Wallace reminds me of his character Lateral Alice: his momentum tends to be sideways rather than forward, with chapters often seeming interchangeable with the almost 400 footnotes, some a dozen pages long. As the title -- a nod to Hamlet's Yorick -- indicates, the emergent theme is that we as a nation are amusing ourselves to death. A legless Canadian terrorist tells his American counterpart: "You all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The without-end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible." The terrorist is trying to find Joelle van Dyne in the hope of locating the master copy of the cartridge, code-named "the Entertainment." This would constitute the ultimate terrorist weapon, a device to facilitate the American penchant for entertaining ourselves senseless.

What makes all this almost plausible, and often pleasurable, is Mr. Wallace's talent -- as a stylist, a satirist and a mimic -- as well as his erudition, which ranges from the world of street crime to higher mathematics. While there are many uninteresting pages in this novel, there are not many uninteresting sentences. And there are dozens of set pieces that double as dazzling mini-entertainments -- like an essay on the etiquette of videophones and a street brawl between drunken Canadian separatists and a houseful of recovering addicts. Equally lively is Mr. Wallace's rendition of a New Age 12-step men's group in which bearded hulks sit in a circle clutching teddy bears that represent their inner infants. "Can you share what you're feeling, Kevin?" asks the group leader. "I'm feeling my Inner Infant's abandonment and deep-deprivation issues, Harv," answers a weeping, bearded bear-clutcher.

In this ONAN-ite world, everybody's in a 12-step group of some kind, like Phob-Comp-Anon, a "12-step splinter from Al-Anon, for co-dependency issues surrounding loved ones who were cripplingly phobic or compulsive, or both." The satirical narrative distance evident in both these passages collapses, however, in the long sections about Ennet House and Boston A.A. (the only institution treated with a certain earnestness and even reverence), which seem somewhat out of tune with the book's overall omniscient-hipster narrative stance.

These two strains are never quite synthesized. It's as if Mr. Wallace started with the Glass family whiz-kid plot and then got more interested in the gritty church-basement world of A.A. But, in the end, it is the dogged attempt of the recovering addict Don Gately to reclaim the simple pleasures of everyday life that overshadows the athletic, intellectual and onanistic pyrotechnics of the Incandenzas -- and makes this novel something more than an interminable joke.