[Issue #1, Winter 1997-98]
Infinite Jest
By David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown and Co., 1996
Reviewed by Bob Wake
The remarkable and remarkably large-scaled Infinite Jest examines
in voluptuous detail what it means to be an addict in an overstimulated
society, as well as the perils of trying to find sobriety in an era of accelerated
global anxiety. Here is an America addicted to drugs and pop culture, lethally
obsessed with dope, booze, movies and TV, and (not so odd in context) professional
tennis. The narrative arc itself, which I'll attempt to discuss momentarily,
is frequently and hilariously disrupted by often bizarre footnotes (388
in total) that unspool at the back of the book in one hundred pages of dense,
smallish print.
David Foster Wallace was 33 years old when his 1,079-page novel was published
to notable critical and marketplace success in February, 1996. At the time
of the book's publication, Wallace was teaching literature and creative
writing at Illinois State University, although he was no stranger to literary
notice -- albeit below the radar of bestsellerdom and media hype -- having
published a moderately successful novel at age 24, The Broom of the System,
followed by a much-admired collection of short stories, Girl with Curious
Hair. His reputation prior to Infinite Jest was as an idiosyncratic
"cult" writer and daring stylist whose work appeared in mainstream
magazines such as Playboy and Harper's, in addition to "serious"
academic literary journals like The Review of Contemporary Fiction
and Conjunctions. The fallout from Infinite Jest has in less
than two years greatly enriched Wallace's literary standing, not to mention
his monetary fortunes (including awards of $50,000 from the Lannan Foundation
and $230,000 from the MacArthur Foundation, plus a recently announced HBO
movie deal).
The narrative timeframe of Infinite Jest is placed a few years in
the future, seven years or so from now, and thus is distanced as well as
dislocated just enough from the present to give the story a funhouse refraction
without succumbing to hoary science fiction clichés or dystopian
cyberpunk babble. Wallace's writing style is both dreamlike and precise,
with often obscure details and occurrences enlarged to sinister paranoiac
significance. Sentence by sentence, the novel is so besotted with language
and literary art that it becomes a testament to the postmodern struggle
to wrest meaning from sensory overload. There are three prominent narrative
threads that weave throughout the book: student life at Enfield Tennis Academy,
outside of Boston; and, nearby, the daily operations of Ennet House, a facility
for recovering substance abusers; third, an elaborate terrorist scheme by
a group of Canadian Québecois separatists. Two characters with whom
we share much of the novel are Hal Incandenza, a pot-smoking student at
Enfield, and Don Gately, a former thief and drug addict now living at Ennet
House. As for the Canadian terrorists, well, their immediate intentions
are to locate the video cartridge of a film (made by Hal's father, and titled
Infinite Jest) rumored to be so diabolically entertaining that it
causes viewers to seizure and literally die from pleasure. Wallace constructs
endlessly imaginative set pieces and satirical broadsides while unfurling
these three storylines, which become entangled in unexpected and at times
supernatural ways. The novel is, by turns, outrageously funny, dark and
mysterious, sad and wistful. Wallace is particularly strong on the workings
and psychology of Alcoholics Anonymous, so much so that the book has already
been hailed as the Great American AA Novel. But this is just one facet of
its ferocious, multi-tiered range and vision.
Infinite Jest is a creative breakthrough for David Foster Wallace
and for U.S. fiction in general because it has successfully managed to inject
experimental writing techniques into the more traditional realm of mainstream
storytelling. The resulting mixture, which in less capable hands would be
fundamentally incoherent if not merely tedious, is very weird fun. There
are surprisingly few examples of epic scale meta-novels being done well.
Recent casualties include The Tunnel, by William Gass, and The
Runaway Soul, by the late Harold Brodkey, both novels decades in the
writing, hugely anticipated, and then somehow instantly forgotten upon publication.
The most celebrated progenitor of these works will forever remain James
Joyce's Ulysses. What Wallace has (re)discovered, and which he shares
with Joyce (and Shakespeare), is an absolute faith in the dramatic and moral
truth embodied within our dreams and psychotic raptures.
Although David Foster Wallace has been compared ad infinitum to Thomas Pynchon,
enigmatic author of the mammoth modern classic Gravity's Rainbow,
Wallace has vigorously discouraged the comparison, and for valid reasons:
Gravity's Rainbow is a complex novel, but it's never really "experimental"
in any true sense. And while Wallace mirrors Pynchon's extravagant egghead
erudition and antic playfulness, it seems clear that Wallace has a deeper
interest in subverting our notions of what a novel is or isn't, and he appears
to be raising structural questions in his work that writers like Pynchon
and, say, the late William Gaddis -- for all their 1960s and 70s postmodern
pizzazz -- have never cared to address. Wallace wants to alter the landscape
of the late 20th century American novel, but he also wants desperately to
entertain us. In other words, his ambitions are as gargantuan as the resulting
book. And yet, his methods are fueled not by hewing to the current literary
trends of ironic detachment and cynical relativism, but rather by coupling
the rigorous avant-garde sensibilities of Samuel Beckett and David Markson
with the long-winded narrative prowess of European philosophical novelists
like Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch. Is it possible for a novel to be drunk
with language, yet sober in its discipline and aim? Simultaneously bloated,
yet austere? Crazy as hell, yet sane as the Serenity Prayer? Infinite
Jest is a dazzling achievement imbued with all the paradoxes of great
art.
__________
From Infinite Jest
So this purports to be a disease, alcoholism? A disease
like a cold? Or like cancer? I have to tell you, I have never heard of anyone
being told to pray for relief from cancer. Outside maybe certain very rural
parts of the American South, that is. So what is this? You're ordering me
to pray? Because I allegedly have a disease? I dismantle my life and career
and enter nine months of low-income treatment for a disease, and I'm prescribed
prayer? Does the word retrograde signify? Am I in a sociohistorical era
I don't know about? What exactly is the story here? [p. 180]
_____________________________
Bob Wake is editor of the Cambridge Book Review and author of Caffeine
& Other Stories.
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