"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 a professor of English at Illinois
State University, although 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 has 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), and allowed him to
vacate his teaching post and concentrate full-time on writing.
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 cliches or distopian
cyberpunk babble. Wallace's writing style is both dreamlike and precise,
with often obscure details and occurrances 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 fiction 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 Wall," 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, 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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