Infinite Jest – an appreciation

[This was written as my first of what was supposed to be a series of columns for PLAY Magazine, a weekly New Haven arts/entertainment mag I once interned at and still occasionally write for]

The 10th anniversary edition of Infinite Jest (image courtesy of Amazon.com)

 

            I’m writing this, my first in what I hope to be the first a series of columns for PLAY Magazine, less than a week after the death of the author David Foster Wallace. Wallace was a brilliant iconoclast, a man who wrote about everything from David Lynch to lobsters, but the most celebrated of his works was the now decade-plus year old Infinite Jest.

            Reading Infinite Jest is a labor of love. It is a thousand plus page tome, with more than 100 or so of these pages consisting solely of footnotes. DFW was prone to using obscure terminology and wrote with a denseness that is often compared to Thomas Pynchon. However, anyone brave enough to try and read the book will find their investment more than worthwhile.

            Describing the plot of Jest is a hard enough task in and of itself. It focuses on several characters, most notably the Incandenza family, most of whom reside at the Enfield tennis academy, Don Gately and the residents of the halfway house he helps run and a group of Quebecois separatists/terrorists in search of “Infinite Jest” a film that James Orin (J.O.), the now deceased head of the Incandenza family made that is allegedly so entertaining that anyone who watches it will lose all desire to do anything but watch the film ad nauseum.

            The characters themselves are genius enough; Donald Gately is an odd sort of anti-hero, a drug addicted burglar gone clean now trying to help others but gritting his teeth all the way. The Incandenzas are an aloof bunch who seem like something straight out of a Wes Anderson film. Hal, who along with Gately is the main character in focus of the book, is emotionally detached and heavily reliant on smoking pot just to make day to day life tolerable.

            What makes Jest even more of a gem, though, is that it seems to touch on nearly every emotion as well as every facet of American life. The dark comedy and 1984-esque vision of the future is brilliant. We have now entered subsidized time and years are sponsored rather than numbered (most of the book takes place during the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, for example). J.O. Incandenza commits suicide by putting his head in the microwave, an act that seems to confuse more than upset any of his family, who are more concerned with how he made the microwave door air tight enough to pull it off that why he decided to “eliminate his own map” (another DFW-ism). Most of New England and southern Canada is now a landfill known as the “Great Concavity” rumored to be full of genetic mutants such as oversized infants. The outrage caused by this act leads to the growth of the above mentioned separatists, who also, by the way, are all wheelchair bound as a result of a bizarre ritual requiring inductees to jump in front of a moving train before they can enter the group.

On the flip side, at one point Avril Incandenza delivers a heart breaking speech on the nature of emotional suppression and drug and alcohol abuse are a central theme. The stories of the prices paid by the residents of Ennet house and the Enfield tennis academy are heartbreaking, Gately’s own back story, particularly his relationship with his mother and her abusive boyfriend, as well as the recount of J.O.’s slow descent into alcoholism especially. Poor Tony Krause is a drug addict whose harrowing experiences with withdrawal are documented in incredibly graphic and emotionally devastating detail. Orin, the eldest Incandenza son is prone to meaningless sexual acts, constantly sleeping with married mothers and then throwing them aside in a not so subtle attempt to get back at his mother, whom he resents deeply.
            I’ve written nearly 600 words and I’ve still only begun to touch on what makes Infinite Jest one of the most important novels I’ve ever read, both on a literary and intensely personal level. David Foster Wallace effectively produced a snap shot of what it means to be an American today: our intense preoccupation with entertainment and technology, the unrealistic expectations of beauty and wealth they create, the prevalent drug culture, the increasing problem of just where the hell to put all the garbage our ever-consuming lifestyle creates and how intensely lonely, helpless and disconnected it can all make us feel.