It took me almost three months to read this 1078-page behemoth. It’s the size of a lunchbox. I have written elsewhere in this blog about my predeliction for big books—to quote myself: “I love books that are worlds unto themselves, places were I can go to live for a while. That have their own rules, customs, and logic.” That description fits Infinite Jest very well, and yet it is a hard book to love.
Infinite Jest is about a lot of things, but more than anything it is about drugs and alcohol—“substances”—and the way they damage lives. It is encyclopaedic in its depiction of the misery, degredation, and delusion attendant on substance abuse, positively mediaeval in its relentless focus on the varieties of human suffering. There is also a fair amount of humor along the way, and even a bit of speculative near-future dystopian stuff, but we never stray far from the spectacle of people destroying themselves.
When we think of sin and suffering in the world, we often think of evil, yet we do not witness any deliberate evil in Infinite Jest. Most of the losers in this book harm nobody but themselves, except accidentally—they abdicate all moral responsibilities, empty themselves out, become zombies. Like the crack-addicted mother who carries her dead infant around in a bundle for weeks. It’s been a long time since I read William Burrough’s Naked Lunch, but I have a hunch there might be some interesting parallels between that book and this one. A particular phrase from Naked Lunch kept occurring to me as I read Infinite Jest—“the algebra of need.” It’s the peculiar kind of savagery that possesses a person who becomes enslaved to a substance. The negation of all moral sense. I suppose that is a kind of evil, just not the sadistic, malevolent kind.
Normal life brings both pleasure and misery by turns, but when this balance is disturbed by substances, the result is that all pleasure becomes concentrated in the experience of the substance, and is thereby vacuumed out of everyday life. Wallace obviously knew quite a bit about depression, and writes about it in a manner that is terrifying and vivid. In one passage he makes a distinction between the garden-variety anhedonia and a more profound type of depression:
Hal isn’t old enough yet to know that … numb emptiness isn’t the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. … It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self…
This amazing description goes on for several pages.
Have I written anything to this point that would actually make you want to read Infinite Jest? Perhaps not. But when I say it is a difficult book to love I do not mean to say that it is a difficult book to be engrossed and amazed by. Like a Hieronymous Bosch painting it is a vast canvas filled with incident, color, and character. There are two main spheres of action—the first is the Enfield Tennis Academy, founded by James O. Incandenza, a man of many talents who ultimate takes his own life by sticking his head in a microwave oven. If you’re wondering how one could do that, we learn that the secret is to remove the glass from the door. (You have to be impressed by a mind that can come up with such things—and then be glad that it isn’t yours.) Incandenza starts out as a tennis prodigy, becomes a scientist specializing in optics, founds a tennis academy, and then in his final years becomes an avant-garde filmmaker. One of his films, also named Infinite Jest, can effectively lobotomize anyone who sees it, apparently by overloading their neural circuitry with pleasure. Once someone has seen even a few frames of this film, they become permanantly vegetative—unable to speak, move or dress themselves. It is the ultimate substance, and thus do we discover the moral of our story. It’s spelled out on the back cover: “Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to dominate our lives, about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people, and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.” Fair enough in a way, but I think this moral is a bit of a Macguffin, because the book doesn’t really have much else to say about entertainment and its dangers. Entertainment may deplete meaning and richness from our lives, but not like drugs can. It’s just not a convincing comparison.
Two of James Incandenza’s three sons attend the academy he founded and one of them—Hal Incandenza—is for lack of a better candidate the “main” character of the Incandenza/tennis part of the book. He’s a very good tennis player but needs to smoke a little dope every day to maintain his equilibrium. Hal’s a decent enough fellow, but he’s mostly just a pair of eyes through which we view his world, and his thoughts are perhaps not much different from Wallace’s. He’s kind of a depressed dude, though with a ridiculously high IQ.
The other main sphere is action is the “Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House” where we encounter a large cast of characters attempting to resuscitate their lives. There is Randy Lenz, the recovering coke addict who relieves his feelings of powerlessness by torturing animals. And Kate Gompert, whose dependency on marijuana has left her subject to the “bad” kind of depression—the great white shark kind. (Gompert is not the only Ennet House resident who is there because of marijuana—Wallace posits that if you’re the right sort of person, any mind-altering substance, no matter how seemingly minor-league, can take you down.)
The hero of the Ennet House crowd is one Don Gately, who has made enough of a recovery to become a resident employee, responsible for verifying everyone’s comings and goings. Gately also serves as cook, and his special meat loaf (covered in corn flakes, for crispyness), is perhaps the least of the inmates’ trials. A former burglar and Demerol addict, Gately has had the misfortune to tie a gag into the mouth of someone he came across in a house he was burgling, who just happens to have a headcold, and who suffocates as a result. There is a wealth of wonderful and fascinating detail about Gateley’s upbringing and career in Infinite Jest, and if Wallace had wanted himself a tidy little success, he could have quarried himself a nice little 250-page Gately novel.
If I were to re-read Infinite Jest I’m sure I would discover all sorts of profound things—but I’m probably never going to re-read it. it’s a great book, but a harsh one. I get the sense that Wallace was waging a kind of war against his own wit and ebullience as he wrote Infinite Jest—nobody was ever going to accuse him of peddling entertainment. Thus we get 100 pages of footnotes to serve as a kind of ballast, to make the book less of a joy and more of a labor. Wallace was quoted as saying the footnotes were intended to “slow the reader down.” Mission accomplished. I hated the footnotes, which were usually just bits of text that could easily have been incorporated into the body of the novel—or discarded completely.
Maybe this war against entertainment is just a trick—an illusion, like a mime walking against the wind. In any case, there is a certain amount of reassurance to be found in the pages of Infinite Jest—flowers among the rubble. There are noble characters like Michael Pemulis, a working-class scholarship student at the tennis academy who incriminates himself (and therefore faces expulsion) to save Hal. And there is the third Incandenza brother—Mario, born with numerous birth defects who, after apprenticing under his father, manages to become a documentary filmmaker (of a sort), and is the conscience of the Incandenza family.
Finally, there is the aforementioned Don Gately, who despite an endless series of setbacks and disasters is able to persevere in his recovery and is perhaps even falling in love with a fellow recovering addict as the book draws to a close. (Recovering addicts are required to avoid intimate relationships for one year after cleaning up, because romance will distract them from the relentless focus and determination required to stay sober.) Gately is not supposed to be very bright, but as he looks back on the ruins of his first 30 years of life, he begins to understand how he might be able to make a go of things without substances. Of course, Gately is lying in a hospital with a gunshot wound as he reviews his life, and while there are no clear indications either way, I feel pretty sure he is about to die of his wound. Because that’s what kind of book this is, folks.
Here is a passage that captures some of the essential flavor of Infinite Jest for me. Two pages from the end of the novel, as one last character’s life ends in a characteristically gruesome and revolting auto-de-fé, Wallace (or more precisely, Gately) has a few thoughts to share about Linda McCartney:
…somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings—as in the historical Beatles’s McCartney—taken it and run it through a Kurtzweil remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine. … Poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney just fucking could not sing, and having her shaky off-key little voice flushed from the cover of the whole slick multitrack corporate sound and pumped up to solo was to Gately unspeakably depressing—her voice sounding so lost, trying to hide and bury itself inside the pro backups’ voices. Gately imagined Mrs. Linda McCartney…imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her husband’s pro noise, feeling low esteem and whispering off-key, not knowing quite when to shake her tanbourine: [the] depressing CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic-seeming, like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom.
Ladies and gentlemen, Infinite Jest.
