book discussion

Please?

Heck yeah--it's my favorite book, and I've been DYING to have it analyzed.

I will.

I have a theory about what it all means. I'd love to hear yours.

I don't know if I have any theories. I just really loved it. I read it in about a month like four months ago, and I actually just started reading it again, this time more slowly so I can really digest it.

I'm open to any other interpretations, but re-reading it, I'm struck by how many possibly crucial plot points are in the first 50 pages, before you even know which details might be crucial. Especially in that weird appointment Hal has with the 'conversationalist' that turns out to be his dad, which probably isn't really happening anyway.

Another discussion possibility is the long ongoing scene with Marathe and Steeply in Arizona.
A lot of people complain about how boring this ongoing exchange is. I personally think their conversation is hilarious. I especially love the french-to-english translation idiosyncracies Wallace ascribes to Marathe when writing from his POV.
What do you think?

I don't exactly have the book wide open in front of me so forgive me if I get a bit messed up.

It seems to me that the movie list in the appendices is key to understanding the book. The conversationalist piece is one of the movies in the set, and it seems like Hal's father is making movies FOR Hal---a sort of desperate cry for his attention.

Also, I've heard a lot of mention comparing Hamlet to Infinite Jest--I understand why, I mean Hal's father is dead and also "Infinite Jest" comes from a Hamlet quote. However, couldn't it be more apropo to compare it to Henry IV? That play is about the end of an era and the beginning of another--the Prince's name IS Hal, who also seems terribly bored of his family. Also the three different "places" that Henry the IV is set in (The tavern, the palace, and the battlefield) roughly correlate to the three places in infinite jest (the house, the tennis academy, and various scenes involving political intrigue).

How about that Mario, huh? I read the book about 4 years ago, and I have been meaning to read it again with a pad of paper to write down all of the descriptions of this character. A few that I can remember are, "all of his teeth are second bicuspids," and something about his skin being gray.

Purchasing this book and Delillo's Underworld are the two greatest crimes I've ever committed against the innocent trees of the world. Big fat books that I couldn't finish and couldn't bear to inflict on anyone else, so I just threw them away.

I still have it. Never finished it. I remember as i was reading this, I really got into each story but, of course, as you probably remember, there are many and it takes a while before they all start to come together. Now that I have seen that other people have actually finished it and enjoyed it, perhaps I will pick it up again

I particularly enjoyed the way the years are referenced as though, in the future, each year has a sponser, like the olympics. Or bowling.

hell, i read it over and over. every time i've picked it up i figure out more about each character and the fucked up things that have happened to them. i can't believe someone threw it away. :(
wallace is a genius. i don't have any theories about it, but it's funny, and tragic, and challenging, and frustrating all at once. i doubt i'll ever stop reading it, or any of his other works.

Loved it, it's genius. Top five favorite books. I'm still reeling a bit, actually. I'm not going to bother typing out my review again though!

You can find some great ideas/theories about the book here:

http://www.thehowlingfantods.c...

I also have a personal theory about who is narrating the book. but it's about three pages long, so let me know if you wanna read it and I'll email it to you. I agree that Wallace is a genius and this is one of the best novels I've ever read, although I do see why alot of people don't like it, it can be very idiosyncratic. For those you didn't like Infinite Jest I suggets A Supposedely Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, his book of non-fiction. The title essay is unforgetable.

One of my all-time absolute favorite novels. A thrilling and moving read, occasionally frustrating but never for a moment boring.

Has anyone noticed that the essay on this book in 1001 BOOKS YOU MUST READ BEFORE YOU DIE is almost completely inaccurate?

What do you all think about the acid incident w/r/t to Joelle v. D., the Prettiest Girl of All Time?

Veiled because she's perfect? or because she's seriously acid burned?

I really think this is something that has no answer or, rather, the answer is gleaned through your own views on beauty and the pros and cons of containing it. Wallace is purposefully vague, saying things like Joelle was "grotesquely lovely" and "hideously attractive" (290) when describing her pre-veil. And also UHID had a term for her kind of beauty (290) meaning that they had encountererd people with her kind of beauty before. Also he mentions her beauty "getting visibly worse" (298) and "repelling every comer". For more references to her face and its effect on people see:

footnote 134, pg. 538 (Joelle saying her face is perfect and thus deformed), 613-619 where Gately almost sees her face.

There's more too. let me know if you want to here the rest. oh yeah, and personally, I think she is dazzlingly beautiful and that she has had so much trouble with her beauty (specifically with her dad) that she wants to hide her beauty and not have to deal with it.

IJ has many more mysteries like this and this is part of why I love it so much: every reading yields new insight.

I took a seminar class from DFW at Pomona (the syllabus was 7 pgs, with footnotes and a Caveat Emptor page) -- probably one of my best academic experiences (and I was a bio major). Unfortunately it was an unspoken rule to never ask him these burning questions... That would kinda ruin the whole "inifite jest" experience of reading it though -- these questions remain to get us ADDICTED to this book! (Fiction = drug)

You guys just restored my faith in this website.

I'm reading IJ now. I'm about a third of the way through. I'll jump on when I'm done.

I hope you're still talking then . . .

OK, I really like David Foster Wallace's magazine pieces. And I loved "Infinite Jest" for the first few hundred pages. I made it into the 700s before I finally bailed. (It was at the point where the Irish father is abusing his son.) What I found frustrating was that it seems like there is a really great book here dealing with drug/alcohol recovery and a certain portion of the criminal underground, with the Quebec revolutionaries and the addictive entertainment "cartridges" mixed in. But what lost me were the science fiction elements that popped up throughout -- the fans, the hamsters, etc. I also think DFW's writing affectations -- the footnotes, especially -- ultimately detract not only from his narrative but, in this case, from his meaning as well.

I am still willing to pick it back up and finish. Somebody will have to give me a reason, however. What am I missing?

Spoiler Alert!

@Jesse You're right that there's no answer to a lot of questions in the book. Joelle's beauty or disfigurement is ambiguous. If we believe Molly, then she's got crazy acid burn, but DFW deliberately set Molly up as an unreliable narrator.

@Sophia Right on! Taking a course from DFW would be great. The unspoken rule not to ask him questions like this seems reasonable, but would be hard not to! Was in a literature course? If so, what books did you read?

@Matt If you got 700 pages in and quit, then I'm not sure I'm the right person to convince you it's worth it... at that point in, I was hooked. Like Sophia said, IJ is almost a drug...

I'm ridiculously excited to have found this discussion thread. Does anyone have an idea about DFW's use of the detail that one of his characters (book on other side of room and too lazy to get up for page number...) gave the impression of smoking several cigarettes at once? It's an obvious allusion (or outright theft if you want to look at it that way) of J.D. Salinger, though I'm interested in hearing someone else's interpretation. IJ is one of my favorite books and, in my humble opinion, genius on the part of our friend Mr. Wallace. But I've been itching to hear someone's take on this specific bit. Let me know!

andy, you should have labeled your comment with a "spoiler alert." i'm still reading the book.

matt, do you have any links to any of his magazine pieces? and sophia, i'm interested too in hearing more about your seminar taught by DFW.

I loved this book. Wallace reminded me of every writer I've ever liked rolled in to one, sometimes without those writers less redeeming qualities, and others with. One of the things I really liked was that Wallace introduced a sort of post-modern sensibility and play to a work that he wanted to be very sensetive and spiritually searching, the exact opposite agenda that most "metafiction" seems to want.

I also felt funny about the science fiction elements to the story at first, like they were out of place and didn't belong. He was painting this beautiful picture of Boston, and I know some people might cringe when I say this, in the same way Joyce tried to capture Dublin in his works, then all this very real sort of romanticism about Modern Boston gets muddled with this futuristic babble. I changed my mind about midway though, and decided that it wasn't just some little quirk for critics to site over and over in reviewing the book to make it sound whacky and satirical. Instead, I ended up greatly enjoying that aspect of the novel because Wallace seemed to be creating this very mythological north America and these events that were sort of isolating the main location, Boston, from what was happening. It seemed very real the further I read into the novel, and less cute like I thought originally. Just look at some of the descriptions about what the chemical effects of the Great Concavity/Convexity do to the sky and forests.

The end reminded me, in a way, of Gaddis's The Recognitions (that work in particular Wallace said was an influence on him). It has a lot of the same fragmentation, where all this information is given to you in snippet paragraphs, and all of it seems unrelated to each other to the point where it MUST be related. Very mysterious. I'll end up reading it again in a few years or so.

Part 1: Reading "Infinite Jest"

Like so many I've heard from or read on pages such as this one, I too failed to finish it on my first effort. I began reading it not long after it was first published, lugging that 7lb. monstrosity all over New York -- even taking it with me to Boston(!) for the 4th of July weekend that year on a solo excursion, where I holed myself up in my aunt's empty house and read DFW and sipped whiskey until loneliness sent me forth into the humid Boston nights -- until i quit, guiltily, just shy of the 400th page.

I started again little more than a year ago, determined to read the book no matter how difficult it might be. The amazing revelation is that, save for a few sections (mostly having to do with the Wheelchair Assassins), this book moves! Yes, sometimes the footnotes interrupt the rhythm -- but they also get you to stop and think -- and, sure, you need a dictionary -- but think of all the cool words you learn! I know I need to read it again, but I also know (which I tell all potential readers) that you absolutely must read the first 30-50 pages as soon as you finish the novel. I think the novel really "ends" on page 30 or so.

Part 2: "Underworld" and "The Lost Scrapbook"

I was amused to see that someone in this thread highlighted DeLillo's and Wallace's tomes as unreadable. They have some similarities -- the seething, swirling, swinish undercurrent of American greed and waste and stuff-lust -- but they are markedly different reading experiences. I think DeLillo's novel is much more readable; while Wallace's has much more heart. (These are, of course, oversimplified descriptions: Forgive me.) DeLillo has written a pitch-perfect epic where sentences crackle on the individual level and his lyrical images resonate, repeat, refract and resolve. (Think of the baseball; think of the planes in the desert; think of Lenny Bruce; my god, think of the hardcover jacket design.) Wallace has written something that, while it all fits, doesn't worry for a moment about boondoggling the pitch. Which brings me to Evan Dara's "The Lost Scrapbook." If you like Wallace and you like DeLillo, then it's one hell of a mind-bender. It's not an easy read -- just try to figure out who's talking sometimes -- but it rewards the diligent, and it too has something to say about the way we live today.

That far, far too often we don't listen to one another, that we ignore the stories that need to be heard, that taking the easy route whenever it appears is a sure way to our own destruction.

But, hell, they're just books right? Entertainments? Distractions?

I'd like to marry David Foster Wallace. However, except for the fact that he's a famous author, I'd avoid Don DeLillo at a cocktail party. I loved your post, Michael.

I was really disappointed with Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, because I felt like it occasionally simplified the complexities of Infinite Jest. I could suddenly understand the sullen conversations with therapists and pseudo-therapists when I read the story which discusses how being smarter than your therapist defeats the purpose.

It's a slightly-askew alternate universe, IMO. The Boston in IJ is Not-Quite-Boston, there are minor geographical discrepancies that might seem radically confusing only to a native Bostonian, e.g. the lumping together and re-mapping of the Common and Gardens, or the thoroughfares passing by accurate landmarks except for a glaring exception here and there. With a handful of noticeable exceptions, DFW's pre-future Boston is accurately mapped. And we're not talking about O.N.A.N. reconfiguration or other random future events changing Boston, this is an already warped Boston DFW is working with. IMO, that means it's also an overall warped future, an alternate dimension, a la "many-worlds", where some of the 1997-2009 technology is sickeningly accelerated and surreal, some of it is lagging woefully behind our world's pace, some of it is right on schedule. Therefore, BU's being in a future college bowl game is just one of the many quirks of this alt-world, quirkier than even DFW had intended since BU's football program was suddenly cancelled just like Syracuse's is in IJ, and this all happened years after IJ was published. Same thing with Cheapo Records, as a Boston-bred reader living in 2008, there are two scenarios where that incongruity (in real life Cheapo's been out of business a good while) doesn't upset one's suspension of disbelief: #1, future IJ-land Cantibrigians have opened a new music store in honor of old Cheapo's, or #2, it's just one of many slightly askew alternate universes. #3, DFW-just-made-a-bad-prediction, isn't very interesting, and DFW makes a point during the Mario puppet movie that there's basically little difference between the parodic and the factual in the alt-universe. It doesn't really matter whether he made good calls or bad calls (although he did make many a good call), the whole sci-fi angle rests on what-might-as-well-be, and the specific what-might-as-well-be in IJ just "happens" to sync up symbolically with so many of the book's themes, a la Feral Infants, and part of DFW's genius is that he crafts thoroughly plausible and intricate mundane-life explanations for the surreal symbology-vehicles. Unlike, say, the movie Magnolia, or whatever. Although I found it hard to visualize Marathe's wife, I just can't see how such a device would work.