Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace – Omaha Beach Read
The second chapter of Infinite Jest involves a man waiting for a woman to arrive with a marijuana delivery. This is absolutely the last time he is going to use marijuana. To make sure that this last time is really the last time – unlike all the other last times – extreme measures are called for. He is going to smoke so much marijuana that the very idea of the stuff will become disgusting. This debauch will be a heroic and disciplined effort. He’ll keep smoking, when every instinct is telling him to stop, and so finally win freedom from marijuana.
Infinite Jest is similar to this upside down approach to drug rehabilitation. Discipline is required to make your way through hundreds of thousands of off-kilter words, and a wandering plot about a film so compelling that anyone seeing it has no choice but to watch again and again. On the other hand, the reading experience is like retreating into hedonism, giving up on your job, the chores, not posting any reviews on your blog for weeks, just to read through these endless pages.
I suppose in the end, Infinite Jest is about good books, as in what they are and how they work. A book is often considered good in making a reader feel they can’t put it down, becoming like an addictive drug in that sense. But we all know that addictive drugs are very bad for you, physically and mentally – with reminders of the hazards, if we need them, provided by the many scenes in Infinite Jest involving drugs. So maybe a good book is one you really can put down for some reason, maybe because it’s cheap sensationalism and not worth your time, or conversely because it’s a challenging read, requiring effort and thought, and giving opportunity for demanding essay topics. Infinite Jest is at times unputdownable, over-the-top and hilarious, at other times so horrible, in both subject matter and textual difficulty, that it begs to be put down. In fancy, intellectual terms there are references to Bertolt Brecht and his idea that an audience should be pushed away from a beguiling, hypnotic, theatrical experience, to think for themselves. Infinite Jest remains both chunky, sensationalist entertainment and an austere Brechtian production, insisting that the reader take a fair share of the heavy lifting. This might be the best book, or the worst book, but is rarely anything inbetween. I was both sad and hugely relieved to get to the end of something that was like a drug with its own built-in antidote.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace was published in 1996 and is on the Time Magazine list for best novels in English 1923 – 2005.
