Infinite Jest
‘A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy…’ said Hamlet of Yorick by Ophelia’s grave. But in David Foster Wallace’s novel the infinite jest is the name of a lost film made by the now self-deceased father of Hal Incandenza, tennis junior star, brilliant young mind but also, junkie. This film turns out to be the ultimate upper (or downer) but whatever you can’t be without it. Watch it once and you’ll drool your life away, anything so long as you can watch it again, and then again and then again.
Strands of plot are after this film for reasons of state, international fractured relations, terror at the hands of sectarian breakaway Quebecois wheelchair assassins, but also the deniable nonspecific forces of the newly-formed O.N.A.N (the Organisation of North American Nations) of which the US has become Interdependently a part along with the despised Canadians, the Concavity to the US Convexity (or the other way round).
ONAN: what’s it make you think of? Wankers? Or an anagram of ANON as in anonymous as in AA or NA because, believe you me, the US part of O.N.A.N is addicted to the hilt – not only young Hal (Hamlet?) ((There are echoes of Hamlet that get raised then dropped – but no matter)): booze, drugs, cooked and cooked-up, but ways of wasting pointless lives too. Mega-pap and corporate nonsense so that even Time has been put out to tender to the highest bidder, sponsored, bought, branded year by year - The Year of the Adult Depend Undergarment, or the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad , or the Trial Size Dove Bar etc etc ( a somewhat medicalised, none-too-fragrant- sounding calendar).
At the top of the hill, somewhere near Boston, is the Ennet Tennis Academy for upscale smooth-skinned tennis-show-pro wannabes, all hormones and diets and players’ superstitions, locker rooms and shower room stinks. Down the hill is the Ennet junkies’ half way house recovery centre where the (mostly) underclass have crawled in their final desperation, for 12-step or 13-step sampler cliché proto-religious homilies to keep coming back, take it day by day.
A resident staffer at the Ennet House recovery centre is big Don Gately, and by big I mean big, erstwhile professional burglar, one of whose burglings went seriously if inadvertently wrong. He’s the most realised character of the lot and hogs the tale as the pages march goes by. But he’s only one of a cast-list of hundreds, many of them getting their maps gruesomely eliminated, or planning the same for others, altogether a cartographer’s nightmare.
It would be a spoiler to give away the plot. Actually that was just an excuse because although I read this more or less straight through in the sense that I didn’t do much else, I couldn’t summarise the plot even without having my knuckles rapped by a moderator. I’m not sure I really know what happened at all. What’s more I couldn’t care less because I don’t think it matters.
In 1996 when the book came out, the New York Times observed that ‘while there are many uninteresting pages in this novel, there are not many uninteresting sentences.’ Yes. Indeed. At over 1000 pages (a lot fewer than he, DFW, originally handed in, this book is too long by some hundreds of them. But which ones? If you’re looking at structure by any usual measure you might, I suppose, strip out enough to make the thing clear. But clear in what sense, for what purpose, and for whom?
I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite so detailed, where every marvellous sentence describes so minutely a world of such ugliness. There is not one image of beauty. Not one. And only one trusting individual, and one moment of genuine love – though a number that might like to be taken as such.
Infuriating, confusing, completely compelling, deeply, deeply sad. Dave Eggers insists in the forward that DFW is a normal guy. He has to be kidding, Dave Eggers.
Strands of plot are after this film for reasons of state, international fractured relations, terror at the hands of sectarian breakaway Quebecois wheelchair assassins, but also the deniable nonspecific forces of the newly-formed O.N.A.N (the Organisation of North American Nations) of which the US has become Interdependently a part along with the despised Canadians, the Concavity to the US Convexity (or the other way round).
ONAN: what’s it make you think of? Wankers? Or an anagram of ANON as in anonymous as in AA or NA because, believe you me, the US part of O.N.A.N is addicted to the hilt – not only young Hal (Hamlet?) ((There are echoes of Hamlet that get raised then dropped – but no matter)): booze, drugs, cooked and cooked-up, but ways of wasting pointless lives too. Mega-pap and corporate nonsense so that even Time has been put out to tender to the highest bidder, sponsored, bought, branded year by year - The Year of the Adult Depend Undergarment, or the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad , or the Trial Size Dove Bar etc etc ( a somewhat medicalised, none-too-fragrant- sounding calendar).
At the top of the hill, somewhere near Boston, is the Ennet Tennis Academy for upscale smooth-skinned tennis-show-pro wannabes, all hormones and diets and players’ superstitions, locker rooms and shower room stinks. Down the hill is the Ennet junkies’ half way house recovery centre where the (mostly) underclass have crawled in their final desperation, for 12-step or 13-step sampler cliché proto-religious homilies to keep coming back, take it day by day.
A resident staffer at the Ennet House recovery centre is big Don Gately, and by big I mean big, erstwhile professional burglar, one of whose burglings went seriously if inadvertently wrong. He’s the most realised character of the lot and hogs the tale as the pages march goes by. But he’s only one of a cast-list of hundreds, many of them getting their maps gruesomely eliminated, or planning the same for others, altogether a cartographer’s nightmare.
It would be a spoiler to give away the plot. Actually that was just an excuse because although I read this more or less straight through in the sense that I didn’t do much else, I couldn’t summarise the plot even without having my knuckles rapped by a moderator. I’m not sure I really know what happened at all. What’s more I couldn’t care less because I don’t think it matters.
In 1996 when the book came out, the New York Times observed that ‘while there are many uninteresting pages in this novel, there are not many uninteresting sentences.’ Yes. Indeed. At over 1000 pages (a lot fewer than he, DFW, originally handed in, this book is too long by some hundreds of them. But which ones? If you’re looking at structure by any usual measure you might, I suppose, strip out enough to make the thing clear. But clear in what sense, for what purpose, and for whom?
I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite so detailed, where every marvellous sentence describes so minutely a world of such ugliness. There is not one image of beauty. Not one. And only one trusting individual, and one moment of genuine love – though a number that might like to be taken as such.
Infuriating, confusing, completely compelling, deeply, deeply sad. Dave Eggers insists in the forward that DFW is a normal guy. He has to be kidding, Dave Eggers.
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