Infinite Jest in On Paths Unknown

Jun 26, 2018 David Katzman added it

Wow. Infinite Jest could equally have been called Beautiful Disaster. I will not even rate this book. It’s unrateable. There are so many different measures upon which it could be rated that it deserves its own category. The book runs off in too many directions and but has so many brilliant aspects to it. And but yet Wallace’s disinterest in being “entertaining” or, (who can say?) his inability to actually take this story to a satisfactory conclusion leaves the book as a whole distressing and cha Wow. Infinite Jest could equally have been called Beautiful Disaster. I will not even rate this book. It’s unrateable. There are so many different measures upon which it could be rated that it deserves its own category. The book runs off in too many directions and but has so many brilliant aspects to it. And but yet Wallace’s disinterest in being “entertaining” or, (who can say?) his inability to actually take this story to a satisfactory conclusion leaves the book as a whole distressing and chaotic. Life is chaotic, one can say. Life has no ending (well…it might…it will eventually…). Life makes no clear sense. Sure. But do I want to read life? I live life; I want to read about life. Do I want incompleteness as a theme when we all feel it in our daily lives? Do I want to bump into a new character near the end of a 1000 page book that only gets one scene? Incompleteness is anxiety and the incompleteness of Infinite Jest, the hanging comma of so many storylines—as a “Jest” on the reader—is a rather cruel one. Perhaps it’s deserved. Most of us certainly are stuck in our mundane ways while civilization crumbles. Global warming assaults the planet. Our repulsive President endorses hatred, racism and dehumanization of non-Americans and immigrants and tears children from their parents. Remember Gordon Gecko? Greed is Good. Today he could equally say racism is good. Let them hate each other while the rich pillage the world. But I digress. As does David Foster Wallace. The ending was another cruelty. Just brutal. Brutal brutal brutal. Horrible emotional and physical cruelty is where the story ends. So there, the jest is on the reader. Jokes on you! Fine, we don’t get anything satisfying because that’s life. But then, you also get a book that leaves one unsatisfied. AND NOT LIKING IT. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT DAVID FOSTER WALLACE? He was conflicted. Or perhaps just incapable. Because there is also much to enjoy in Infinite Jest. There, I said it. There are many entertaining aspects to it! Oh the irony! There are several scenes in the book that are just laugh-out-loud hilarious. Epic set pieces. Written like theater, one can just see the utter absurdity of these moments that Wallace sets up. Like human versions of Rube Goldberg machines or the gun fight with the baby carriage rolling down the stairs in The Untouchables. There are many clashes in style throughout. The book is at war with itself. Jesting itself. Jousting itself. The characters are realistic. They are unrealistic. They are believable, unbelievable. Which brings me to another point…can you guess what Wallace’s favorite phrase in the entire book is? I’ll tell you. “And but” (and but did you notice that I worked it into my sixth and seventh sentences?) He also threw in a lot of “And yet(s)” and “But yet(s)” but overall “And but” was the most used phrase repeated ad nauseum. Like a verbal tic. Did he know this? Probably, one can perhaps hypothesize it was intentional. But either way, it embodied the schizophrenic nature of the book. Entertaining/not entertaining, absurd/realistic, intertwining plot lines/dead ends, narrator/no-narrator, life/death, comedy/tragedy, text/footnotes, novel/rambling inner monologue. Life is a contradiction, meaningful and meaningless. And but. As far as subjects of the book go, addiction and loneliness are the two central topics, and their teleological trajectory toward suicide. What a painful (yet actually worthwhile) dive into the nature of addiction. The deeper irony of course humming in the background of all those scenes about drug addiction, suicide and depression is knowing how Wallace ended and feeling like it was a horribly painful window into his mind. This was one of the great and tragic aspects of this book that counteracts many of the negative qualities. He bared his soul here, if you will, given his atheism; he shared his own contradictions. And like Ian Curtis, he meant it. Chilling. As my final note on this text, I will say another disappointing aspect to the book was Wallace’s treatment of non-white characters. The casual racism of many of the white character coupled with the stereotypical black and Asian characters…left a degree of dissatisfaction that can’t be explained away thematically but rather stand for a blind-spot Wallace clearly could not address and thus ends my Infinite Run-on Review. Good day to you. ...more

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May 22, 2009 Brian rated it it was amazing

There isn't a proper way to give a review to this book without overdoing hyperbole and superlatives surrounding its greatness. A friends asked me what it is about - I replied it was about the best fiction I've ever read.

DFW was a genius. Read this book. ...more

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Jun 03, 2012 Sarah (Presto agitato) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorite-books

This is a book you really have to finish. Through much of it, I enjoyed it well enough. There are funny moments, though the humor tends to be dark (at times very dark). The depictions of addiction, depression, obsessive-compulsions, phobias, and hyper-competitiveness are insightful and at times have a searing, painful realism. But I felt a lot of the time that in a way it was aimed at a slightly different demographic from me. I could think of a lot of people I’ve known who would be all over this This is a book you really have to finish. Through much of it, I enjoyed it well enough. There are funny moments, though the humor tends to be dark (at times very dark). The depictions of addiction, depression, obsessive-compulsions, phobias, and hyper-competitiveness are insightful and at times have a searing, painful realism. But I felt a lot of the time that in a way it was aimed at a slightly different demographic from me. I could think of a lot of people I’ve known who would be all over this (though I don’t know anyone in real life who has read it). A definable demographic: U.S. males, middle to upper middle class, intelligent, educated, nerdy, probably born sometime between 1965-1985. Don’t get me wrong, I know and love that demographic. As a reader, though, I initially felt like this book was aiming near me, but not quite at me. More important than which group Infinite Jest targeted was the fact that targeting any group at all made it smaller and less universal. A Good book, but not a Great book. Four stars, not five stars.

This is a novel with many flashes of brilliance as well as sustained passages of great writing, but there are also ugly moments. Some were necessary to the story, but at other times I felt like DFW was exorcising his own repellent, obsessive thoughts (view spoiler) by inflicting them onto me. Darkly humorous or not, the more he did it, the less I appreciated it. There were gratuitous cheap horror show tricks and gags that dragged out longer than necessary.

But somewhere around 600 pages or so, I was finally sucked in. Wallace gradually gathers the threads of his myriad story lines together, letting the reader experience epiphany after epiphany as the pieces of the puzzle start to slide into place. It’s a fun feeling when we are finally allowed to step back from a large canvas that we’ve been looking at too closely, to see that the beautifully detailed scenes he has created eventually make sense as parts of a whole.

Then the story starts to get stranger, but proportionally more intriguing. (view spoiler) It’s wild, initially subtle but gradually more obvious, and leaves plenty of questions. Incredibly, at the end of more than 1,000 pages, the natural instinct is to turn back to the beginning to try to figure it all out, in a recursive loop of a story it’s hard to turn away from. That says a lot for a writer who has challenged his readers with frustration, ugliness, and mirrored roadblocks.

Comments on the ending (I am spoiler-tagging this):
(view spoiler) ...more

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Mar 25, 2008 Nate D rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-in-2008, post-modernism, favorites

Even at its 1079-page length, Infinite Jest seems to extend indefinitely off the page in all directions. The book's contours can contain only a piece of the sprawling universe Wallace seems to have created for it, its bindings like an empty picture frame held at arm's length against distant mountains.

This is one of those books that will be with me for a long time, gnawing in the back of my thoughts, just like its eponymous, viewer-trapping Entertainment.

Note to self: this. (Thanks Karen) ...more

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