Infinite Jest in Metafilter

Sep 27, 2009 Gar rated it it was amazing

I had to let this simmer at a mental back burner for awhile.

It's a book for people who love the english language. Not just in raw vocabulary, though that helps (my vocabulary inventory is pretty ridiculous to begin with, I always buried the needle in tests about reading in context, I've soaked up enough etymology to be able to make guesses at compound latin-ancestored technical words usually better than random chance...and I still had to keep looking things up; people who aren't friendly with di I had to let this simmer at a mental back burner for awhile.

It's a book for people who love the english language. Not just in raw vocabulary, though that helps (my vocabulary inventory is pretty ridiculous to begin with, I always buried the needle in tests about reading in context, I've soaked up enough etymology to be able to make guesses at compound latin-ancestored technical words usually better than random chance...and I still had to keep looking things up; people who aren't friendly with dictionaries should stay far, far away from this book) but also in the craft of it. There are turns of phrase that just ring like a bell; where you think "that right there is a beautiful sentence." This happens over and over throughout it.

There are stumbles getting there. Wallace's prose style goes to run-on sentences and parenthetical digressions everywhere and frequent endnotes that themselves have endnotes. Frequently that works deftly, but when it doesn't, it's the kind of stumble an editor really should have been able to help with. (I suspect whoever did help as editors mostly got dizzy.) Also, there's an isolated section that's apparently in some dialect attempt at ebonics, and good god does that section ever not work. But overall, the stumbles are overshadowed by writing that wasn't just written, but had the hell written out of it.

Trying to give a plot synopsis is probably kind of hopeless. The key McGuffin loosely binding the wide cast of characters is the titular Infinite Jest, a film so entertaining that once someone views even a few seconds of it, they don't care about anything else except watching more of it, and rewatching it when it's done. This matters more than such minor things like eating and drinking. (Monty Python's Flying Circus had a skit once about the WW2 arms race to write the perfect joke, a joke so funny that anyone hearing it would laugh to death. Same concept here.) Government agents want to lock down all available copies and the lost master copy; radical Canadian separatists like the brutally violent Wheelchair Assassins want to use them as a weapon to bring down the Organization of North American Nations, which is what NA became by a complicated alternate history involving the United States solving its pollution problems by converting Maine and surrounding bits of New England to a giant toxic landfill and giving the territory away to Canada. Also, three or four separate types of fusion power using that toxic waste, where the waste products of each fusion plant feed the next type, provide the continent's energy needs, with the downside of most babies born nearby being born without skulls, and also plagues of hamsters. The creation of O.N.A.N. is largely covered in an expository section recapping a movie filmed with stop-motion puppets. That's just a small snapshot of the plot, which isn't so much a plot as a very disorienting whirl, and clearly is that way on purpose.

Appropriately for the title, it's also frequently a really funny book. Two highlights:

1) the description of a tennis-academy schoolyard game of Eschaton (a baroque abstract global thermonuclear wargame played over three or four tennis courts with serves and physical impact of the tennis balls acting as the game moves and ball buckets and whatnot as cities) devolving into a brawl--as watched by deeply, deeply, DEEPLY stoned characters.

2) one of our frequent protagonists intending to go to a 12-step program meeting, and accidentally ending up at a group-therapy encounter meeting revolving around age-regression to heal by way of dialog and meeting the needs of the particpants' "Inner Infant" and him being paralyzed with intense vicarious embarassment. Just masterfully built up.

And there are umpty serious scenes too, ranging from action-packed (there's a great street brawl ending in a gunshot wound) to horrifying (the Wheelchair Assassins are funny, sure, until you see them in action on their mission) to meditative. There's a downright chilling section that's really just a kind of transplanted essay, with minor tweaking into a character's voice, about what the experience of clinical depression with suicidal ideation is like, which was all the more resonant considering suicide is exactly how the author's life ended a decade-ish after he wrote the book.

It's definitely not for everyone. It can be easy to lose the thread of what's happening even within single paragraphs (in single sentences sometimes!), it demands a kind of constant mental bookmarking as you read through nested digressions before leaping back to a starting point you may have forgotten by then, the vocabulary is going to kick your brain's ass unless you're a sentient copy of the OED, and the "ending" will drive anyone who demands traditional plot structures right up the nearest wall and then every available wall after that one every time they remember it. I'm very glad I read it. ...more

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