James Roach’s Reviews > Infinite Jest > Status Update

Today I completed the book. I started reading it again in either April or May and finally read the last word at the same place where I read so many pages in the last 4 years - Beachwood Swim Club.

Verdict: I don't know that the experience was worth the effort reading this thing for the last 4 years. It could be funny, it could be profound, but as a novel, I found it really hard to sum up what I had just read.

981 is the last page in the novel. Up to now, I've read all 286 footnotes, which covers an additional 70 pages. Pretty sure I've read all the end notes, too. There weren't many of those.

I found the pages on depression in pgs 692-698 to be very profound. It is no wonder at all to me that a man that understood depression as well as DFW did would end up offing himself.

Restarted my summer read. On the whole, the main character arcs are now well established: Hal and the kids at the tennis academy, the 2 spies hanging out in AZ smoking cigarrettes and arguing politics, and the characters at the substance abuse house. The arcs are rotated fairly evenly, though there is still no clear connection between them. They could easily be 3 novels at this point instead of 1.

In addition, there is a really great chapter between a U.S. and Quebec secret agents that argue over what motivates Americans and makes them uniquely American. I don't know if it actually answers the question, but it is thought provoking: 2 Americans deeply desire a single-serving can of bean soup, and each have an equal claim to the soup. How do you determine who gets it and who goes without?

The last 60 pages have been very interesting. There is an explanation of how the U.S. government sort of annexes Mexico and Canada called "Interdependence", and basically creates this an area in New York/New Hampshire as a huge garbage dump and then gives it as a territory to Canada sparking the main conflict between the two nations. Also how the entertainment industry changed into the interlace cartridges.

Have been in some long chapters about AA, and the humor (whether intentional or not) goes right off the cliff for me. This is a deep dive into AA meeting territory - how they are organized, how they are run, the different segments of alcoholics that are in attendance, etc. You can say a lot about DFW, but when he drills into a topic, he really goes deep down the rabbit hole.

This book is funny. Not always, but when it's funny, it's really funny. I like this passage a lot right now:

"...you make a big deal of how head-over-heels in love you are with your wife, how wonderful she is, the wife, how blue and clean the pilot-light of passion stills burns in the central heating system of your love for her..."

Just finished the long chapter on the nuclear war strategy game called Eschaton which features tennis balls as ICBM's played on a tennis court. Maybe it's because of the war in Ukraine and the daily rhetoric about nuclear holocaust, but I think this chapter would have been laugh out loud funny maybe 2 years ago or something. My reading progress does not count the many pages of footnotes and end notes I've read.

Finally cracked 300 pages!