a change of opinion.
Infinite Jest: A Novel by David Foster Wallace
(link to review on goodreads.com)
rating: 5 of 5 stars
as if the sheer heft of the book wasn’t enough, there’s a culture of active intimidation that’s grown up around infinite jest (which is why it’s taken me so long to pick it up). it’s sold as impossible but “incredibly worth it,” something you can’t read on the subway but have to take “a few months to read” – the intro to my edition had the always cloying but also always well meaning and usually lovable-despite-yourself Dave Eggers likening the read to some sort of initiation: like beers or ritualized genital mutilation. it’s a book to live by, people say. and the footnotes!
well, all i want to do with this review is set the record straight:
Infinite Jest is incredibly readable, even with the criminal font and non-existant margins. the footnotes are not in excess or in any way treacly. the majority of the text is plot driven, Foster Wallace being an avowed anti-academic (if you’re paying attention to camps, or to the text itself, which always has one hand under the table, flipping off the universities) who knew good writing meant audience engagement… and even Entertainment.
Meaning: I can understand how it would be difficult to comprehend, as a whole, if it was approached over the course of six months, or piecemeal over a lifetime (like Finnegan’s Wake or something). This is clearly not how the book is set to be experienced, it being more of a frenzied plot driven sort of experience than philosophical tract – although it may be that too, for some people. Read it straight through if you pick it up. The people who are intimidating you with this book are reading it the wrong way. it is – and if you pick it up, you’ll understand – it is The Entertainment (for better or worse).
it’s also anti-entertainment, which I suspect is the point of the whole thing, the blast whole (sic) at the end and the thousand pages of where-is-this-going? and the realization that maybe most of the plots you thought were driving the whole thing weren’t really and the empathetic tremens. but that’s a hole (sic) other discussion, the meta-commentary. the joke doesn’t work if you just drop in for the punchline.
if you want to know about comparisons that aren’t completely bogus or unhelpful, it (mostly)felt to me like a sprawling and tragi-comic sci-fi novel – Salinger’s Glass Family as imagined by William Gibson, Burroughs, and Kennedy O’Toole. (Maybe amend that to read “William Gibson if he’d written Ender’s Game” and “Burroughs if he wasn’t an idiot a-hole”).
also, n.b., it sometimes feels like your reading of the text is somehow historic, which i’ve only come across before, really, with Ulysses. This book definitely has a Ulysses sort of feel/heft to it, but is (again) less consciously obfuscatory – more concerned with audience entertainment and less an aggressively historic artifact: in short, a very long but very good book.
A book I sometimes read en route to other places, ignoring directions, in between things. And a book with an ending that read, to me, like a landmine victim blown apart. A book that ultimately felt, for its thousands of pages, like half a book.
which is why i’m not sure how i feel about infinite jest, even though i enjoyed it immensely, sometimes in a good way and sometimes in a way that was good for being almost nauseatingly bad.
but never the writing: that was always mostly very good.
****
PS: do yourselves a favor and google DFW and “Sierpinski Gasket”. the macarthur will make sense, if it didn’t already.
View all my reviews.
Posted on 28 January 2009 at 5:49 pm
[...] yes, I think you had something on AMR about that, too Nick: here’s what i think: great books have plots that people care about. YA is awesome [...]