Note to my precious readers:This is a guest post by a dear literary friend, George LaCas. His words speak volumes, and the world listens.
Author: Infinite Jest
Title: David Foster Wallace
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Bay Back Books, 2006
Page count, List price: Paperback 1104 pp, $17.99
ISBN-10: 0316066524
ISBN-13: 978-0316066525
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel, is a Work of Genius. There. I've said it. No doubt others have as well. And I've said it about a handful of other novels I've read, that special breed of novel that, for want of a better term, I've dubbed Major Major Novels. I have read reviews of Infinite Jest in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone and elsewhere, and I agree with a lot of it, disagree with some, though of course I will not second-guess reviewers here. I have come to praise Wallace, not to bury his critics.
I guess the easiest way to describe Infinite Jest for the potential reader would be to say that it takes place in Metro Boston, and its two main narrative lines concern, respectively, the doings at an upscale junior tennis academy called E.T.A., and the denizens of a nearby halfway house for hardcore addicts and alcoholics called Enfield House. I lost count of the number of characters. The adventures, and stories-within-stories and instant anecdotes that often lead straight into nightmare scenarios, or into the funniest territory imaginable in fiction.
What joins all the characters together (and they range from a Québec-separatist double agent who may be a triple- or even quadruple agent, to a recovering addict named Don Gately who used to be an enforcer for a bookie, to a dwarfish deformed young man named Mario whose innate peace and wisdom make him an unlikely Buddha figure, to his younger brother Hal - one of the book's "heroes" - who is an overachiever and in many ways a cipher or lost soul; etc etc etc), what glues the figures together in the same book when they, shall we say, come from different parts of town, as in different sides of the tracks, is their various connections to a mysterious, all-consuming film called Infinite Jest.
What is Infinite Jest ABOUT, though, in terms of theme and meaning? That's a tough one, because there are many different themes. One of the themes you'll likely hear about, if you've read any of the articles about this book that followed Wallace's suicide last year, is Entertainment, and its place in modern society. Since I'd heard that from many different reviewers, I guess I took it for granted going in. Infinite Jest contains a parallel between addiction to drugs and entertainments like television, and how in the end we may as individuals be isolated and destroyed by our obsessions.
To me (and this was something I thought of very early this morning as I got up from my reading, having finished the book, and went downstairs to make a bowl of peanut butter oatmeal), some of the major Statements put forth in Infinite Jest are: Art and its relationship to reality, Redemption of the individual through excruciating effort, and Dehumanization through regimentation, victimization, brutality, and isolation. Ultimate beauty (and the fatal pursuit of it, as if beauty itself were a drug) in sharp contrast to disease and deformity. Other issues touched upon are the environment, American politics and foreign relations, obsession, and last but not least the primacy of family (or lack thereof) in defining us.
This is not an easy book, however swiftly it hurtles forward. Sometimes it’s like fingernails across a blackboard, but then you have to ask yourself “Why is this bothering me?” It rewards patience with laughter (not little reading-to-self chuckles, but real LOL rattle-the-windowpanes laughter that the neighbors might hear), and though at times it seems like an ocean of text, with sentences that often go on for more than 500 words, you will never for an instant have any doubt that you are in the middle of something grand and important.
But this is the powerful image I got from Infinite Jest, as I spooned peanut butter onto hot thick oatmeal: great works of art (be they books, paintings, films) floating amongst us like little black holes, free-floating singularities that suck reality into the undeniable gravities of Art, churning our world and spewing it back out anew, refreshed and very strange. Over and over and over. Which, perhaps, can be seen as a kind of immortality.
I told my followers on Twitter that Infinite Jest is in my All-Time Top 5, and I mean it. Right up there with Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, Blood Meridian and 2666. This is no little skim-and-forget beach read. This is the real deal, folks. This is the kind of fiction that I aspire to write -- something this huge and important -- and I say to Hell with those who would tell me different.
David Foster Wallace ... Rest in Peace, Brother. You are not forgotten.
George LaCas
You can purchase Infinite Jest here.
George LaCas is the author of The Legend of Jimmy Gollihue.
Hoppy Reading!
