Infinite Jest
_Infinite Jest_ is the name of a novel written by David Foster Wallace and published in 1996. (If you are keeping track of my reading habits, this makes it possibly the most recently-written novel I have read, and certainly the most recently-written since I started college, unless I am forgetting something extremely unmemorable, with the possible exception of _The God Of Small Things By Arundhati Roy_, a first publication for which I cannot pin down with fifteen minutes on Google, but it won the 1997 Booker Prize so it cannot have been much later.) I have spent much of my time in the past week and a half reading said novel. I am now done.
I enjoyed this book tremendously because many of the specific narrations resonated strongly with my own personal experiences. In these sections with which I found some personal connection, there were snippets of language which I found to be beyond beautiful, in that they were not actually beautiful at all but merely true. Furthermore, they were true things which I already knew but had not previously known how to put into words, which lent the book a certain credence in terms of "knowing how the universe works." This feeling of truth may or may not have been a device employed by the author to convince me of things which are not actually true; only time will tell.
The story is also wickedly funny in places, shifting perspectives and intermingling plot lines in ways that are, if sometimes contrived, usually enjoyable. Once you get really into the story, it is rather hard to get out again, even when you know you are being nailed by intentionally obvious symbolism or taken along a completely unbelievable plot tangent. There are many narrators, all of whom are in their own way engaging and whose perspective on the world differs slightly from each other character's in a compelling way. Perhaps they do not differ enough; perhaps, as I am told is the case in _Finnegan's Wake_, the fact that they do not differ all that terribly is part of the point.
However, there are a few reasons I cannot recommend this book to you. First: Getting into the story, becoming enmeshed in the world of the book and in Wallace's prose, required reading almost 200 (of over a thousand) over-sized, small print pages. These first two hundred pages felt like slogging through mud. With the exception of one or two scenes, they were not enjoyable to read; I felt like I was desperately trying to construct a puzzle out of one-tenth of the pieces from ten different puzzles, and that even if by some miracle they all fit the picture I constructed would be completely worthless. I
would have given up on the book around page 150 had it not been for one of my best friends insisting that it was an _amazing_ book and I simply _had_ to read it. While I am glad that I did not, I am not sure other people would be.
Second: Most of my enjoyment of the book's prose and small details came from literary allusions rather than from new ideas. You can blather about postmodernism, I guess, but in general I don't feel that pointing my friends at books where my response to many passages is "That's totally a reference to the fourth chapter of Ulysses!" is a good call. The world "ineluctable" comes up many times. I think I would have enjoyed the book a lot less if I were not familiar with a number of other authors, and take that criticism as you will.
Third: The book is intentionally irritating. Wallace sets out to piss you off --- either that or he is a horrible writer, and given how much I enjoyed much of the prose I doubt that. Unless you want to be pissed off and left with a sense of something missing, you may not wish to read this book. He does it for a reason, which I will not explain since that would ruin the book, but yeah. The reader is deceived and punished rather a bit.
Note that I am not suggesting that you do not read the book. I rather liked it.
I enjoyed this book tremendously because many of the specific narrations resonated strongly with my own personal experiences. In these sections with which I found some personal connection, there were snippets of language which I found to be beyond beautiful, in that they were not actually beautiful at all but merely true. Furthermore, they were true things which I already knew but had not previously known how to put into words, which lent the book a certain credence in terms of "knowing how the universe works." This feeling of truth may or may not have been a device employed by the author to convince me of things which are not actually true; only time will tell.
The story is also wickedly funny in places, shifting perspectives and intermingling plot lines in ways that are, if sometimes contrived, usually enjoyable. Once you get really into the story, it is rather hard to get out again, even when you know you are being nailed by intentionally obvious symbolism or taken along a completely unbelievable plot tangent. There are many narrators, all of whom are in their own way engaging and whose perspective on the world differs slightly from each other character's in a compelling way. Perhaps they do not differ enough; perhaps, as I am told is the case in _Finnegan's Wake_, the fact that they do not differ all that terribly is part of the point.
However, there are a few reasons I cannot recommend this book to you. First: Getting into the story, becoming enmeshed in the world of the book and in Wallace's prose, required reading almost 200 (of over a thousand) over-sized, small print pages. These first two hundred pages felt like slogging through mud. With the exception of one or two scenes, they were not enjoyable to read; I felt like I was desperately trying to construct a puzzle out of one-tenth of the pieces from ten different puzzles, and that even if by some miracle they all fit the picture I constructed would be completely worthless. I
would have given up on the book around page 150 had it not been for one of my best friends insisting that it was an _amazing_ book and I simply _had_ to read it. While I am glad that I did not, I am not sure other people would be.
Second: Most of my enjoyment of the book's prose and small details came from literary allusions rather than from new ideas. You can blather about postmodernism, I guess, but in general I don't feel that pointing my friends at books where my response to many passages is "That's totally a reference to the fourth chapter of Ulysses!" is a good call. The world "ineluctable" comes up many times. I think I would have enjoyed the book a lot less if I were not familiar with a number of other authors, and take that criticism as you will.
Third: The book is intentionally irritating. Wallace sets out to piss you off --- either that or he is a horrible writer, and given how much I enjoyed much of the prose I doubt that. Unless you want to be pissed off and left with a sense of something missing, you may not wish to read this book. He does it for a reason, which I will not explain since that would ruin the book, but yeah. The reader is deceived and punished rather a bit.
Note that I am not suggesting that you do not read the book. I rather liked it.