Book Review: 'Infinite Jest' by David Foster Wallace
“When you exit [those months] of reading, you are a better person. It’s insane, but also hard to deny. Your brain is stronger because it’s been given a monthslong workout, and more importantly, your heart is sturdier, for there has scarcely been written a more moving account of desperation, depression, addiction, generational stasis and yearning, or the obsession with human expectations, with artistic and athletic and intellectual possibility.” - Dave Eggers
For a book that suffers so much from its reputation—of pretension, of excessive complexity, of eye-rolling “litbro” aesthetics—Infinite Jest floored me with its humanity. It was special to me since I read the majority of it alongside my lover, who had also read and adored it. It is a simple, relatable story at heart, wrapped in non-linearity and a number of wild conceits. It IS complex, and the complexity is exquisite and fractal, a complexity of moving parts, the sensation of absence through outlines lovingly puzzled together, and the discursive feedback loop of pleasure and suffering and trauma and talent and imperfect morals, in universal mosaic. When asked who he’d written it for, David Foster Wallace replied “I wrote it for people who like to read,” and it shows. He rewards any reader for their efforts, and never asks entirely too much—a reason this book is much “easier” a read than its reputation suggests, since it is so constantly enjoyable and filled with excitement, fascination, and Treats—but he rewards the Good Reader tenfold. I could easily read this book multiple times. It was designed as a loop and it functions perfectly, compulsively, as such. For an inveterate Reader it is a perfect Entertainment: a rubik-esque literary device for reflective self-stimulation. It satisfied me in the emotional dimension, intellectual dimension, abject dimension, aesthetic dimension, novel dimension, and so on. My least favourite thing was the subtle SciFi. I just don’t like SFF anymore—but it did remind me of one of the few salvageable works in that genre to memory: Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Rant’. And no one can say his ideas weren’t prescient. The stoner bro analytic philosophy and encyclopaedic pharmaceutical stuff are also, maybe, an acquired taste (all things I loved). Nevertheless! It was exceptional.
“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. […] This hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.” - DFW, Infinite Jest
Two more things:
1. He reminds me of a mix between Vladimir Nabokov, the aforementioned Chuck Palahniuk, and Victor Hugo of Les Mis fame. I’ve also heard Marcel Proust, but I cannot speak to that personally.
2. The reason I picked this up ahead of my other scheduled reading, on a whim really, was because I’d heard it’s a good book to read if you know someone who has struggled with serious addiction. In that sense, it made me sob a few times; it also helped me process and understand some things I hadn’t known how to approach as an onlooker. The themes of addiction are a part of this book’s stunning humanity, and I think he pulls it off gorgeously, heart-shatteringly, but also—optimistically.