Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

It took me three and a half months, but I finally slogged through Infinite Jest. Now I’ve got the howling fantods. Adding the phrase ‘howling fantods’ to my vocabulary was the only good that came out of forcing my way thru this infinite book.

Infinite Jest is pretty much summed up with North America entertaining itself to death. The title of the book refers to a film that is so utterly captivating that the viewer literally cannot stop watching it. The viewer will pee and poop in their seat and quit eating and drinking until they ultimately die. Rescue workers come in and get enthralled to the point that they are drawn in, too. Then you end up with a whole room of people who have entertained themselves to death. A group of legless men in wheelchairs from Quebec are intent on tracking it down. (?)

DFW hammers in our addiction to constant entertainment a bit heavy handed. The film maker is named J. O. Incandenza. Canada, the US, and Mexico has formed one country called O.N.A.N. (if you are familiar with the Old Testament you will get this reference.)

Infinite Jest takes place mostly at an elite tennis academy and a halfway house for recovering addicts. I found the halfway house to be slightly more entertaining. Some of the tennis sections got so bogged down that, as someone who knows virtually nothing about tennis, I could feel my brain oozing out of my left ear.

DFW is hailed as predicting the future with this badonkachonk of a book. The main one being Don Gately, with his square head, predicting Minecraft Steve.

Oh, and the footnotes. Dear lord the footnotes. There are hundreds of them. Some of them are up to five pages of tiny print long with sub footnotes. Having to constantly flip back and forth was a major pain. Allegedly this is supposed to give the reader the feeling of the back and forth of a tennis game. I just found it to be a little too pretentious. In fact, the book should be called Pretentious Jest. By the last hundred pages or so I, in an act of rebellion (or plain exhaustion), quit looking at the footnotes.

I swear for every fifty pages I read, I think the ghost of David Foster Wallace past sneaked in and added ten more pages.

You may be asking yourself, “Wendy, why do you do this to yourself?” In short, it’s the same reason former Libertarian Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson feels the need to climb every mountain in the world: we both smoke a lot of weed. It’s made us not right in the head.

To keep myself sane I made IJ my book on the side. I read about twelve other books while I tackled this doorstop.

Infinite Jest is the Marmite of the book world: You either put it on everything, or you think its the creation of Satan’s anus. In this case, I’m on team anti-Marmite.

I’m sure there are a slew of dude bros in the world who will say that my delicate little female mind just didn’t get it. Maybe they are right. Maybe it went over my head. Or maybe, just maybe, the book is a pile of shizz.

My next challenge is to read Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson, published in 1748 and clocks in at 1533 pages. Hopefully I won’t break my foot by dropping Clarissa on it. I can’t afford a trip to the emergency room.

Happy reading y’all,

Wendy