BOOKLIST 197: INFINITE JEST: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by American writer David Foster Wallace. The novel is widely noted for its unconventional narrative structure and its experimental use of endnotes (there are a total of 388 endnotes, some with footnotes of their own). It has been categorized as an encyclopedic novel and made Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
The novel's title is from Hamlet, Act V, Scene 1, in which Hamlet holds the skull of the court jester, Yorick, and says, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!" Wallace's working title for Infinite Jest was A Failed Entertainment.
Eschewing chronological plot development and straightforward resolution—a concern often mentioned in reviews—the novel supports a wide range of readings. At various times Wallace said that he intended for the novel's plot to resolve, but indirectly; responding to his editor's concerns about the lack of resolution, he said "the answers all [exist], but just past the last page". Long after publication Wallace maintained this position, stating that the novel "does resolve, but it resolves ... outside of the right frame of the picture. You can get a pretty good idea, I think, of what happens". Critical reviews and a reader's guide have provided insight, but Burns notes that Wallace privately conceded to Jonathan Franzen that "the story can't fully be made sense of"
LITERARY CONNECTIONS: Infinite Jest draws explicitly or allusively on many previous works of literature. As its title implies, the novel is in part based on the play Hamlet. Other links to literature include the Odysseyand The Brothers Karamazov.
The film so entertaining that its viewers lose interest in anything else has been likened to the Monty Python sketch "The Funniest Joke in the World", as well as to "the experience machine", a thought experiment by Robert Nozick.
CRITICAL RECEPTION: Infinite Jest was marketed heavily, and Wallace had to adapt to being a public figure. He was interviewed in national magazines and went on a 10-city book tour. Publisher Little, Brown equated the book's heft with its importance in marketing and sent a series of cryptic teaser postcards to 4,000 people, announcing a novel of "infinite pleasure" and "infinite style". Rolling Stone sent reporter David Lipsky to follow Wallace on his "triumphant" book tour—the first time the magazine had sent a reporter to profile a young author in ten years. The interview was never published in the magazine but became Lipsky's New York Times-bestselling book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (2010), of which the 2015 movie The End of the Tour is an adaptation.
Early reviews contributed to Infinite Jest's hype, many of them describing it as a momentous literary event. In the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Steven Moore called the book "a profound study of the postmodern condition." In 2004, Chad Harbach declared that, in retrospect, Infinite Jest "now looks like the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit." In a 2008 retrospective by The New York Times, it was described as "a masterpiece that's also a monster—nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness. Its size and complexity make it forbidding and esoteric."
Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
As Wallace's magnum opus, Infinite Jest is at the center of the new discipline of "Wallace Studies", which, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, "... is on its way to becoming a robust scholarly enterprise."
Not all critics were as laudatory. Some early reviews, such as Michiko Kakutani's in The New York Times, were mixed, recognizing the inventiveness of the writing but criticizing the length and plot. She called the novel "a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Wallace's mind." In the London Review of Books, Dale Peckwrote of the novel, "... it is, in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous, and—perhaps especially—uncontrolled." Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale Universitycalled it "just awful" and written with "no discernible talent" (in the novel, Bloom's own work is called "turgid"). And in a review of Wallace's work up to the year 2000, A.O. Scott wrote of Infinite Jest, "The novel's Pynchonesque elements...feel rather willed and secondhand. They are impressive in the manner of a precocious child’s performance at a dinner party, and, in the same way, ultimately irritating: they seem motivated, mostly, by a desire to show off."
Some critics have since qualified their initial stances. In 2008 Scott called Infinite Jest an "enormous, zeitgeist-gobbling novel that set his generation's benchmark for literary ambition" and Wallace "the best mind of his generation." James Wood has said that he regrets his negative review: "I wish I'd slowed down a bit more with David Foster Wallace."
MY REVIEW: Let me start by saying; I would not recommend this book to anyone. Not because it’s not good, but simply because it’s infuriating. It’s not infuriating because it doesn’t end (we can debate this later); it’s irritatingly and unnecessarily long. I realised when I’d finished that I’d been reading this for around 6 months – that’s half of a whole year! It didn’t take me that long because it was lengthy (it’s a very hefty book) but because it was difficult. Getting a story out of this book was like trying to draw conversation from an awkward but precocious teenager – it read that way too. Some conversations between characters carried over many pages without any plot development; people were introduced without their story ending up anywhere and most frustrating of all; it just ended. The ending left you stranded, all that was left for you were the ideas about where you thought the story was going or the ends you tied up for yourself as you were reading.
Earlier I said this book was good, or I eluded to as much, but I’m still not sure how to feel about it. It’s not terrible, it’s not a work of genius either, or is it? I’m conflicted but I will tell you this, if you don’t read it you’re not really missing out on much. I’d say the returns are not worth the hard work but it was interesting to read.
If you’d seen the film The End of the Tour, as I did, then you might have believed that you’d start reading this book and get hooked and proclaim Wallace as a genius – I didn’t have this experience and, I suppose, because of this, I was a little disappointed. One interesting aspect of the book that I will share with you is the fact that it’s set in the future (the year is unclear) but interestingly for a book written in the 90s the word millennial does pop up quie a bit, also there are predictions about advances in technology and entertainment – all, for the most part, wrong but interesting all the same.
