Infinite Jest Review

You will find out… [t]hat most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking… [t]hat 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves.

I promise not to make this site a book review blog, but frankly I sank too much time into Infinite Jest to have nothing to show for it other than a sense of accomplishment. It’s fresh now, but in a couple years, I’ll have forgotten most things about one of the major events of my 2023 except that I must have liked it because why else would I finish it. I do know why I started it: to be able to discuss it with my brother. I wrote this to organize my thoughts, and I might as well publish it. Besides, now that I’ve rated it 5 stars on Goodreads, everyone who follows me (i.e. my family) has said, “Oh you must have really liked Infinite Jest.” and I feel the need to justify myself.

I have this uncanny ability to avoid spoilers (or really any information at all) about media, even popular books published almost 30 years ago. I’ll try to avoid getting into the plot to preserve that same ignorance for anyone somehow convinced to read it by this review. (I also have a fear of Viggo Mortensen looking disappointed at me for doing too much summary). Thankfully David Foster Wallace made it easy by not including much plot in the first place.

The one thing I will explain, which is probably common knowledge but which again I miraculously avoided ever learning, is that Infinite Jest, in the world of the book, is a maximally entertaining film. Those who view it spend the rest of their short lives either watching it on repeat or begging to watch it to the exclusion of all basic physical needs.

But Infinite Jest, the book, is a collection of stories from various perspectives around a Boston-area tennis academy and a nearby halfway house. I imagine DFW cackling at George Saunders’s formulation of the economy of a short story, that every detail must be simultaneously entertaining and relevant. Novels as a form are less bound by this constraint, and sagas even less. Still Infinite Jest seems particularly determined to flout it. Many of its stories have no relevance whatsoever to anything else (and often little entertainment either). It is first and foremost gratuitous. It would be vastly improved if it were half the length and had half as many tangents about children with congenital disorders getting molested. While it’s notorious for its length (it’s the only thing about it I couldn’t avoid knowing going in), it’s also its greatest flaw. I’m convinced I rated it 5 stars because I know there’s a 5-star book hidden somewhere in the 1000+ pages.

The only rationalization I can muster for its length is that it’s explicitly trying to avoid being too entertaining or popular although the end makes me question whether it’s going for the addicted begging-for-more out of sheer lack of resolution, but surely DFW couldn’t possibly think it was entertaining enough to make that work.

To give it as much credit and grace as possible (more than it deserves at least), I have to mention that it’s about addiction and ceding personal control to substances (and to Higher Powers), and that these substances (alcohol, narcotics, and television) exist to distract from some other painful aspects of life. “Distract” doesn’t even do it justice. They literally consume all the time and energy in a person’s life until they have nothing left to devote to whatever pain they’re avoiding. By making Infinite Jest such a long and grotesque book, DFW provides you with practice confronting pain rather than your own personal substances. It is a workbook that will stick with you for at least the month you need to read it. Every night you have a fun dilemma: watch TV or read about addiction destroying people’s lives. (I actually do think this had a noticeable effect on the amount of time I spent on YouTube. Hard to say which way the arrow of causation points or if this is just a general, longer-term trend in my life that happened to overlap with the months it took me to read it). The weakness is that, for any piece this long, lots of the author’s other personal interests that ought to stay personal creep in (for instance, thoughts about people investigating handkerchiefs they’ve just blown their nose into).

In lieu of saying anything specific about the plot, I’ll try to convey the way it feels to read through an extended metaphor. George Saunders compared the tension in a story to a juggling ball in the air (referencing Saunders here so I don’t seem like the juggling-obsessed one).

If Infinite Jest were a juggling show, it would start with one man on the stage holding a lot of balls, and you would think that’s a lot of juggling balls. I’m excited to see how he juggles all those. Then he would throw them all up above the curtain and some of them would never come down. Early on, you’d really be trying to focus on which balls were currently in the air and where the tension was. Then maybe someone would drop some new balls and you’d think, did I just fall asleep for 100 pages of this juggling show? Every so often, the man would throw a chainsaw, and you be really excited to see where it went, but it would fly offstage and would not appear again except maybe as some chainsaw noise in the background just loud and frequent enough to remind you that it’s still out there and definitely hasn’t been resolved yet. Then the man would tell some backstory about a few of the balls that maybe you were curious about before but had long since resigned yourself to not getting. Then the curtain goes down and the lights go up and you’re ushered briskly out. No dawdling. And even though you’re still annoyed about the chainsaws, you’re forced to admit that, yes, he was a very impressive juggler.

I don’t know whether I’ll ever recommend it to anyone. (Actually one friend has already made good progress based solely on my Goodreads rating without consulting me first. Thankfully she’s enjoying it. But she also told me to read Gravity’s Rainbow (which I haven’t yet), so maybe that makes us even. Nobody else better start it before I can get this post out, and they can make an informed decision). It’s not that I think it’s a bad book. I just can’t imagine ever being in a conversation that would make me think my interlocutor would like it. Even if they would, I feel like it would be insulting to tell them. Since I’ll probably never recommend it to anyone personally, I’ll mention the type of person who might enjoy it, and they can self-select. You might like it if you’ve never met a negative emotion you couldn’t intellectualize or if the part of your brain that governs your moral gag reflex is necrotized.

I can’t help myself from saying that it’s well-written. Yet this is the first time I don’t mean that wholy as a compliment. Most saliently, it exhibits a wide vocabulary without being too hard to read. A third of the words you don’t know are street names for drugs that are comprehensively documented in the footnotes. The next third are medical terms for various physical deformities which you try to remember not to look up, but you end up learning the Greek and Latin roots anyway. The final third are regular obscure English words (or occasionally made up Quebecois) which you can get from context but still look up sometimes hoping that connotation is important which it never is (e.g. “what’s a gonfalon? It sounds like it’s just a pennant, but I’m sure the connotation is really important in this case.” It’s not).

Juggling is an apt analogy not just because DFW is throwing so many words around but because you get the sense that he’s showing off. Like look at me: I can write a page-long sentence while being anal about grammar and usage. And you sort of have to hand it to him because you stopped paying attention halfway through and when you tried to skim back to the beginning of the sentence you couldn’t find the previous period much less the subject. As Misha Glouberman observed in The Chairs Are Where the People Go, “Skill should be a means to an end, or it becomes like watching acrobatics, or being very tall… At a certain level, virtuosity has only one thing to say, and that is: Look at how good I am.” Whether you like this book mostly comes down to whether you care for juggling or not.

If you do care about skill as a means to an end, it might be better to start with DFW’s nonfiction. I’ve heard that he’s a much more natural essayist than novelist, which I can see. Every so often, there’s an essay essentially lifted and dropped into Infinite Jest. The example that come to mind is from early on about how in the dystopian near-future of the book (published in 1996), video chat technology is available but after a while everyone stopped using their cameras because of how uncanny it is to be able to see your own face while talking to someone else and other reasons familiar to everyone in 2024. (Insightful, yes, but at all relevant to the story? I couldn’t tell you).

The length and writing style are the dominating factors that determine whether you’ll like or be able to put up with the book. I could list other strengths and weaknesses. I found it very funny, but I won’t defend that. There are a lot of characters and it’s hard to keep track of why each one is a freak, and sometimes you don’t even learn why until long after you’ve met them and you have to reimagine all their past scenes. But these other points sound like nits at best compared to the length and style, so I’ll leave you now to make your informed decision against reading it.