Infinite Jest
By David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown, 1,079 pages, $29.95
This mammoth comic novel, which is only its young author’s second, bears obvious resemblance–and considerable indebtedness–to the crowded, polyphonic, loose and baggy monsters of immediately previous postwar literary generations.
William Gaddis’ exhaustive analyses of contemporary mendacity and greed (“The Recognitions” and “JR”); John Barth’s gargantuan parodies of academic strife and scholarship (“Giles Goat-Boy” and “Letter”); Stanley Elkin’s metaphoric employment of multiple sclerosis to explore commercial and psychological diversification (“The Franchiser”); Don DeLillo’s memorable sendup of the scientific imagination (“Ratner’s Star”); William T. Vollmann’s hallucinatory reconstruction of the history of North America (his ongoing Seven Dreams sequence); and especially Thomas Pynchon’s magnificent reimagining of the Second World War as the defining event of this century’s past and future (“Gravity’s Rainbow”)–all these daunting (and, to various degrees, brilliant) fictions underlie David Foster Wallace’s blackly funny vision of America in the years just ahead as a culture shaped by its surrender to various addictions and destroying itself in the pursuit of pleasure.
So, of course, does William Burroughs’ seminal “Naked Lunch,” that funereally witty explication of “the algebra of need” whose jump-cut “cinematic” structure finds echoes both in this novel’s skillful manipulation of parallel scenes and in its focus on film as both plot device and animating idea.
Having said all this is not to minimize either the achievement or the essential originality of a most impressive addition to an oeuvre already acclaimed for its energy and precocity. Wallace, now 33, arrived on the scene with “The Broom of the System” (1986), a willfully farcical romp–very preppy and very Pynchonesque–set in the environs of his alma mater, Amherst College, and featuring characters with names like Rich Vigorous and Candy Mandible, a price-and-product war between rival baby-food companies, and a fugitive granny escaped from a nursing home. Next came “Girl With Curious Hair” (1989), a collection of 10 wonderfully weird stories obsessively–in a few cases, numbingly–concerned with the entertainment media and specifically with what might be called the L.A. mindset. Then Wallace received a Whiting Award (or “genius grant”) and there ensued the long wait to learn what would surface following these promising early signs.
“Infinite Jest” will confirm the hopes of those who called Wallace a genius and, to a lesser extent, the fears of those who think he’s just an overeducated wiseacre with a lively prose style. The novel is intricately constructed, alternately brashly funny and genuinely moving, distinguished by vivid and meaningful figurative language and riddled with sophomoric gags and preachy digressions that will make even the most sympathetic reader wish, now and then, that he had the strength to pick the book up and heave it across the room.
My advice: don’t. This one is worth the long haul. It creates a frighteningly believable near-future and weaves together at least three sets of interrelated stories with remarkable skill.
Here goes. The majority of the manic action in “Infinite Jest” occurs during “The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment” (in the craven new world of Wallace’s making, corporate sponsors pay to have years named for their products). Its primary setting is the ruin formerly known as New England, now poisoned by toxic waste–not to mention being terrorized by “a herd of feral hamsters” (don’t ask).
New England has been given back to Canada, which belongs with the U.S. to the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. Canadians are less than pleased, especially, obviously, Quebecois separatists–one of whom, Remy Marathe, holds secret meetings (in the Arizona desert) with M. Hugh Steeply of the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services, ostensibly to divulge information about the terrorist activities of Quebec’s “Wheelchair Assassins”–unless, that is, Marathe is a triple agent dedicated to undermining U.S.O.U.S.’s information-gathering mechanisms . . . you see what I mean.
And I haven’t even mentioned the actions that link a traveling Canadian tennis team with the hothouse phenoms cultivated at the Enfield (Mass.) Tennis Academy, among whose star pupils is Harold “Hal” Incandenza (“the fourth best tennis player under age eighteen in the United States”). Or Hal’s older brother, Orin, who failed at tennis but went on to success as a pro football punter; or their other brother, Mario, physically unprepossessing (in fact, deformed), who nevertheless is “the family’s real prodigy.” Or their father, James Incandenza, of Arizona, who committed suicide but who also founded Enfield (tennis is to Wallace what wrestling is to John Irving) and produced numerous documentary films, as well as a single commercial movie, “Infinite Jest,” reputed to be so feverishly entertaining that it reduces its viewers to gibbering idiocy and is, accordingly, a potential ultimate weapon much desired by the Wheelchair Assassins.
Or that the druggy indulgences rampant in Enfield’s dormitories are reflected in the goings-on at (nearby) Ennet House, a similarly authoritarian facility, where addled members of A.A. and N.A. (Narcotics Anonymous) undergo detoxification and other ordeals–and where Don Gately, an addict and petty criminal with a history of uncontrollable violence and connections with souls as lost as himself who are also variously connected to the Incandenzas, works as a staffer and tries to rehabilitate himself as well as others.
That the consequences of all these bizarre matters are catastrophic should surprise no one. Wallace’s title alludes to Hamlet’s affectionate recall of the jester Yorick. But he’s holding the long-dead Yorick’s skull as he speaks, and standing in a graveyard.
Further summary seems pointless. Besides, many of the book’s pleasures are located in the twists of its increasingly odd plot. Suffice it to say that “Infinite Jest” clanks and wheezes whenever it takes extended potshots at officialese double-talk (as in its broadsides aimed at government stonewalling about environmental disaster) and that its fondness for lame jokes and farcical acronyms clearly reveals that this is a young writer’s book.
If the humor frequently descends to the collegiate, it rises as frequently to levels of postdoctoral freshness and complexity. There’s an attention-getting bit of wordplay, if not an outright laugh, on almost every page. Wallace’s talent to amuse shows itself particularly in the 96 pages of “Notes and Errata” that follow the novel proper and comprise a Nabokovian text-within-a-text that’s also a hilarious (and informative) gloss upon it.
But this big book can wrench you as well. The tales of supporting characters’ addictions are harrowingly detailed, as is the doomed reach toward recovery of Don Gately (whose troubled dreams have a nervous intensity, and whose climactic hospitalization occasions the novel’s single scarifying sequence).
And in transcribing the difficult, sometimes delirious relations of the embattled Incandenzas–incarnations of American energy and intelligence and promise–Wallace has given us a vividly, relentlessly observed family of brilliant misfits worthy of comparison with Faulkner’s Compsons and Sartorises and Eugene O’Neill’s Tyrones. You may forget this gutsy novel’s dumb jokes, even its more ingenious inventions. But you’ll remember the incandescent Incandenzas.
