Is David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” Really, Like, Great?
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) often wrapped a bandana around his head, as if covering a wound.
Last month, craving distraction, I downloaded David Foster Wallace’s 1,000-plus-page novel Infinite Jest. I just staggered past the halfway point, Kindle says I got 15 hours left. Not sure I have the stamina to keep going, gonna offer a few thoughts now.
The novel’s McGuffin is a parody of a McGuffin, a meta-McGuffin. It’s a video so entrancing you watch it over and over. You forget to eat, drink, piss, shit. Then you die. In one of many subplots, Canadian terrorists (yeah, funny because it’s oxymoronic, typical Wallace humor) sneak copies of the video into the U.S. to further some nutty conspiracy.
Is the video hilarious? Sexy? Horrifying? Mystical? No one knows, because one glimpse and you tumble into a black hole, forever sealed off from reality. Or is it that viewers see reality and can’t handle it? The video is “The Zahir”—except Borges makes his point in 10 pages.
The video embodies all our addictions--religion, politics, money, violence, drugs, booze, food, sports, sex, love, art—and Wallace’s voluminous opus. Wallace wants Infinite Jest to suck us in, so we forget about our silly humdrum lives.
The problem is, Infinite Jest ain’t that entrancing. Yeah, I’m awed by the range of Wallace’s erudition and imagination, by the manic headlong rush of his, like, low-brow/hi-brow verbiage, by his fetishistic focus on the mundane, which makes you realize how weird everything is, how laden with meaning.
Example: Wallace punctuates a riff on a blue-collar Boston neighborhood by noting that the houses’ ticky-tacky idiosyncrasies highlight their sad, essential sameness. Oof. But is this payoff worth the interminable buildup? Some jokes take so long to tell that no punchline justifies them.
If I never tumble down the wormhole of Infinite Jest, that’s because Wallace is jumping up and down at the portal, windmilling his arms, shouting, “Me! Me! Me!” You’re never bored, exactly, but after a while you resent the relentless brilliance. Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach had a similar effect on me. After a while, you want to watch X-Files reruns or draw a pretty picture.
Like a pre-teen prodigy performing for grown-ups, Wallace is too show-offy, intent on dazzling us. Thomas Pynchon’s prose has this same adolescent “Look at me!” quality, which is why I could never get through Gravity’s Rainbow. Wallace also reminds me of J.D. Salinger, who sneerily divides characters into the cool, who get it, and the uncool, who don’t.
Wallace’s characters remain caricatures even after we get to know their most intimate, excruciating secrets. Recounting the antics of a transvestite spy or cracking-smoking hooker, Wallace smirks. He seems to see all humans, even those who suffer—and many of his fictional folk suffer terribly—as goofy, deserving of mockery.
Not all looooong novels by geniuses get on my nerves. I’ve not only read War & Peace and Ulysses, I’ve reread them. How do they keep me enthralled? Tolstoy’s prose, even in translation, is transparent. Joyce’s isn’t, at first, then it is. Both authors recede into the background as they magically whisk you into Russia in the early 19th century and Dublin in the early 20th. These fictional realms and their inhabitants are uncannily real, three-dimensional.
Tolstoy and Joyce treat even nasty characters (with the exception of Tolstoy’s Napoleon) with empathy and affection. Compared to Tolstoy and Joyce, Wallace, who was 34, not a kid, when Infinite Jest was published, seems, like, immature. Reading Tolstoy and Joyce, you’re learning about humanity, the human condition, Life. Reading Wallace, you’re learning about Wallace.
That’s not entirely fair. Wallace teaches you a lot about tennis prodigies yearning to go pro and junkies struggling to stay straight. But as Wallace piles detail upon detail, I’m not transported into his characters’ lives. I’m thinking, How does Wallace know all this stuff? What has he gleaned from first-hand experience, what has he imagined? (In his youth, Wallace was a ranked tennis player, and he spent time in rehab.)
Wallace is too narcissistically needy. He insists we pay attention, because if we don’t, we might miss something extremely important. I’ve been reading Infinite Jest forever, and Kindle says I’ve still got 12 hours to go. Yikes. I’m trapped in a padded cell with a high-IQ youngster on a meth jag screaming every thought zipping through his crackly brain. I want out! I’ve got things to do!
And yet. It’s a testament to Wallace’s talent that I keep second-guessing my ranking of him below Tolstoy and Joyce. Maybe Wallace isn’t just dumping his big brain’s contents on us. Maybe he knows exactly what’s he’s doing. Maybe he wants us to scrutinize his frantic style rather than looking past it. He’s a painter forcing you to study his brushstrokes, so you don’t forget that art is just art, it’s not reality, whatever that is.
Maybe Wallace’s hysterical take on existence is more on target than that of the wise old grandmasters. I mean, look around you now. Wallace notices shit that slips past the rest of us, or from which we look away. Maybe that was the upside of his chronic depression, he can't look away, he’s compelled to pay attention.
An undercurrent of loneliness and melancholy runs through even the jolliest sections of Infinite Jest, a dark that counters the snark, that lends the novel heft and depth. Sometimes the dark bursts through the surface, as when Wallace describes a young woman’s suicidal depression, which he calls It. Far from the mere absence of pleasure, It is an all-consuming, hellish flame. It is William James’s “diabolical” experience, a heavenly mystical experience flipped on its head. It is what makes Kurtz groan, “The horror! The horror!”
That It riff haunts me, I can’t get it out of my head. It’s Wallace’s suicide note.
I sought distraction, a diversion from reality, in Infinite Jest. My mistake. Far from diverting you, this novel rubs your face in reality’s cruelty, absurdity, pain. It tells you how hard it is—not impossible, maybe, but really, really hard--to find love, a love that isn’t just another addiction. Wallace beats us over the head with this message because we are sentimental creatures, who resist hard truths.
Infinite Jest sucked me in after all. Only 8 hours and I’ll be done with this damn thing.
Further Reading:
Drawing Pretty Pictures in Troubled Times
My Bloomsday Tribute to James Joyce, Greatest Mind-Scientist Ever
Free Will, War and the Tolstoy Paradox
Moby Dick and Hawking’s “Ultimate Theory”
The Golden Bowl and the Combinatorial Explosion of Theories of Mind
Dumpster Diving: Why I Draw Trash Cans
Jack London, Liberal Arts and the Dream of Total Knowledge
Strange Loops All the Way Down (profile of Douglas Hofstadter)
I also riff on Wallace in Chapter Five of My Quantum Experiment.