1996; 981 pages (plus another 96 pages of notes). New Author? : Yes. Genre : Modern Literature. Laurels : Time Magazine calls it one of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. Overall Rating : 8*/10..
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Infinite Jest takes place in a slightly-alternate universe and slightly in the future. Most of the book is set in the greater Boston area - either at a teen Tennis Academy, or the halfway house for recovering addicts just down the hill therefrom..
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The main protagonist is one Hal Incandenza, an 18-year-old tennis prodigy; and we follow his whole family and a bunch more characters from the two aforementioned institutions, plus a pair of Quebecois terrorists (or are they double agents?) who for most of the book are in the desert night, just outside Tucson.
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Let's get the negatives out of the way first. Infinite Jest is bodaciously long; with a nebulous plot and a random ending point. It's hard to keep track of all the characters, and the storyline is non-linear. The writing style is atrocious. The book is over-cluttered with acronyms and profusely wordy. One run-on sentence runs a full five pages. Countless sentences begin with phrases like : "But yes so", "But and so", "Plus then", "And so but", etc. The 367 notes, all hundred pages of them, are a PITA, but sometimes whole chapters are hidden in them. For the record, I skipped most of the notes, and was (presumably) none the worse for it.
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And so yet...
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What's To Like...
Infinite Jest is a wonderful exposition on American culture. The teenage tennis phenoms are under mind-boggling pressure and treated like show dogs. There is a whole sub-culture of drug addicts (recovering and otherwise), crooks, and other assorted low-life. The Incandenza family is impressively dysfunctional.
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Northern New England is turned into a giant toxic dump, and canisters of waste are catapulted into it, with giant fans blowing the noxious fumes into Canada. For that matter, all of North America in now a single country, the USA having coerced Mexico and Canada into being weak sisters in the union. The government has long since gone broke and among other things now sells naming rights of individual years to corporations. For example, this year is called The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment ("YDAU").
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There are a slew of existential episodes to enjoy. The Quebec terrorists are all in wheelchairs and use giant mirrors to sabotage nighttime motorists. The academy kids play a great game called "Eschaton" which is like the board-game Risk played on multiple tennis courts. There is a "Cult of the Veil" which both men and women can join.
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All the characters are 3-D, complex, and "gray". I found reading the Wikipedia entry on Infinite Jest beforehand helped me grasp how the seemingly unrelated plotlines tied together.
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Kewlest Word...
Koan : a paradoxical anecdote or riddle which defies logical reasoning.
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Excerpts...
In the eighth American educational grade, Bruce Green fell dreadfully in love with a classmate who had the unlikely name of Mildred Bonk. The name was unlikely because if ever an eighth-grader looked like a Daphne Christianson or a Kimberly St.-Simone or something like that, it was Mildred Bonk. She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitters's dreamscape. (pg. 38).
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"So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he an I, Boo." (pg. 40)
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"Katherine, I will tell you a story about feeling so bad and saving a life. I do not know you but we are drunk together now, and will you hear this story?"
"It's not about Hitting Bottom ingesting any sort of Substance and trying to Surrender, is it?"
"My people, we do not hit the bottoms of women. I am, shall we say, Swiss." (pg. 776)
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Poor me, Poor Me, Pour Me A Drink. (pg. 839)
Life is like tennis; those who serve best usually win. (pg. 952)
At its core, Infinite Jest is a work of Modern Absurdism. The terrorists are absurd; the addicts are absurd; the tennis prodigies are absurd; the dysfunctional Incandenza's are absurd (papa I. commits suicide by nuking his head in a microwave). And like any piece of existential literature, the storyline is subsumed in the pointlessness of the lives of the characters.
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In that respect, it is a masterpiece. Yes, it's a slow, difficult read, but I kept coming back for more. It took me just over a month to read Infinite Jest, but IMHO it was a worthwhile trek. 8 Stars.
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