A lot of people on Goodreads are adding David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest to their "to read" shelves.
I'm sorry the guy is dead--by all accounts he was a great teacher, and I really liked his nonfiction writing.
But Inifnite Jest really really sucks. I'll get into why in a bit, but in the meantime, I thought I'd give you some talking points, so that if it comes up, you can pretend to have read it. This will be far less painful than actually finishing the book or even than buying it and never finishing it, which is what most people do.
So. Our book begins with a kid whose name I forgot, some kind of tennis prodigy, but he's in some kind of catatonic state. We then flash back and follow him (his dad has made, or possibly just discovered, some kind of film that makes people insane or something) through his prep-school, tennis playing days. There's some game that he and his buddies play where they pretend the tennis court is a map of the world, and they throw tennis balls at each other or something. The description of this game goes on forever. There's also some kind of tension with his parents. Or maybe the dad's dead and the movie killed him. I can't really remember
We also follow a guy named Gately, a recovering addict who works at a halfway house. Also, there's some other guy who's a junkie. I think he's also a cross-dresser, but I can't quite remember. There may be a couple of other plots as well, but these are the main ones.
The plots never intersect. At the end, Gately is beaten up and forcibly drugged. We never find out how the kid got catatonic, we never find out if Gately's sobriety has been totally compromised, and what the junkie is doing there is not really clear. (Whether this paragraph counts as a spoiler is, I suppose, a kind of interesting philosophical question. Can you spoil an ending that doesn't exist?)
So since the whole book is a flashback that begins with the expectation that you're going to figure out what the hell happened, and you get caught up in plots that never resolve, by the time you reach the end of this doorstop, you find out that the Infinite Jest is on you, the reader. Get it?! You just spent a thousand pages on what amounts to a shaggy dog story! Ha ha!
Here's what really annoys me about this: the guy was a very talented writer, and he was able to create characters that you care about. (The fact that I can remember this much about a book I read ten years ago should be evidence of that.) The book works on an emotional level until the end, when the whole thing is revealed to be an intellectual joke that can only be appreciated in a detached, intellectual way. This is, in effect, a big middle finger raised at the reader who allows him or herself to get lost in the book.
I got taken by this book, and I was pissed. A lot of people in similar straits develop a kind of literary Stockholm Syndrome and begin identifying with and praising the book that held them captive and ultimately abused them. The book makes you feel weak and stupid, and a lot of people internalize this and end up praising the superior strength and intelligence of the writer.
I suppose it's also possible that there are people who genuinely like this book. I think these people want something from the reading experience that I fundamentally don't get.
Anyway, there are a lot of interesting, thought-provoking, challenging books out there that don't play their readers for suckers, and you could read three or four of them in the time it takes you to plow through Infinite Jest, so my advice is to read elsewhere, and if you want to read some David Foster Wallace, grab one of the essay collections.
Recent Comments