Jan. 20th, 2011

peterbirks: (Default)
So I finally finished David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which I was inspired to buy when the "Style Analyzer" put Pete Doubleday down as this writer. My own style, I am pleased to say, was adjudged to be the pithier Jonathan Swift.

One can see why Pete got pigeon-holed as David Foster Wallace. Long, rambling (in a good sense) and not infrequently hard to keep track of, but nevertheless an enjoyable jorney.

Infinite Jest, just in case you have never come across it, is more than 1,000 pages of closely written text and even more closely written footnotes. If you can read a bit of a summary which doesn't give too much away, the reading of the main text is made easier. Although for dedicated crossword solvers there is a certain sense of achievement in reading the whole thing without help from outside.

That said, a brief summary is here:

There are three main threads, with most of the action set in either Spring or (mainly) November of "Year of the Adult Depend Undergarment" -- this being the west's name for what can be worked out (with a bit of calculation) to be 2009 (10 years after the publication of the book).

The first thread looks at the Enfield Tennis Academy, with Hal Incandenza as the central character. Hal (16 years old during the main action) is a student at the Academy, which is run by his mother and her half-brother. His father, J O Incandenza, had killed himself five years previously, and Hal had discovered the body. Hal has two older brothers; Mario, who is physically disabled but doesn't let it bother him, and Orin, who is a kicker with a football team in Arizona.

Hal's father James Orin Incandenza founded the Academy because his own father had wanted him to become a pro tennis player. What James did instead was become an expert in optics and lenses, which made him a fortune. He also dabbled in making movies, one of which is the aforementioned "Infinite Jest".

The second thread covers a half-way house for recovering addicts, set down the hill from the Tennis Academy, and focuses on Don Gately, who has been there for over a year and is now on the staff. Various other "recoverers" are featured, including Joelle van Dyme, who links to the Incandenzas. Various other complex interlinks occur in the narrative, which chops and changes throughout the book, just to keep you on your toes.

The third thread covers the "upper echelons" of the reshaped North America, including a couple of secret agents for the "new" USA and the "new" Canada, plus a collection of "wheelchair assassins" from Quebec, who are terrorists.

Ostensibly one could say that the book is about said film "Infinite Jest", which is meant to use light and lenses in such a way that once anyone watches it they are hooked, watching it again and again until they die. Copies of this have arrived in various places, and both the Canadian secret service and "new US" (called O.N.A.N) want to get hold of it. Interspersed throughout the book is a conversation between Marathe, a wheelchair assassin, and Steeples, an ONAN agent, which takes place overnight halfway up a mountain overlooking Tucson. They basically talk about "freedom of choice" and the conversation is really philosophical.

But this is just one thread of the whole narrative, which covers many other issues and which addresses much more than just plot. There are several academic analyses of the book, with some giving Foster Wallace (who committed suicide a couple of years back) far more "calculating credit" than do others.

If I had to plump for what the book is "about", I thnk that I would say that it is "identity". From the opening chapter to the close, it's a case of "who or what are we, and who or what are we responsible for?" But, à la Pete Doubleday, the route Foster Wallace takes is so diverse that this does not give true weight to the depth of the book.

All of which is just a lot of rambling, really. I spent much of my time reading it (and it took me about six months -- but I read far less fiction these days) wondering whether or not it was a masterpiece. Having finished it, I find myself reading it again, picking up things that passed me by first time round. I'm marking phrases with a pen which I now see are important. I have become, in other words, an Infinite Jest geek.

+++++++++

August 2023

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