And after nearly five months of intermittent reading, here’s the big one. For what it’s worth I think reading this piecemeal certainly helped me get to the end but I lost a lot of the detail as a result. Next time, it’s all or nothing...
55 Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
It’s going to take me a while to digest this one, and it’s hard to know where to start reviewing it.
There is so much going on, so many set pieces, cross references, vignettes, digressions, jokes, different narrative voices - I think it would be almost impossible to get a true sense of it with only one reading. It’s entirely frustrating if you like clear narratives and explicit endings. It’s 981 pages of dense text plus 100 plus pages of even denser footnotes. The end of the story is (sort of) at the start, and the structure loops (broadly) across a period of seven years, going back and forth in time. The years are named not numbered so the reader doesn’t know how the chronology works for a sizeable chunk of the novel until a footnote clarifies things.
Broadly speaking (although I don’t know how important the plot really is) the US has entered a period in the near future where everything is commercialised and a massive toxic landfill site has been put near the Canadian border. I think giant feral hamsters may be involved. The founder of an elite tennis academy in Boston was also a film maker before he killed himself and made a film so insanely addictive that anyone seeing it is no longer able to do anything apart from watch it until they die. His family still rattle round the tennis academy - one son is a highly gifted tennis player with a hyper-large vocabulary, one has significant birth defects and makes movies like his dad and the other is (I think) an American football player. Meanwhile, Québécois terrorists including a radical faction of wheelchair activists are trying to find the film so they can flood the US with copies and bring down the enemy state. Meanwhile, close to the academy is a halfway house where residents attend AA meetings, NA meetings, and reflect on their lives. All sorts of other stuff happens, often with no obvious link to anything else.
Tennis, kids’ games, substance and other addiction, separatist politics, end of days capitalism, instant gratification, family relationships, maths... I don’t think that does justice to the themes but it’s a start. A lot of the book has nothing to do with the plot - he introduces minor characters who are irrelevant but we spend pages inside their head, he wanders off into detailed descriptions of bathroom doors and alternatives to sunscreen. It is like a massive anthology of weirdness.
Some of it was horrifying, some of it was very very funny, some of it really sad, and some of it was downright confusing. It deserves its status as a cult novel and I see why it has the reputation it does for being one of those books few people finish (and maybe those two things are connected). And it’s unquestionably imperfect in so many ways and it makes the reader work really hard to keep track. But it is surprisingly readable for all its length and messiness and show-off-iness, and a lot of it is deeply entertaining. I expect I will go back and reread it in a year or so, at which point much will become clear.