The first chapter of the book takes place at the chronological end of the story. Hal is competing at a national tennis tournament in the Southwest and interviews with deans at the University of Arizona for a tennis scholarship. Although Hal's first person narration is beautifully written, when he tries to answer the deans' questions, he makes sub-animalistic noises that sound like a goat drowning. They think he has a seizure and send him to the emergency room. There, Hal remembers when he and Donald Gately dig up Hal's father's head, which, the reader will learn about 700 pages later, is where the master of Infinite Jest is.
A few chapters later, Wallace introduces the protagonist and moral center of the novel, Donald Gately, a big man who burgles the homes of rich people to support his addiction to oral narcotics. On a September night two years before Hal's interview at Arizona, Gately breaks into the Brookline, Mass. mansion of a Canadian national, M. DuPlessis, who serves as liaison between Quebecois and Albertan separatists. The loot Gately and his partner, Trent Kite, gain in the burglary includes a non-master copy of Infinite Jest, which they fence and which the Wheelchair Assassins ultimately trace to Antitoi Entertainent (sic) in Cambridge.
In the hundreds of pages between the opening and the climax, Wallace builds intense, enjoyable suspense about the questions the plot raises. What has deprived Hal of the power of speech in the chronologically last scene? Was it the powerful hallucinogen, DMZ, that Hal's best friend, Pemulis, picked up at Antitoi Entertainent? How will Hal and Gately, who have completely separate story lines, come to dig up JOI's corpse together? Will the Wheelchair Assassins succeed in acquiring the master and gaining Quebec's independence? Wallace whetted my appetite for a mind-blowing plot turn that would unite all the story's disparate narrative arcs. Disappointment sets in in the final hundred pages, as Wallace goes deeper into Gately's back story and introduces new side characters and the reader comes to realize that none of the really important narrative questions will be answered.
Another mystery that the book sets up only to leave unresolved is the extent to which Infinite Jest parallels Hamlet. The title of the novel and JOI's eponymous film is taken from Hamlet's description of his childhood clown, Yorick, a "fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy." Ellsinore, the setting of Hamlet, is haunted by the ghost of Old Hamlet, the hero's father and recently deceased king of Denmark. Enfield Tennis Academy, the setting of IJ, is haunted by the ghost of JOI, Hal's father. In both stories, the mother of the hero takes up with another man, who has an apparent familial relation to the hero, right around the time the father dies. In both, the second husband of the hero's mother succeeds the father as the leader of the community where the story take place. Do these parallels indicate that JOI was killed by his wife's lover, Charles Tavis, who succeeds JOI as headmaster of ETA? Wallace doesn't say.
Most of the book is devoted to Don Gately's effort to get and stay sober using the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. The ultimate moral value in the novel is avoiding dependency on shit that you can catch a buzz from. The novel suggests that one should do anything necessary to stay sober, and the starting point is getting on your knees every night and thanking God for the day of sobriety that has just come to an end. Gately faults JOI for self-pity when the ghost of JOI complains to Gately that he was unable to connect with Hal and that his critics failed to understand that the purpose of his films was simply to entertain. It dismayed me that in the moral hierarchy of the novel Gately, a recovering narcotics addict, has a higher rank than JOI, a Renaissance man who managed to scale that "high ridge where the mountainside of 'scientific' knowledge joins the opposite slope of 'artistic' imagination." fn1 But Wallace apparently believed that Gately was nobler than JOI because Gately learned to live without intoxication.
Wallace's own life suggests the poverty of a moral system that prioritizes sobriety over everything else. He wasn't enslaved to any intoxicating substance the last two decades of his life, yet he found his sober existence so miserable that he hanged himself at age 46, when he was hundreds of pages into his next novel, Pale King, and married.
Under one plausible reading, JOI is a tragic figure because he cannot want to live without alcohol. This would mean the novel isn't anti-drug because it recognizes that some people are not constituted to live without intoxication. But Gately's success in getting off narcotics through AA's 12 steps suggests that JOI might have been able to give up Wild Turkey if he'd done the same, living one day at a time, praying to God, and going to AA meetings all the time. Wallace's positive portrayal of AA and his lionizing of Gately lend the book a moralistic tone.
Wallace was on firmer ground when he attacked the association between ironic detachment and hipness in pop culture. All the shows telling us that it's cool to be sarcastic and insincere alienate people from themselves by discouraging them from acknowledging that they have true feelings. Instead, they are conditioned to think that it is cool to feel nothing other than patronizing contempt for people who express genuine feelings and opinions. Hal's handicapped brother, Mario, says that pop culture can't depict death and pain with anything other than absurd situations that are intended to make "everybody roll[] their eyes or laugh[] in a way that isn't happy." Tragedy is out of vogue because it requires genuine feelings, and genuine feelings just aren't cool.
Despite its flaws, Infinite Jest is a great piece of literature. Anyone who loves the written word should love this novel. Wallace’s prose style is conversational, relaxed, and frequently obscene, yet it always reads like prose poetry, and every sentence deserves to be read out loud. The drunken monologue that JOI's father gives to JOI at age 10 before the boy's first abortive tennis lesson is among the best 20th-century American fiction I've read. In it, Wallace transcends postmodernism and puts himself in the same camp as Hunter S. Thompson and Kerouac.
Wallace's writing is full of useful but difficult words that caused me to break out the dictionary scores of times. And Wallace had a capacity for inventing fictional personalities that merits comparison to Orwell, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare. The novel has dozens of realistic, complex characters. Although the book leaves unanswered the questions that kept me turning pages for the length of the 1080-page novel, the ending has spine-tingling beauty. For good reason the publisher overruled Wallace's decision to subtitle the novel, A Failed Entertainment.
fn1 The quoted line is from Nabokov's memoir, Speak, Memory.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Review of Infinite Jest, Part 1
David Foster Wallace fills his 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, with dozens of compelling and realistic characters, and his writing is often spine-tingling, but in the end the plot is deeply disappointing, even as the novel's final image delivers a pang of memorable, melancholy beauty. This is the first part of the spoiler-filled review I wrote after spending four months reading Wallace's 1,080-page novel.
At the end of the 20th century, a Las Vegas singer turned politician, Johnny Gentle (the alliteration doubtlessly refers to Ronald Reagan), wins the U.S. presidency on a third-party ticket that promises gun rights, an aggressive foreign policy, and environmental regulation that will make the sidewalks clean enough to eat off of.
When NATO is dissolved, the United States refuses to accept the return of nuclear missiles deployed in Manitoba unless Canada agrees to join a North American super-state, the Organization of North American Nations. Canada reluctantly bows to this demand, stirring anger among Quebecois separatists, who now must pry Quebec not just from Canada but also the ONAN in order to gain independence.
President Gentle's plan to blast America's solid waste into space proves to be infeasible, so the president and his puppet-master, Rodney Tine, decide to convert northern New England, from Maine to Massachusetts, into a repository for the country's toxic waste and garbage.
Canada agrees to accept the waste dump as an addition to its territory in response to President Gentle's threat to detonate nuclear missiles on the U.S.-Canadian border. Runoff from the waste dump, which is called the Great Concavity by Americans due to its inwardly bent southern border, causes birth defects in Quebec, which further stokes separatist sentiment.
Of the Quebecois separatists, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (the Wheelchair Assassins) are the most militant. These men lost their legs playing La Culte du Prochain Train, in which adolescent boys compete to see who will be the last to jump across train tracks as freight trains speed toward them. “Hearing the squeak,” the sound of the assassins' wheelchairs, has become synonymous with the violent assassinations they carry out.
The assassins want to acquire a master copy of Infinite Jest, the last film that James O. Incandenza, Jr. completed before committing suicide. JOI was a physicist who made a fortune by working out a new means of electricity generation called annulation. Later he took to making films with the lenses he designed and founded the Enfield Tennis Academy, where wealthy kids are taught to subordinate the self in order to play high-level tennis. He got drunk on Wild Turkey every day until the final three months of his life. Infinite Jest was JOI's attempt to arrest the progression toward solipsism of his youngest son, Hal, a nationally ranked junior tennis player who has a verbal IQ score far above the genius range. JOI feared that Hal was becoming a figurant, an extra on a TV show who's seen in the background but has no voice. With Infinite Jest, he wanted to create a medium that would allow him to have a conversation with his son.
The film doesn’t have this effect, but it turns out to be so entertaining that a person who catches a momentary glimpse of it loses the will to do anything other than watch the movie. In the film, a beautiful woman leans into a crib and says "I'm so sorry," over and over again. The scene is shot from the floor of the crib with a wobbly camera that mimics the visual field of an infant. Why would JOI think that this material would interest Hal? Why do audiences find the image so captivating that they can think of nothing else afterwards? Wallace doesn't offer satisfying answers to these questions.
The Wheelchair Assassins plan to turn thousands of Americans into zombies through the mass dissemination of Infinite Jest. They hope that Washington will blame Ottawa for their acts and that Ottawa will expel Quebec from Canada to demonstrate that it is not responsible for the assassins' campaign of entertaining people to death.
At the end of the 20th century, a Las Vegas singer turned politician, Johnny Gentle (the alliteration doubtlessly refers to Ronald Reagan), wins the U.S. presidency on a third-party ticket that promises gun rights, an aggressive foreign policy, and environmental regulation that will make the sidewalks clean enough to eat off of.
When NATO is dissolved, the United States refuses to accept the return of nuclear missiles deployed in Manitoba unless Canada agrees to join a North American super-state, the Organization of North American Nations. Canada reluctantly bows to this demand, stirring anger among Quebecois separatists, who now must pry Quebec not just from Canada but also the ONAN in order to gain independence.
President Gentle's plan to blast America's solid waste into space proves to be infeasible, so the president and his puppet-master, Rodney Tine, decide to convert northern New England, from Maine to Massachusetts, into a repository for the country's toxic waste and garbage.
Canada agrees to accept the waste dump as an addition to its territory in response to President Gentle's threat to detonate nuclear missiles on the U.S.-Canadian border. Runoff from the waste dump, which is called the Great Concavity by Americans due to its inwardly bent southern border, causes birth defects in Quebec, which further stokes separatist sentiment.
Of the Quebecois separatists, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (the Wheelchair Assassins) are the most militant. These men lost their legs playing La Culte du Prochain Train, in which adolescent boys compete to see who will be the last to jump across train tracks as freight trains speed toward them. “Hearing the squeak,” the sound of the assassins' wheelchairs, has become synonymous with the violent assassinations they carry out.
The assassins want to acquire a master copy of Infinite Jest, the last film that James O. Incandenza, Jr. completed before committing suicide. JOI was a physicist who made a fortune by working out a new means of electricity generation called annulation. Later he took to making films with the lenses he designed and founded the Enfield Tennis Academy, where wealthy kids are taught to subordinate the self in order to play high-level tennis. He got drunk on Wild Turkey every day until the final three months of his life. Infinite Jest was JOI's attempt to arrest the progression toward solipsism of his youngest son, Hal, a nationally ranked junior tennis player who has a verbal IQ score far above the genius range. JOI feared that Hal was becoming a figurant, an extra on a TV show who's seen in the background but has no voice. With Infinite Jest, he wanted to create a medium that would allow him to have a conversation with his son.
The film doesn’t have this effect, but it turns out to be so entertaining that a person who catches a momentary glimpse of it loses the will to do anything other than watch the movie. In the film, a beautiful woman leans into a crib and says "I'm so sorry," over and over again. The scene is shot from the floor of the crib with a wobbly camera that mimics the visual field of an infant. Why would JOI think that this material would interest Hal? Why do audiences find the image so captivating that they can think of nothing else afterwards? Wallace doesn't offer satisfying answers to these questions.
The Wheelchair Assassins plan to turn thousands of Americans into zombies through the mass dissemination of Infinite Jest. They hope that Washington will blame Ottawa for their acts and that Ottawa will expel Quebec from Canada to demonstrate that it is not responsible for the assassins' campaign of entertaining people to death.
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