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.
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