Infinite Jest: A Novel Review

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Infinite Jest: A Novel ReviewDavid Foster Wallace is a genius, and he knows it. But unlike other geniuses that you might know, he never tries to make you feel dumb. He just wants you to understand the same things that he does, so occasionally you'll feel out of your depth. But he's also a gifted writer, so odds are that you *will* come out understanding him. And what he's saying is brilliant, so you'll feel like a better person for it.
Wallace has been described as ``postmodern", a word that seems to get smacked onto anything written after World War II. I don't see it. To me, postmodernism involves a few things: 1) irony, in liberal doses (e.g., DeLillo's _White Noise_); 2) a continuous awareness that we're *reading a book* and that there's an author talking to us, and that the characters are under his control (e.g., anything by Kurt Vonnegut); 3) self-reference, sometimes to the point of disorienting involution (e.g., Wallace's story ``Westward The Course Of Empire Makes Its Way" from his book _Girl With Curious Hair_ - and that story is, notably, a spoof of postmodernism). This may be an overly conservative definition of postmodernism, but the word's overapplication justifies some conservatism.
_Infinite Jest_ is not postmodern; it's just a great story with beautifully constructed characters. It is a book about a movie that is so addictive that anyone who starts watching it has no choice but to keep watching it forever - foregoing food, water, and sleep, and suffering as much pain as is necessary to keep watching. The movie itself is, to paraphrase a friend, an uber-McGuffin (I'm never sure whether I've spelled that right) - an object that never gets clearly explained, but around which the plot coheres.
The movie itself is not the main point of the book. _Infinite Jest_ is a novel about American addictions: television, drugs, sex, fame, and indeed the American need to be addicted to something. An addiction to addictions. Wallace summarizes the book's mood well when he says,
``There's something particularly sad about it, something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whether it's unique to our generation I really don't know."
(...)
The main sign of Wallace's genius - and yes, I mean that word with all it entails, content in the knowledge that it is overused but that it fits here - is that he can make us feel this gut-level sadness without even appearing to work at it. Heavy use of irony can make you feel that there's some deeper, unseen, lurking gloominess about the world, and for that reason it's the easy way out. Ditto self-reference, which after a while is dizzying and confusing. Wallace is too brilliant a writer to take any of the easy postmodern routes. He's just written a great story with an unpleasant underlying mood. It's been a long time since I've read a book of such masterful subtlety.
It has all the classic aspects of a great novel: characters whom the reader *understands*, a compelling story that edges inexorably toward an uncertain ending, a gut-level mood, and a habit of dispensing brilliant toss-offs so suddenly that the reader can't help but gasp. For instance, see the attached text file containing Wallace's future-retrospective explanation of why videophones failed.
My first inclination was that this book - weighing in at over a thousand pages, including hundreds of footnotes (some of which have their own footnotes) - needed an editor. And it may, at points. But there's very little chaff amongst the wheat: the book's heft serves at least three purposes:
1) To build characters, slowly and methodically. One of Wallace's flaws is that his characters' dialogue - particularly that of his youthful protagonist and tennis prodigy, Hal Incandenza - doesn't sound genuine. It sounds like Wallace talking through 17-year-olds, not 17-year-olds who've been transcribed. I think Wallace realizes this, which is why most of his character development comes through narration.
2) To dump out the contents of Wallace's swirling brain. He has so much to say, and he seems to want to get it all down on paper in this one book. Less profound thoughts from a less talented author might have left me screaming for an editor, but they didn't do so here.
3) To structure the book as a conversation. Reading this book, one feels as though one is talking directly with Wallace. More often than not, his sentences will contain heavy Latinate words like ``epicanthic" just a short distance from the conversational stammerings ``like" and ``and so but". Again, had a lesser writer written these words, I would have edited the book myself, filling the margins with red pen.
The book's length will discourage all but a few readers, but it handsomely rewards the patient.Infinite Jest: A Novel Overview

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The Pale King Review

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The Pale King ReviewThere are so many different reasons to love David Foster Wallace's work, and so many reasons to feel that his death ripped an irreparable hole in the fabric not just of literary culture in America, but also in our daily world. In everything he wrote, DFW was grappling with the hardest subject of all--what does it feel like to be alive, not generally, but specifically, in the here and now, with billions of details crashing through our fields of perception? For that reason, although always dark, his work shimmers with a kind of graceful light. He was a philosophical novelist in the way the great nineteenth century Russians were. He couldn't hide the fact that he loved people, and he loved teasing out the unique predicaments that people encounter by just being people who love things and hate things and want things and enjoy things and grow tired and jealous and bored.
These elements, and more, are abundantly available in The Pale King, DFW's unfinished novel. In terms of organization, it is understandably a huge mess, although neatened admirably by the editor. But who reads DFW for conventionally organized plots? And why should you read this novel? For starters:
1) The language. DFW is a masterful stylist, a brainiac who always could have sounded much more intellectual than he chose to, instead embracing an easy-going, colloquial tone because he wanted people to read his books. The opening lines of PK alone ring with the linguistic sensibility that sounds like him and him alone. His signature music courses through passage after passage. His verbal precision, so simple word-wise, gives a jolt by making you see things in a new, though until-now, overlooked, way.
2) The characters. Sure, they're a lot of them. Some will grab you, others won't. But at least one of them you'll probably recognize and glom on to and follow and love. The great thing about the juicy, rich, character-bound novels of DFW is that you really can (and must) skim through the sections that bore you. (Skimming, skipping, lingering, underlining and rereading are interactive engagements that mean the book is making you do things with it and to it over a long period of time.) This is another way DWF is like Tolstoy and Dosteovesky. Just read, they seem to say, don't try to think too hard as you read. And then read again and again. This isn't school, after all. This is LIFE.
3) The humor. The idea/hook is, let's face it, flat out funny. And poignant. A novel set in an IRS Center in Peoria. The po-mo stuff is also sardonic, even as it's instructive. If you don't like the "apparati" ignore them. And you'll see why they're not just snooty, but also funny ha ha. DFW was, tragically, too smart for his own good, but he tries not to be too smart for us, and that disjunction laces the novel with humor. I also suspect that he took it in stride that people would inevitably make fun of him too; that's how we work.
4) The love of mind. This book brims with it, not negatively, as in his masterpiece Infinite Jest, but more sloppily. DFW was not afraid to address the fact, and to delve into it for page after page, that we have minds, and that what we choose to do with our minds every day of our lives is what makes us finally who we precisely, irrefutably are. If this is a novel about the plague of boredom, it is also a revelation about the rippling power of imagination and play, flexibility and hope, as it copes with and escapes from that plague. This power lies within each individual. We may be amused, or tempted to mock, but really what makes anyone measurably any better than anyone else? If I'm really using my mind, I'll know the answer.
This mindful modesty is, of course, DFW's greatest legacy. He was a critically depressed man of prodigious talents who could have become simply a seething cultural critic, marked by a sense of superiority to the masses. But he wasn't superior--his depression made him see that--so he chose, and it was a choice he kept making from page to page, section to section, to be both kind and sardonic to all of us, as equals, at once. This is the combination that makes him wonderful to read. His hugeness, his too-muchness, may feel annoying at times, but this immensity also feels brimming with possibility. There's nothing neat about The Pale King, and that makes it unusually wonderful. It doesn't seem to be "over," because it is in no way "finished." It's raggedy and keeps going.
Such a novel-ish thing can teach you how to read with patience and generosity and a curious openness to lived experience. Another DFW trademark. He understood that writers have an obligation to make their readers work for their reward. The work needn't be grueling, but the truth is, reading through a novel should be a little like living through a life. You should feel that you've really done something big, been somewhere life-changing, by the time you're through.
If you like novels to be neat, pre-packaged, tied-up, not roiling and complicated and baggy, chances are you won't love anything by David Foster Wallace, but reading him will teach you something about yourself. He's that good.
If this will be the first DFW for you, I recommend starting not here but with his first published boyish novel The Broom of the System, and reading your way through them all. You'll find the same brilliance and snarkiness, tenderness and dark, precise humor, shot through with simple hope. Enjoy.The Pale King Overview

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