Infinite Jest review

by Frank Brown, August 2000

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996, Little Brown) is quite the novel. Weighing in at 1079 pages (hardback, including copious footnotes) it is probably the kind of book one either loves or hates. Me, I'm a lover of this amazing book. So much so that I'm typing this review while only on page 714, with still a third of the book in front of my devouring eyes.

I started out just reading a page or two, before bed. Soon I was reading whole chapters at a time. Now I find myself taking breaks from work so I can sneak in a few more reads on the job.

Situated primarily in Boston, the main characters spend most of their time in a tennis academy and an AA halfway house, with agents of the Canadian and US government also playing major roles. The author posits a future Organization of North American Nations, consisting of Canada, the US, and Mexico. A seminal character, Dr. James O. Incandenza ¹, founder of Enfield Tennis Academy and a prolific independent filmmaker, has a filmography (printed as footnote 24) which takes up over 8 entertaining pages of fine print.

Footnotes² frequently eclipse the narrative in this novel about addiction, entertainment, politics, tennis and the pursuit of happiness. I laughed; I cried. What more can I say? Wallace can write. He occasionally gets carried away, and some passages are violent enough to give me the howling fantods, but it's worth almost every word because the bulk of IJ is by turns powerful and entertaining. It's also probably the funniest book I've read in years.

OK, what's the most interesting method you can think of for eliminating your own map (suicide)? Dr. Incandenza is pretty creative in this regard. Creativity is a recurring face in this book; take, for instance, the A.F.R. (Les Assasins De Roullents), a.k.a. Wheelchair Assasins, cult terrorist organization with which you do not want to fuck. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that men will probably enjoy this book more than women.

The street slang of Boston, either Wallace has got it or he invented it, but either way it's pretty darn interesting/amusing. And entertainment, that's a major item in this book here. Plots drip off Wallace's fingers like drops of water after stepping out of the shower. I now realize that a plot is just a plot, not necessarily the prime mover in a novel. In fact, what's the big deal about novels anyway?

Please excuse me, I've got a couple hundred more pages to read.

1. Whos wife Avril and three sons Hal, Orin and Mario are fascinating characters themselves.
2. In fact, I used two bookmarks with this book; one for the text and the other for the footnotes.