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Literature

(Still) Tackling Infinite Jest

Shortly after David Foster Wallace’s death in 2008, I picked up a copy of Infinite Jest, something I had been meaning to do for years. I am quite sure that I was not alone in the timing of this attempt; the Infinite Summer project was started when it was at least partly due to many people’s rekindled desire to read and understand Wallace after his suicide. But for me, reading a book like this due to any kind of external stimulus, and particularly such a bleak one, is far from the best way to get the most out of it.

I knew that Infinite Jest would not be an easy book, but I wasn’t intimidated. A few weeks and some 200 pages in, though, I got stuck. Over the next couple of years, the book sat next to my bed, reminding me that I had failed. Every time I would try to get back into it, I would give up not long after, defeated again, and incredibly bothered by the fact that this book that I should like so much was causing me such difficulty.

I love Wallace’s writing. This piece from the Times made me watch tennis in an entirely new way, and made me love Federer above any other player. Part of his commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005 may well be part of the reason I finally started this blog in the first place:

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

So many of his short pieces enthrall me. His precise observation of the water we all swim in, and his ability to craft that observation into remarkable prose, is incredible. And yet, I kept putting down Infinite Jest.

I finally picked the enormous novel back up a couple of weeks ago, and something about it feels different this time. It might be that I’ve sat with ONAN and the Great Concavity and the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment and Lyle the cross-legged sweat-nourished guru in the boys’ locker room for long enough that they’ve gotten into my head. I started where I left off, not being able to bear starting at the beginning yet again, and I have a feeling that when I finish I will return to those early pages one more time to read them in a new way.

It’s going to take me awhile–the amount of time I spend reading is less than it used to be, and I feel that I read more slowly–but I’m looking forward to sharing some thoughts on it once I make it through.