Completing Infinite Jest

By Mingji Liu · July 14, 2020

Well, it only took me five years, a few false starts, and a global health crisis. But I’ve finally finished Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s famous (and very infamous) door-stopping 1,079-page novel. It’s done. It’s fucking done. I never have to read again. Some thoughts on the novel (with mild spoilers):

• The reason why it’s considered the ur-example of the white, early-20s, pseudo-intellectual college guy novel is embarrassingly obvious. It’s about obsession, talent, addiction, the meaning of life, being cursed with intellectual gifts and emotional stuntedness, family dysfunction, not being understood, and lots and lots of male characters. Hah.

• No one has to read this book. (I mean, no one has to read anything…) Some chapters are a tough slog and some are simply very boring. The prose is intelligent and distinct for the most part, just not always that engaging subject matter-wise. Its experimental use of footnotes was intriguing at first but ran out of gas by the end. The worst are the occasional shaggy dog chapters which go on dozen-page digressions only to loop back and drop a lame ‘punchline’. To quote The New Yorker book critic James Wood: “The big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion. Inseparable from this culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality at all costs.” If this type of literature does not appeal to you (and it does not always appeal to me, either) then skip Infinite Jest.

• That said, there are also some exceedingly creative ideas and some beautiful and intricately written chapters (the Eschaton chapter, for instance, has been widely pointed out as a highlight). Likewise, many of the jokes are sharply funny and a couple of the side characters shine through with superb flair. It’s just a shame that one needs to swing a machete through the book to get to its laurel-wreathed passages.

• A lot of fuss has been made around the fact that the novel (published in 1996) ‘predicted’ the invention of things like Netflix and social media filters. Make of that what you will.

• The length is unfortunate. There is probably a case to be made that excessive length is morally problematic. Time is, after all, a finite resource that dribbles away till we die. I am reminded of a letter that H.G. Wells wrote to James Joyce upon the publication of Finnegans Wake: “You have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence and you have elaborated. What is the result? Vast riddles.” What is potentially a deal-breaker for some people is that the novel – despite already being over 1,000 pages long – is in effect an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. The book starts with its chronological epilogue and then bounces through time before deliberately omitting its third act. You are left with the realisation there is probably another 500+ pages of phantom narrative, but – but! – the novel drops enough hints for you to piece together what happens in these missing sections and, indeed, many people on the Internet have created a fairly convincing outline of what happens in the book’s non-existent final chapters.

• It is also firmly a nineties novel and projects all manner of nineties issues into its dystopic universe – from its parody of NAFTA to its landfill-and-pollution-slant on environmentalism to its Third Way flavoured nightmare of corporate American takeover. And it’s a very nineties novel in terms of its predilection for late-90s/early-2000s style gross-out humour. Think shit and piss humour. Think people soiling themselves. Think all that excessively ‘edgy’ comedy from back then and you have an idea of where Infinite Jest occasionally fires and misfires.

• It’s a problematic novel on the issue of race. There’s no avoiding this point. The novel features a string of racist characters who indulge in some incredibly nasty racial slurs throughout the narrative. There is even a notorious chapter where David Foster Wallace makes a, quite frankly, laughable attempt at writing in African-American Vernacular English. The novel is also perhaps one of the whitest depictions of Boston I’ve ever encountered. I’m not claiming the author is racist in any way, but the fact that such an intelligent writer is willing to indulge in so much uncritical racial ordure is deeply frustrating. This particular reader can only be told that Asian characters are ‘chinky orientoids’ so many times before the text he’s reading begins to degrade in on itself.

• If my last point bothered you, then you should know that the book is also problematic with its depiction of women and people with disabilities. Oh, and throw in some cheap shots at trans people and immigrants too. While some of this is played for laughs (and sort of works), it was a baffling choice given how much of David Foster Wallace’s oeuvre makes the ‘This Is Water’ plea for patience, common humanity, and sympathy. Its descriptions of disabilities, for example, are at times fucking horrifying to read. I was more astonished than anything else by how far the author was willing to push it.

• But in the end, did I personally feel like the novel was worth my time? A little bit, yes. How often does one do endurance leisure reading? Or try and wholly commit to a big, strange, semi-experimental text? I’ll certainly say this, it was a memorable journey and there’s plenty in it that’s hot discussion material. And regardless of whatever I could say, its legacy in contemporary literature is secured for decades to come.

• This post is already too bloody long, so I’ll end by pointing out something I genuinely respect about this book. More than its depiction of drug addiction and recovery, or junior competitive tennis, or mental illness, or mathematics, or its perverse vision of motherhood and experimental film techniques (and it is really about all these things), it is a book that taps into a deep, intangible sadness that we all feel sometimes. It taps into an isolated, wordless sadness and into that latent dissatisfaction we can experience when trying to communicate and relate to others. It’s certainly something that I’ve felt many times in my personal life. And after reading the final sentence of the book, it was all I could feel for the rest of the day.