In Which I Read "Infinite Jest" (Part One) - Asterisks, Impressions, and Eight-Page Endnotes

It's basically a universally mocked cliche within book circles now. "I used to read but then something happened and now I don't!" Well, cliche or not, that's what happened to me. The "something" in question was the Covid-19 pandemic, which drove my screen time up by a significant amount and unfortunately turned me off from reading for fun for several years.

However, I am glad to report that I have gotten back on the wagon, and I have been reading every single day for the past several weeks. I've been reading a lot of works by Cormac McCarthy in particular. But what I really wanted to read was a "doorstop book." The definition of a "doorstop book" is a book that can be used to prop a door open. Typically doorstops are over a thousand pages long. I did some research and settled on one that looked like something I would enjoy: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, an epic following the lives of a group of rehab residents, tennis academy students, and Canadian terrorists, all connected by the titular Infinite Jest, a film so entertaining it kills all those who watch it. Now that is a plot! So I picked it up from my local library and got to reading.

I am currently 109 pages into my copy's 1,079-page total, and I figured it would be a good time to update. I intend to post one of these Infinite Jest updates every hundred or so pages. Just to explore some impressions, opinions, favorite parts, and to chronicle my experience reading one of modern English literature's most infamously challenging novels.

First, some asterisks:

Let's get the most important thing out of the way here: David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, had a history of despicable physical and emotional abuse towards the writer Mary Karr, a history that is well-documented. It should be a given that I completely condemn his behavior in the strongest terms, and I do not attempt to justify or excuse it. Experiencing a work of art is not an endorsement of its creator, or their views or behavior.

Secondly, Infinite Jest is considered the peak of "bro-lit," a term that essentially means any book that a male lit major will start talking about unprompted at a party. I dislike "bros" as much as the next person, and I have made it a goal in life to never become one. However, attaching the stigma of being "bro-lit" to a book (or any work of art) is, I think, unfair. The term reduces the artwork and insults the idea of enjoying it in one fell swoop. I implore my readers to not attach this stigma to any work of art. To "love the lit, hate the bro," as it were.

Now that we've acknowledged the problematic points of the novel's history, it's time to move onto...

The impressions:

• Yeah, they weren't kidding, this is a difficult novel. It was hard to work out what was happening in the first chapter. Though, oddly, the difficulty of the novel seems to vary from chapter to chapter. Some are relatively easy, some are going to hurt your head. If I run into a particularly challenging chapter, I'll finish the chapter and then read the LitCharts summary of it. That really helps.
• David Foster Wallace is a fantastic writer. The ability to place words as perfectly as he does is immensely rare.
• That being said, this is an incredibly wordy book, sometimes to the point of feeling as if you're being strangled with words. Chapter Two, in which the character Ken Erdegy is sitting in his house waiting for the $1250 worth of marijuana he ordered to be delivered, is a perfect example of this. It's 11 pages long and is mostly one unbroken paragraph of him stressing out, going over his plans for the weekend, and making random observations about his surroundings. It's a well-written chapter and is even one of the easier ones to understand, but I felt palpably claustrophobic while reading it. It was a welcome relief when the paragraph ended.
• The Incandenza family has to be one of the most screwed-up families in American fiction. Every chapter dealing with their relationships only brings new revelations about how insane their whole dynamic is.
• This book is, at points, genuinely very funny! Some humor is to be expected, as it is plainly a satirical novel, but Wallace repeats one of my favorite parts of the work of Douglas Adams, which is inserting jokes whenever he can within the narration.
• The ending of Chapter Six, recounting Bruce Green's crush on and eventual marriage to Mildred Bonk, absolutely floored me. It is a passage full of humorous observations and genuine pathos. I have rarely seen English prose describe so well the experience of being a teenage male in hormonal overdrive, or the gradual descent into "attitude" that accompanies becoming a high schooler, and how destructive that descent can be. It's about a page and a half of utter perfection. If I wasn't using a library copy, I would have highlighted it, underlined it, everything. What an incredible passage.
• The idea of the in-universe film Infinite Jest is fantastic, but I wish that it would be better integrated into the narrative at the point in the novel I'm at. So far all we know is that it was made by James Incandenza, that it was sent to the Medical Attaché and subsequently killed him, his wife, and the police, and that it is somehow connected to the A.F.R. I wish it would be more prominent by this point.
• Don Gately's burglarly was a fantastic chapter. It is also a chapter I would be perfectly content with never having to read again.
• I read that Michael Schur owns the film rights to the book and has apparently written multiple episodes of a TV miniseries based on the book. Pardon me for saying so, but...that seems genuinely impossible. There are too many characters and threads, even for the longer time allowed by a miniseries. I think Infinite Jest may be legitimately unfilmable.
• It is also in these first hundred pages that we encounter Endnote 24, which is eight pages long (still falling short of the most infamous endnote, 304, which is some 30 pages). Call me insane for saying this, but...I genuinely enjoyed reading Endnote 24. It's presented as an academic catalogue of the complete filmography of James Incandenza, and as a film nerd with a penchant for thorough worldbuilding, I found it way more entertaining than I should have. It could have been even longer and I still would have read it.
• On a related note, we learn here that James Incandenza made four films titled Infinite Jest, all a remake of the original, and most of them unfinished. Will we learn which one was sent to the Medical Attaché?
• The Kate Gompert chapter is mind-bogglingly well-written. Only someone deeply and painfully familiar with the experience of having depression could have written that.
• Am I the only one who found most of the conversation between Steeply and Marathe pointless? Except for the brilliant "choose your temple" bit, a lot of it just seems to be exposition and character work.

Alright! Excited for where that will go in the future.

And now, the question on everyone's mind...

Q: Is the jest infinite?

A: It sure seems like it so far, but I'll keep you updated if that changes.