Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

Where do I start with Infinite Jest?  I'll always remember how I read it.  I had just started the book when the Patriots won the AFC Championship game against Baltimore.  In an effort to avoid compulsively checking the Internet every 15 minutes for football news, I decided to give myself the goal of completing this mammoth (nearly 1000 pages plus another 100+ pages of footnotes) tome before the Super Bowl.  I did not quite succeed - I ended up finishing Infinite Jest the day after - but the effort shaped my reading of the novel.

Reading the book as an act of will was appropriate because, in a lot of ways, Infinite Jest is a book about will.  Many of the major characters are recovering drug addicts struggling through Narcotics Anonymous and similar programs.  They cannot take drugs or alcohol without sliding back into addiction, but by deciding each day not to take drugs, to work their menial jobs, to attend their NA meetings, they can carve out a life.  I almost wrote "find salvation," but Infinite Jest does not promise (nor presumably do drug / alcohol recovery organizations) anything so lofty.

We see this abdication of free well in favor of a regimented life in the day-to-day lives of the student-athletes at the Enfield Tennis Academy.  Protagonists Hal Incandenza and his classmates don't live the lives of normal 17-year-olds; they wake up before dawn to work out, have matches, go to academically rigorous classes, drill, and play more matches.  It is not a normal life for a teenager, but if the students want to make The Show (professional tennis), it is the only path.  Hal rebels against the system through covert drug use (where the thrill is as much the secrecy as the effects of the chemicals themselves), and when he quits smoking pot his life begins to unravel.  It is left ambiguous whether he "needs" marijuana to reach his highest potential, and whether or not reaching this potential is truly of value.  There are sad parallels between Hal and Wallace, himself a serious amateur tennis player.  Wallace struggled with depression much of his life but quit taking medication because he felt it interfered with his writing.  This contributed to his 2008 suicide.

Will also shows up in the video which gives the book its title.  "Infinite Jest" is a short film created by Hal's late father James to be the ultimate Entertainment, manipulating the emotions of the viewer to such an extent that after one watches it, one loses all desire to do anything but watch the video.  Catching just a glimpse of Infinite Jest ultimately results in death, as the viewer no longer has any interesting in eating or sleeping and only desires to watch the film on an infinite loop.  Obviously this is taken to a silly extreme, but Wallace's point is that to some extent any art we read, watch, hear, or see is a partial abdication of free will; we are voluntarily taking in stimulus that is designed to manipulate the emotions we would otherwise feel.