Infinite Jest

This book is just too much. By reading and completing this book you are joining a club (of mostly men) who, just as with fans of TV shows such as The Wire, will, if given time and a glimmer of interest from anyone, chew your ear off explaining aspects of the book until you start looking for a polite or even impolite mechanism to end the lecture. And sadly, yes, I have now joined this club. Having joined “the club” how can I convince you to join?

This is an incredibly long book, some sixty hours of audio, and mostly that is how I consumed the book using the audio allowed me to use my driving time for consumption. Additionally, parts of the book are in french or use abbreviations which narration makes much more easily understood, not to mention that this large tome has not quite 400 footnotes and the audio incorporates the footnotes, thus saving you from flipping back and forth. Buy the book if you want a trophy but the audio made this tome much more accessible for me.

Immediately, the reader must adjust to a new calendar where years have corporate sponsors, and the chapters in are named for dates. Thus most of the book takes place in the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment”, there are references to years named for “The Whopper”, “The Trial-sized Dove Bar”, “The Whisper Quiet Maytag Dishwasher” etc. Apparently at some point (year 2000?) the US(?) migrated to sponsored dates (the latest normal date I could find referenced was “BS 1998” (Before Sponsorship) Given that this book was published in 1996 we are in a near future dystopia.

Publisher’s Weekly says that the "story weaves between two surprisingly similar locales: Ennet House, a halfway-house in the Boston Suburbs, and the adjacent Enfield Tennis Academy… the U.S. and Canada have been subsumed by the Organization of North American Nations, unleashing a torrent of anti-O.N.A.N.ist terrorism by Quebecois separatists; drug problems are widespread; the Northeastern continent is a giant toxic waste dump; and CD-like “entertainment cartridges” are the prevalent leisure activity. ”

One plot of the book follows the "dysfunctional family of E.T.A.'s founder, optical-scientist-turned-cult-filmmaker Dr. James Incandenza (aka Himself), who took his life shortly after producing a mysterious film called Infinite Jest, which is supposedly so addictively entertaining as to bring about a total neural meltdown in its viewer. As Himself’s estranged sons, professional football punter Orin, introverted tennis star Hal and deformed naif Mario, come to terms with his suicide and legacy, they and the residents of Ennet House become enmeshed in the machinations of the wheelchair-bound leader of a Quebecois separatist faction, who hopes to disseminate cartridges of Infinite Jest and thus shred the social fabric of O.N.A.N. ”

This book tells many stories about addiction, recovery from addiction, about family relationships that, while not abusive or violent, are at the same time not normal; a few of the stories are touching and many of them are tragic. But the glue that holds the book together is absurdity that is couched in matter-of-fact, verbose, detailed, grounded narrative. For notable example, there are two descriptions of an incident where a transvestite, addict and thief snatches the purse of an artificial heart recipient, one from the thief’s perspective and one from witnesses to the incident. Note the victim has installed the actual external pump into an expensive purse and is walking around Boston shopping in expensive stores (which is absurd!). The story from the witnesses notes that the theft victim chases the purse thief while, "shouting repeatedly, ‘She stole my heart, stop her!’ In response to her plaintive calls, tragically, misunderstanding shoppers and passers by merely shook their heads at one another, smiling knowingly at what they ignorantly presumed to be yet another alternative lifestyle’s relationship gone sour. A duo of Cambridge, Massachusetts, patrolmen, whose names are being withheld from Moment’s dogged queries, were publicly heard to passively quip, ‘Happens all the time,’ as the victimized woman staggered frantically past in the wake of the fleet transvestite, shouting for help for her stolen heart.”

Orin Incandenza has a phobia for insects and early in the book it explains how he puts glasses over roaches in order to cleanly asphyxiate them. “And no matter how many times he has the Terminex people out, there are still the enormous roaches that come out of the bathroom drains. Sewer roaches, according to Terminex. Blattaria implacablus or something. Really huge roaches. Armored-vehicle-type bugs. Totally black, with Kevlar-type cases, the works. And fearless, raised in the Hobbesian sewers down there. Boston’s and New Orleans’s little brown roaches were bad enough, but you could at least come in and turn on a light and they’d run for their lives.” Towards the very end of the book, the Assassins Fautueille Roulon (wheelchair assassins), quebecois terrorists, as part of their pursuit of the Infinite Jest film, capture Orin for “technical interrogation” and trap him in what is no less than a giant glass jar into which they intend to release roaches.

I enjoyed the book and it’s subtle humor but it is not a linear narrative and it does not have a coherent message. The closest thing I found in the book to a message is the faith that 12 step programs, at least for some, offer hope and progress. On the other hand, is the book entertaining: yes and in a work this large and entertaining is there really need for an unambiguous moral or message?