infinite-jest.jpg It took me six weeks to finish this book, which I believe is a personal record. I’ve spent more than six weeks trying (and failing) to finish a book when I was younger, before I was wise enough to know when to throw in the towel, even if the books was supposed to be classic, change-your-life good or the favorite tome of someone I admire. (See here or here for examples). But unlike those paper weights of unfinished (sometimes undecipherable) prose, I loved this six-week long adventure, every one of its 981 pages. That’s 1,079 with the footnotes. Yes, it’s fiction and yet it has footnotes, but we will get to that later.

This is a story about an America of the very near future, where the U.S. has basically annexed Mexico and Canada to form the Organization of North American Nations. They cede “The Concavity,” which is basically America’s toxic waste dump, to Canada, elect a Vegas-crooner ala Tom Jones to the presidency and do away with the numbering of years (i.e. 1999, 2000, 2001) in order to make a buck through sponsorship. Enter the Year of the:Whopper, Tucks Medicated Pad, Trial-Size Dove Bar, Perdue Wonderchicken, Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishwasher, etc. Welcome to the world of modern individualism, technological isolation, educated non-communication, bumbling social/political policy, post-post modern art, Canadian terrorism, and meanlessness existences full of humor and irony, if not true emotion.

This is the story (mostly) of the Incandenza family. A professional grammarian mother and a optics expert/tennis enthusiast/film director/alcoholic father who commited suicide via microwave, who have three boys — a womanizing NFL punter, a disabled budding filmmaker and Hal, our (mostly) main character, who is a nationally ranked student at the tennis academy his father founded and a bit of a pot head. Hal, who …

“… himself hasn’t has a bona fide intesity-of-interior-life type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he is in there, inside his own hull, as a human being.”

The other cast of characters is filled out by a range of addicts, alcoholics and junkies who at one time or another inhabit the halfway house down the hill for the tennis academy.

This is the story of searching for meaning and finding none, of creating your own, of cracking jokes that are too serious to be funny and suffering tragic circumstances without getting the larger joke. It’s about depression and the substances or people we use to plug the gaps in ourselves. It’s about our burning hunger for entertainment, any entertainment to escape the self, and of the ultimate entertainment–an elusive film that is so perfect, it could infest humanity like a plague, bringing mankind to his knees faster and more effectively than any bio-terrorist WMD every conceived

“We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what?”

But mostly, this book is pure David Foster Wallace. Dense and intelligent without taking the world too seriously. Incredibly funny without being vapid. Very long sentences trailing into the distance, moving at the speed and with the course of thought, punctuated with volumious footnotes that bounce you in and out of the narrative, in and out of time, in and out of character’s minds, out of your mind in general. He oscillates between erudite words rarely found outside of dictionaries (my favorite repeated examples being prandial and fugue) and amusing, made-up constructions, tweaked pre- and suffixes, or misused nouns (like “polyesterishly”).

No, the novel is not for everyone. What 1,000-page novel is? But I enjoyed it immensley, envied Foster’s brilliance, and know that it will stick in my mental craw for quite some time, interupting routine thought patterns like a wrench in the works, forcing me to think in different circles, giggle at interior jokes no one else (who hasn’t invested the 1,000 pages) will get, and be a slightly different, more complex person with a new point of view on the world at large. Now that is the true hallmark of good fiction.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover