Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace





Reviewed by Ted Gioia





Shhh! Keep quiet and I will let you in on a secret.



Nobody dares say this in the literary world, but

novelists have scaled back their ambitions in

recent years. All big projects have been put on

hold. Special clauses are being inserted in

publishing contracts. I have it on good authority

that you can’t write a novel longer than 650 pages

without getting a 27B-6 form signed by three

senior editors. And no one wants to be the first to

sign.



In the old days, authors aspired to write the

Great American Novel

—

or the

Great Commonwealth Novel

or the

Great Fill-in-the Blank

Novel

as the case may be. Not any more. Nowadays, fiction has

been downscaled, just like your job, your car and your 401-K.

Today a writer’s highest aspiration is

a movie deal

or (the holiest

of holies, pause while I genuflect) a place in Oprah’s Book Club.

Even the phrase Great American Novel is now off limits—only

uttered with a sharply ironic tone.



For your own good, you should practice saying it in front of a

mirror. Put a

Snidely Whiplash sneer

on your face and spit it out

between clenched teeth:

Great American Novel . . . hah!

Trust me,

if you get the tone just right it will help you earn a tenured position

in the English Department.



In short, big, sprawling books are dead. But

somebody forgot to tell David Foster Wallace.

The poor schmuck! While everyone else was

downscaling, he was working on

Infinite Jest

.



Wallace clearly was operating under the old

Pynchon-house rules. He thought he could

pull out all the stops and write

A Heart-breaking Work of

Staggering Genius

. (Whoops, that title was taken a few years later

by Wallace admirer David Eggers, but you get the idea.) Nice try,

DFW (the author, not the airport), but who was gonna publish a

novel that approached a half-million words, with footnotes that, on

their own, are as daunting as the “Penelope” section in Joyce’s



Ulysses

? Yes, there are 388 footnotes in Infinite Jest—all of them in

a tiny font, and some of them as lengthy as

New Yorker

short stories.



This book seemed a non-starter even before it used up the first

toner cartridge on the Wallace family printer. But our clueless

author miraculously found a publisher, and must have gotten the

three requisite signatures, because

Infinite Jest

arrived, with a

heavy thud on the loading dock, at your local bookstore on

February 1, 1996, just in time serve as the perfect Groundhog Day

present. When they put it on the scale at the checkout counter,

everyone gasped: four pound of prose, and no fat.



Even more surprising, this daunting book found its audience,

garnering praise from delighted readers and enthusiastic reviewers.

Writing in

The Atlantic Monthly

, Sven Birkerts declared: “Wallace

is, clearly, bent on taking the next step in fiction.”

Newsday



proclaimed: “If you believe the hype, David Foster Wallace is about

to be crowned the next heavyweight of American fiction. And the

accolade is probably deserved.”



Of course, the leaders of the downscale camp demurred, especially a

certain Michiko Kakutani, affiliated with a prominent Northeast

daily newspaper, who dislikes sprawling fictions the way inner city

parents disapprove of their kids wearing pants two sizes too big. She

wanted

Infinite Jest

to be tighter around the waist, smaller and more

form-fitting; she compared the novel to an unfinished Michelangelo

sculpture weighed down by big chunks of marble that need to be cut

away. But even Kakutani was forced to admit that Wallace was “a

writer of virtuosic skills who can seemingly do anything.”



In truth, Wallace put the equivalent of four novels into

Infinite Jest

.

Even stranger, these four novels have seemingly little to do with one

another—although the author eventually forces them together with

brazen contempt for literary decorum. First, Wallace has written

the Great Sports Novel, a detailed and brilliant account of life in a

very competitive tennis academy. Wallace has grafted on to this

coming-of-age tale an equally detailed and gut-wrenchingly honest

novel about recovering addicts in a halfway house. Then we have a

sci-fi tale based on the concept of a mysterious video that is just too

entertaining . . . so much so, that people who start watching it can

never stop. Finally, on top of all these stories Wallace constructs a

political satire about a crooner turned President who re-shapes

North American borders in alignment with his own personal

obsessions.



Yet the way Wallace presents these stories is never conventional,

and sometimes so wildly fanciful that you need to put down the

heavy tome—thud!—and chuckle or just draw a deep breath. A big

chunk of the political sub-plot sketched above is conveyed in the

form of the description of a filmed puppet show. (Imagine the

peculiar flavor of John Adams'

Nixon in China

to the power of ten.)

Other important story lines are developed in the footnotes, or

presented in street jargon full of malapropisms, or in streamlined

question-and-answer interludes in which all of the questions have

been conveniently omitted.



In short, none of this 1,079 page novel is padding. None of it is

"straight narrative" or conventional story-telling. The constant

creativity that Wallace shows, page by page, paragraph by

paragraph, sentence by sentence, is dazzling in the highest degree.

By any definition, and not just word count,

Infinite Jest

is a big

novel. Big in its aspirations, big in its scope, big in what it delivers.



Yet this flamboyant novel is also one of the most down-to-earth

books you will ever read. At its very core, this book is a critique of

flashiness and attitude, and argues for a healthy distrust of irony and

intellectualizing. Here is my verdict:

Infinite Jest

has a heart of

gold. The viewpoints it presents with the greatest vividness are so

simple that, at times, they come across as truisms and clichés. But,

again and again, our author forces the dead cliché back to life—

which may be one of the most difficult tasks any author can face.

Wallace’s ability to marry this austere and unadorned core of his

vision to the grand superstructures of his interlinking tales is one of

the most compelling aspects to a novel that is rich in things to

admire.



So put aside your sneer for a few days. Send your ironic attitudes

off to the cleaners, and forget to pick them up. You can always go

back to making fun of the Great American Novel next month or next

year. In the meantime, take a chance on a book that aims to scale

the heights. Who knows, you may decide you want to give up on

downscaling completely.

