Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace – 1 star

A quick list of things that Infinite Jest is good for:

1. Prominently displaying on your coffee table so as to convince other hipsters that you are “one of them.”
2. A surefire cure for even the worst of insomnias. In fact, you can put other, more interesting books on top of this one and they will become boring through the process of book osmosis.
3. An impromptu self-defense weapon.
4. An anger management tool, that is, if the catharsis theory of anger management wasn’t a total pile of crap.

As a pseudo-intellectual who is not half as smart as I think I am much of the time, I really wanted to like this book when I dived into it. David Foster Wallace is a fantastic essayist. I particularly recommend his article about the Terminator series entitled F/X Porn. There’s also a good essay of his which freely admits that yes, Black English is a dialect and no, people who speak dialects are not stupider or even necessarily less educated on the things that matter than people who speak the language “correctly”, but nonetheless it’s imperative that you at least learn to communicate in Standard English. This second essay is right at the edge of annoying hyper-intellectualism for me but the very fact that it’s at the edge makes it enjoyable in its own right, sort of the same way that Will Ferrell is funny because he almost but not quite destroys every movie that he’s in with fatuousness.

Anyway, my point is this: you give* David Foster Wallace 5,000 words to make his point, chances are he’ll make it in a way that you will a. enjoy, and b. think very highly of DFW as a writer due to your enjoyment. Surely, you reason, if 5,000 DFW words are great, 100,000 of them must be a grand explosion of literary whoop-whoop, right? Well, my friend, wrong. It turns out, if you give DFW that much space to use, he not only uses it unwisely but he creates a thousand-page orgy of garbage which, I am convinced, people deign to “enjoy” only so that they can express their superiority to you at dinner parties.

Without going into too much detail – just writing about the book makes me want to gnash my teeth – DFW has chosen to take the tack of stream of consciousness writing in this book, a style which was used well by Joyce and Faulkner, sure, but Faulkner at least had the wherewithal to keep these sections down to a hundred pages or so and, come on, who reads Ulysses anymore? When I got my degree, there was an actual elective class in which the topic was “we are going to read Ulysses“. It will probably not surprise you to know that I attempted to enroll in this class. But that’s not the point. The point is is that this style of writing is already not easy to read, and everybody knows this. When you decide to pepper your 800-page text with 200 additional pages of footnotes that may or may not be integral to the plot, it becomes less of a “novel” and more of a “test to see how much pretentiousness I can get away with”.

All of this would just about be excusable if the book had some other saving grace, like if it was funny, or if it successfully explored some aspect of modern society. Actually, the plot, or at least the general idea for the plot, is intriguing: what if the CIA or some other secret government agency created a movie which, once you watched it, would fill you with so much, um, appreciation that you went comatose? Come to think of it, this is more or less the plot for Chuck Pahlianiuk’s Lullabye. Which, by the by, is not written in stream of consciousness and is a far better book than Infinite Jest, albeit in the sense that Tarvaris Jackson is a better quarterback than Roseanne Barr. The book does attempt to be funny. It fails. Horribly. So horribly that you wonder whether or not DFW was attempting to make it ironically unfunny, which then leads you to wonder if there really is a difference between something that is purposefully unfunny and something that tries to be funny but fails, which in turn leads you to dig around in your book collection just so you can find Infinite Jest and heave it some more. It’s too bad that the Highland Games are dead set on tossing cabers; I think people would appreciate the sport of Infinite Jest tossing much more.

*Maybe the proper verb form there is “gave”. Since he’s dead and all.*

**Confession: the only reason I added this footnote is because a DFW review without a footnote is like a Werner Herzog film without at least one period of Herzog doing something bat____ crazy.***

***If this was Infinite Jest, the preceding footnote would be footnoted with a 30 page listing of all of Herzog’s works, a breakdown of the imagery used in them, and DFW’s personal opinions on the subjects. Also, all of the movies would be completely made up and they would be by another made-up movie-maker.