1 post tagged “infinite jest”
While I don’t fully agree with the irritated reviewer, Jacob Levich, who termed David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest a case of “literary interuptus,” I must say the ending was a surprise, after the seemingly infinite alleyways of this so-called novel. The thousand-page behemoth is described as post post-modern, which I guess means, among other things, that he takes certain, shall we say, liberties with the genre.
I’m not qualified to digress on modern, post, post-post or otherwise, but I found that I did have a sense of resolution about the characters by the time I reached the end. Most of the big questions I had about who they were and how they got that way were satisfyingly resolved. There was a generous amount of wonderful, good old fashioned storytelling (or else why would anyone stick around for 1000 pages?). There were also transcendent moments buried in odd digressions. The handshake that Mario, the deformed youngest Incandenza, offers in the subway station is one of the most memorable encounters I have ever read described. These characters were as fully revealed as any you might meet in the pages of fiction and more memorable than many.
The novel also offers satisfying descriptions of various states of dysphoria. A minor character’s description of psychotic depression raise the hairs on the back of my neck and made me understand better than anything else I have read what inner torture led Foster to take his life.
Another description of self-loathing, out-of-control addiction to narcotics has been seared into my central nervous system. Did I really need to understand how much physical pain a recovered addict might endure rather than go back to that hunger for oblivion? Yes, I guess I did.
The plot. Well what can you make of the plot? Just as it threatens to come together -- poof – no more book. The damn book has been your companion for months and now it’s simply over? If it wasn’t such a fun plot, if he wasn’t such a seductive story teller, this would merely be an author trying too hard to be clever. In Foster’s hands, you find yourself staring bleakly over a cliff as you turn the final page – knowing you should have seen this coming.
Despite clear temptation, this is not a good book to skim. Many of the best parts are in footnotes or digressions. Reading it quickly will not really make it a more satisfying experience. For similar reasons, I think it will be a difficult book to make a movie from even though film-making is a major theme throughout.
