Matt Bucher is the administrator of the David Foster Wallace mailing list and publisher of Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. He is an editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, runs a weblog about writer Roberto Bolaño and the novel 2666, and has read Infinite Jest at least three times.
I first saw the novel in the window at the old Tattered Cover in Cherry Creek, Denver. I was a college sophomore and my teacher had earlier assigned us a few selections from the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction. One of those was “Lyndon” by David Foster Wallace. I wasn’t that impressed by the story, but the name stuck with me. And when I saw it again on Infinite Jest, written in tall, skinny, black-on-clouds letters, it all but leaped out at me.
I liked the title, the fat stack of pages, but it was $30 or so and I was a bargain shopper. It came out in paperback in the fall of 1997 and almost immediately the Tattered Cover had a mountain of them in the bargain department for $8.99 each. They were stacked in a large square, three or four feet high, each book a brick in tower, near the cash registers. How could I resist?
My first attempt at reading the book sputtered out about 300 pages in. Classes got in the way. And yet, I knew then that Infinite Jest would become my favorite book. I had never felt so connected to 300 pages. I spent much of Winter Break 1997 in bed with the novel, alternately savoring it and plowing through it. I remember skipping some sections and obsessively rereading others.
The first paperback printing was a strip-and-bind of the hardcover and so the same paper stock bound in paper covers is a good inch taller than the later reprintings. In the years since I first bought that paperback edition, I’ve purchased about ten other copies of the book (either to collect or loan out), but to this day, that first paperback remains my “reading copy.” Before the days of Amazon’s Search Inside! and samizdat hyperlinked-PDFs, you actually had to flip through the book to find all the instances of the word “moon” or all the mentions of a specific prorector. This was tedious and time-consuming, but pulling apart the strands of a work of art had never felt so rewarding. Even 11 or 12 years ago you could go looking for deep discussion about Infinite Jest and find it online. The wallace-l list and the first Howling Fantods message boards were an oasis for me, where I could proudly fly my nerd flag and dig into the minutiae of the book.
One of the first realizations I had about the novel was that there was no magic key to unlocking all of its secrets. Many of the discrepancies and mysteries in the book were not there to be “solved” in any traditional sense. It is still fun to debate some of the fundamental questions about the novel, but there are no definitive answers. Even if DFW himself said “Here’s what really happened…” you could refute his argument with sound logic from the book.
In subsequent re-reads, in my 20s, I identified mostly with the younger character of Hal. But now, in my 30s, I find myself most interested in the older Gately, who struggles to be a responsible, sober adult. Trying to understand these characters has occupied a slice of my mental energy for over a decade now. Somehow, it still seems vital to figure out what happens to them, what motivates them, why they make the choices they do. The same could be said of Hamlet or Othello or Lady Macbeth: outside of the beauty of the language, why do these characters persist? I encourage you to find out for yourself.
But, the thing that keeps people coming back to this book, that keeps them engaged for 1000+ pages, is not the mysteries of the subplots but the raw emotion on the page, the honest feelings laid bare. A persistent theme of the novel is the struggle to sincerely connect with the world. In the process of describing this struggle, Wallace ends up building a connection, a trust, with the reader. Of course this connection made Wallace’s death feel all the more raw and jagged to his readers, present company included.
Infinite Jest is my desert-island book, a book that I could not wring all the pleasure from if I squeezed for a century. I’ll forever ignore the haters and say I’m happy to have found this thing that instructs, that entertains, that loves.
Sometimes I feel like I don’t need any other book 🙂
Lovely essay, especially the remembrances of the olden days when we walked up hill both ways with that book, keeping diaries and spread sheets to organize our progress.
Hi Matt! Great essay. I’m loving that Infinite Summer is a great excuse to share/remember our first experiences with IJ.
Those early paperback printings are even more durable than the hardcover edition. All the hardcover printings and later paperback printings consist of individual pages glued together, whereas the early paperback printings (up to at least the fourth printing) consist of folded signatures that are sewn together – much more sturdy than a merely glued binding, and you can have them rebound in a hardcover which will last forever. I own 5 or 6 copies of IJ, including the signed galleys and a signed first printing of the hardcover, but my rebound fourth printing of the paperback from 1997 remains my most faithful companion.
Did you go to college in Colorado? Which one? I miss Tattered Cover in Cherry Creek.
Matt…I guess I followed the same path as you. I read ‘Lyndon’ also during my undergrad at McGill, but can’t remember why I picked up IJ in 2001.
I had a New York Public Library hardback that I schlepped on the F train out to the first boundary of 179th st, and on the Hillside Av. bus to the ‘outer boundary’ of 269th St. I remember IJest made that commute easier, and later I had to resort to chess puzzles/strategy in order to get through that trek.
I’m tempted to get offline again and read IJ with you all. I’m not working so what is my excuse really?
2666 is my next major commitment. How coincidental. I would really like to know who else shares that nexus.
Perhaps we can put together another effort like this to share that one.
I’m in. I am reading the Preacher series of comics. What could be better to mentally prepare for a dense wordy novel than a wacked out comic book?
Really, really looking forward to reading IJ.
It is my treat to myself on my 30th birthday and hope it arrives on time for sunday after ordering it online yesterday!
Myself and a friend are planning the “infinite summer” over here in England.
Are there any other brits on here?
Kristyn, I went to DU.
Perfect timing, thank you! Just finished my very first read-through last week, and am ready to start all over again – This time with notes and maps and spreadsheets and diagrams. (And yes, Matt: the “connection” of which you speak makes my heart break with every page, even as I’m laughing out loud…)
hey everyone!
i’m so happy i stumbled on this group. i’ve wanted to read this book for so long and promised myself i would after i finished my phd. well, now it’s done so no going back. just have to finish love in the time of the cholera first…
hmm.. cognitively
Very nice essay. I just started reading IJ for the second time, and those connections you talk about have already started flooding back in to my mind. I nearly teared up for no apparent reason at the first mention of “Enfield”. This is going to be fun…
I remember the first time I read Infinite Jest – I went to a new High School in Chicago, and we had Seminars. One of them was about this book and this book alone, with discussion about other writers and such. I read the book to and from school and while I was supposed to be doing homework and studying for other classes for three weeks until I got through the entire thing, and then I picked it up after the end, at the same time sad/happy/sated/yearning, and started to read it again.
I’ve only read it four times, and most of that is picking over it, but it’s by far the most accomplished and beautiful – in short, the most ‘good’ – book I’ve ever read. I hope that in my lifetime I can write something that is 1/10 the book IJ is.
[…] following was written by Matt Bucher (maintainer of the wallace-l listserv and author of this post), and augmented by input from Nick Maniatis (administrator of The Howling Fantods, a site devoted […]
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pompous, self-important, why say something in small words when multi-syllables will do and who talks like that – some of the worst excuse for dialogue i’ve ever read – guess i’ll keep reading though
SPOILER ALERT? [1]
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I haven’t finished this book before, but read up to page 228, which is just after DFW prints a list of the years in chronological order. I’m glad I saw that page number (223) somewhere, probably on this site.
I stopped for a while, partly because I realized with the year list that the first chapter was the end, and it seemed sad. Then life just got in the way.
I decided to start over from the beginning, and I’m obsessively checking which year I’m in, so I can understand it maybe a bit better from the get-go. I have also read some reviews now, and am prepared for the sadness of the book.
[…] of the Infinite Summer ‘guides’ was saying how he relates to this or that character, and it struck me that I couldn’t pick a character I relate to more than others. I identify […]