John Green is the Michael L. Printz Award-winning author of Paper Towns, Looking for Alaska, and An Abundance of Katherines. He is also the co-creator (with his brother, Hank) of the popular vlogbrothers channel on youtube, which spawned the nerdfighter community, a tight-knit group of a hundred thousand nerds who use the internet to celebrate intellectualism and nerd culture.
Okay, so full disclosure: I am behind. (I’m only on page 350.)
I first read Infinite Jest in the summer of 1996, the summer after my freshman year of college. I had a beautiful first edition80 that I’d bought entirely because of a review in Time Magazine. (Off-topic, but remember magazines?) I lived that summer with three friends from high school and a juvenile pet squirrel named Trippy in a two-bedroom apartment in Birmingham, Alabama. We slept on these four full-sized mattresses we had kind of half-stolen from our friend’s dad, who owned a Days Inn.
My memories of that summer:
- The squirrel died. I came home from work one day, and the squirrel was dead in its cage, and I knew I had to tell my roommate Todd, who was particularly attached to Trippy and who was also reading IJ. I When he came home that day, I said, “I think Lenz got a hold of Trippy,” which in the end was, like, way too casual a way of telling Todd that his squirrel had died.
- I spent a lot of time lying on the bare Days Inn mattress, an unzipped sleeping bag over me, my forearms aching from the size of the book.
This time around, reading Infinite Jest has been an exercise in delighted confusion. But for me, in 1996, all reading was a matter of delighted confusion, and if I didn’t understand something, I just kept reading. Of course, I had no idea what was happening in the book.81 All I knew was that I liked Hal, and that I liked mmmyellow, and that even though it was horrible and all I kinda wished I was good at tennis.
When I finished the book, I immediately flipped to the first page and started reading again. For me, that summer, IJ achieved its craziest ambition: It became my Entertainment.
When I got back to school that Fall, one of the first things I did was get on the Internet, which was then capitalized, to find out what other people who’d read IJ had thought of it, whereupon I learned that even though I’d read IJ three times in three months, I’d had absolutely no idea what the book was about and had totally misunderstood everything. So it has been nice to read it with y’all this time around, because it keeps me on track.
I write novels for teenagers now—such books are colloquially called “Young Adult books” or just YA—and whenever I’ve had about two beers and find myself with other YA authors, I always start in on this soliloquy about how the contemporary young adult novel was not invented by J. D. Salinger or Judy Blume or Robert Cormier but by David Foster Wallace, whose ETA scenes more closely resemble what most YA writers are after. Like, for one thing, the best contemporary young adult fiction moves effortlessly between high and low culture in that way that only teenagers and David Foster Wallace can. I mean, my favorite books when I was eighteen were IJ and The Babysitters’ Club #43: Claudia’s Sad Goodbye.82 DFW proved that one way to bring readers to complex ideas is to utilize the sentence structures they hear every day; YA fiction has been trying to do this ever since.
Also, there’s the whole thing of treating teenagers as intellectually capable and genuinely funny people, which IJ did not invent but did master. Plus, YA novels on average are more likely to use footnotes than novels for adults.83 It’s actually pretty stunning how massively so many YA writers (I mean, me especially, but also other people) have ripped off ETA and Pemulis and Hal, how deeply DFW has shaped our understanding of what it means to be smart and talented and scared and 17.
So now, 13 years after first reading the book, I find myself treasuring the ETA scenes more than I did when I was of the age when I should have been treasuring them. Any book worth its salt has any many readings as it does readers. My reading has been slow going because it is such an awful pleasure to be in the shadow of my 18-year-old self, that skinny kid who was learning that unprecedented intellectual feats were not resigned to history.
But this makes it sound like reading IJ has been some rosy-fogged visit to the past. What I’m savoring so much, I think, is not remembering the me who first read the words, but … well, here is the truth: It is the lamest thing in the world to feel like you are alone and then to read a story that makes you feel unalone. Great books like IJ can and do accomplish so much more than this small trick of direct identification, but even so: For me to read a book that so expertly articulated the obsession and narcissism and sadness of the glass eye turned in on itself kind of made my life that summer and moving forward more bearable.
That was no small gift to me at the time—and it is no small gift this time, either.
Wow Great essay. Loved the way you layed this out. Im really enjoying this book more and more each day. Insights about life through the book and infinite summer have been great. John, Thanks for sharing this with us.
I, too, picked IJ up after reading the Time review – and I have a hazy recollection of this thing you refer to as, a “magazine.”
Loved this, and loved listening to it on blogtv earlier! <3
“It is the lamest thing in the world to feel like you are alone and then to read a story that makes you feel unalone.”
Bingo.
Why is that lame?
Page 350? Pick up the pace, man.
I loved this essay. And I can relate (although I didn’t read the book three times that year).
I’m curious to see if you’re in the same place as I am. Did you remember a lot of the book? AS I’ve noted on my blog, I remember odd, sparse details, but forgot a lot of the main action (and the drugs!).
Just curious how much you remembered 13 years later.
Just wanted to say, excellent post!
i love the babysitters club!
Great call that Hal and Pemulis are YA characters.
I don’t think much about the Y/A category, but it is a really great perspective to think that ETA captures something cross-generational in this way. Not that A Y/A would necessarily read IJ (maybe start them on T.C. Boyle or something), but that the ability to Identify is there. Recently, even Mr. Ebert has apparently come down on teen (and tweenty) [1] sophistication, specifically the lack thereof, and your contribution here gives back that lost respect. As I read it, anyway.
[1] Tweenty is my new word for “kids” in their early 20s. Not that all people in their early 20s are tweents (which obviously is derivative of “tween,” since “tweents” are between teen-hood and adulthood). Tweents are not-yet-past their teen fatuations and cultural identities.
Really excellent essay. Thanks!
I would have read this as a YA just as much as now. I missed my (only) chance to read and enjoy Tolkien. As as adult, I don’t have the kind of time to devote to this undertaking, normally. This summer, I have nothing going on. So it’s like being a teenager again.
I think it’s interesting to re-read books you loved as a kid, and see if they stand the test of time. Great works can be read at any age, but certainly give a different perspective. I enjoyed this essay as well. Maybe the fact* that Hal is a Young Adult is why I like Gately better. I don’t identify with angst much anymore. And in my social circle, I see people quitting drugs rather than experimenting.
*opinion
Never too late for Tolkien. Just get the book(s) and start reading. Take all the time you need. I found a six volume set that set, so to speak, me back a hundred bucks but it was exactly what I needed to read on the train. You can get a used edition for 70 bucks: http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Rings-Millennium-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618037667/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251000773&sr=8-1
Kindle edition costs ten bucks. Of course, you have to buy a Kindle. 300 bucks. But you can get IJ on it for ten bucks.
One of the side benefits/burdens of participating in Infinite Summer is that I keep adding new books and authors to my list of must-reads or must-re-reads. But never would I ever have guessed that that list might include The Babysitter’s Club. Thanks for that.
Exacto. Just kidding. But exactly. You nailed it: IJ is so highly readable, is piss yr pants hysterical like every 20 pages, and totally blends the cerebral and the breakfast cereal. Great take. I’m also several hundred pages arears on my second tour of IJ duty. Can’t wait to pick up one if yr novels. Keep defending DFW’s pioneer status as a YA raconteur
“blends the cerebral and the breakfast cereal”
I’m assuming you’re talking Cookie Crisp or Lucky Charms 🙂
Nice . . . I think the best example of this is the Peemster takeover in endnote 123. As far as capturing the voice of the Everyteen, this pretty much nails it. Explaining the Intermediate Value Theorem and why it’s so awesome while mocking his best friend in the title of a graph . . . beautiful.
I also think these teens are not generationally specific, which is a good sign of quality writing. I believe my dad (a baby boomer) could relate to the antics at ETA as well as I can (a GenXer).
I’m a baby boomer and believe me anyone who lived through the ’60’s can relate. For one thing, I don’t have to look up as many “obscure” references…always a plus in my book.
Agreed. It’s all the pop culture references from the last 30-40 years I’m having to catch up on! And, I can’t buy a clue with a rolled-up $20 bill about most of the contemporary references in the blogs & forums (who are these actors & shows, anyway?), but not having trouble with IJ. Who can relate, and how lasting the work will be is discussed at length in “I’ve Seen the Future, Brother, It’s Murder”.
Actually, I followed that discussion and was only commenting on Randy’s opinion about his dad being able to relate to IJ. For keeping up to date with the last 30 years, I have my daughter and her husband keeping me on my toes..both avid readers who read IJ a while ago and who commented on DFW being frightfully modern.
Ugh. I *wish* I had a post so eloquent to follow an admission of being horridly behind. I’m just plain old negligent in my reading at this point.
Any way I can apply for an incomplete and get an extension?
[…] look because I don’t want to read any spoilers. Imagine my relief when John Green’s Why I’m Behind article popped up. Finally, I could join the community […]