Category: Countdown

Colin Meloy is the lead singer and songwriter for the band The Decemberists. Their most recent album is The Hazards of Love.

I think I bought my copy of Infinite Jest in 1997. To be honest, I don’t know what inspired the purchase. Had I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again? Probably. I don’t know why I would’ve bought a book by an unknown author that weighed in somewhere north of 1000 pages. Regardless, it was so long ago that I don’t remember actually buying it. All I know is that it has sat in my book collection for 12 years, unread. My copy of Infinite Jest dates back to the days when it was surrounded by book spines that sported those yellow “USED” stickers. When my collection of books was meager, overly-academic and usually supported on a bookshelf made of pine planks and cinder blocks. It distinguished itself from its neighbors by its girth and by the fact that I had not been obliged to buy it for some class. Volunteer book purchases were pretty seldom back then. I can only assume that my buying Infinite Jest came from a similar place as the impulse to buy Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation when I was thirteen and I had fifteen bucks and a personal mandate to buy my first compact disc. Fifteen dollars was an afternoon’s lawn-mowing and Daydream Nation was a double record–I had to get my money’s worth. I was more broke than I’ve ever been in 1997. I was working at a coffee shop in Missoula, Montana. The owner was a black guy from LA who had fallen in love with Missoula en route to a Rainbow Gathering the summer before and sported one of the most obviously fake names I’d ever heard: Harley Evergreen. He’d had a brief stint in the music business (a record produced by T. Bone Burnett!) and was wildly paranoid; he carried a pistol in the back of his pants wherever he went. He had a habit of withholding taxes from our checks, even though we’d never filled out a W2. He ended up splitting town owing thousands of dollars in back rent and unpaid taxes. His Jeep was left parked out front, festooned with ignored parking tickets. I lived mostly off the terrible tips from that coffee shop. My roommates and I used to get bread out of the garbage bin behind one of the local bakeries. We exercised miserly stinginess on our daily expenditures so we could blow our twenty dollar bills on nights at Charlies’ Bar. Buying a new paperback was not high on the list of priorities, but somehow, in 1997, I bought a copy of Infinite Jest. Now that I think about it, it must’ve been on the strength of A Supposedly Fun Thing … I had loved those essays’ intelligence and humor, particularly the pretty novel use of footnotes and how those tangential digressions could blossom into their own mini-essays. I seem to remember picking up Infinite Jest with excitement and gusto and ambition and … boom, stopped on the 100th page or so. I don’t think I could transition from Wallace, the callow, cynical but deeply funny observer in A Supposedly Fun Thing … to the Novelist Wallace, freed of the constraints of non-fiction. So back to the plank-and-cinder-block shelf it went. It followed me across the country, through every apartment, duplex, warehouse, and house I moved to. Across two states, two time zones. I’m recalling this passage of time through the eyes–or the spine–of the book like one of those somber montages where the subject grows old and disregarded, its pages foxed and faded, its once-brilliant spine becoming sunbleached illegible.

Until now.

Pulling it off the shelf is like sticking one heel of my shoe in a time machine. I can smell the stale bread, the whiff of burnt coffee, the reek of incense coming up from Mr Evergreen’s residence below the coffee shop (he lived in the basement). But I think I’m more prepared now to handle the heft of the text than I was then. I certainly spend more time on airplanes. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I feel as if I’m being reunited with an old friend; rather, I feel like I’m unlocking the door and setting free a bizarre and feral child from a dusty garret I had locked it in 12 years ago. Should be a good summer.

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.

Mimi Smartypants is a Chicago writer and editor, as well as the eponymous author of a long-running weblog.  A portion of her early online writing is collected in The World According to Mimi Smartypants.  She has read Infinite Jest thrice.

Yeah, it’s big.

No reviewer, blogger, or bookstore chitchatter can resist remarking on Infinite Jest’s size, so let’s just get that out of the way first. It’s also in the top ten of the best books I have ever read in my life. It would be my desert island book and the book I would take to prison with me. (For some reason I like to imagine scenarios in which I am mistakenly sent to prison.) In 1996, despite being chronically short of funds and living in a graduate student hovel with my graduate student husband, I splurged on a hardcover copy and a few weeks later accidentally left it on a bus. And I went out later that day and bought ANOTHER hardcover copy with that month’s beer money.

My extreme love for this novel, the way that I tend to corner people who mention it and exclaim about its wonderfulness with a Russian-mystic gleam in my eye, might sound a little fetishistic and alarming, and in fact might be a deterrent rather than an endorsement. Let me try another approach.

I have always been something of a literary wanker, interested in metafiction and fancy ways of writing and reading. I was a Vonnegut and Pynchon dork in high school, spent time in college inhaling marijuana smoke and Nabokov simultaneously (quite an effective “alternative reading strategy,” actually), and still dip into Finnegan’s Wake every time I need a respite from narrative. So when IJ hype began appearing in various book-review rags I was naturally all over it. A giant thousand-page novel set in the vague near-future? With frequent text-disruptions in the form of endnotes and digressions? Yes! Hand it over!

Of course, by this point I know what to expect of my postmodern fiction, right? Lots of little literary in-jokes and poking playful fun at the search for meaning, a big textual circle jerk that allows me to admire the author’s chops while also smirking proudly about how smart I am for getting it.

That’s not at all how reading Infinite Jest is. Not even close. The book is not one long “mess,” as New York Times book critic and my personal enemy Michiko Kakutani so wrongly put it, or an “excuse to show off.” I hope that at the end of the summer you will see how wrong that is. Infinite Jest feels very real, with the underlying premise that we MUST read, write, or talk ourselves out of the metafictional spiral; that it is actually urgent that we connect with the world, not hide from it with drink or drugs or television or literary skill; that paying attention to nothing but the movie inside one’s head will ultimately kill you.* A novel about the absolute necessity of conveying our subjective consciousness to each other, that in fact IS an attempt to convey subjective consciousness to you, the reader—this feels like such a relief after decades of novels that laughingly deny the possibility.

*(It feels unseemly here, after the above, to insert a comment about the sad loss of DFW himself. I have been looking at the cursor-blink for ages but nothing is right. Consider this parenthetical my moment of silence, a fumbling acknowledgment of the Big Bad Thing that I hope will not totally inform the Infinite Summer project, which doesn’t deserve such emotional freight.)

All in all, I find Infinite Jest enjoyable in a way that Barth and Pynchon are not. (Here come the Pynchon fans to kick my ass.) There’s so much fun and humanity in it. There are so many great overlapping stories, and so many laugh-out-loud moments. If characters like Hal and Gately and Joelle don’t stay with you long after the book is over I will eat my hat, and it is not a particularly tasty hat. Also, don’t be surprised if you read the last word and want to start over again at the beginning—that’s what I did, and that’s why I would want this book in prison, and weirdly now I am starting to fantasize (again) about going to prison just so I would have lots of uninterrupted time with Infinite Jest.