Infinite Summer

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  • Roundup

    The National Post’s Afterword interviewed Matthew Baldwin about the genesis of Infinite Summer.

    At A Supposedly Fun Blog, several writers (including Erza Klein of the Washington Post) have assembled to blog their reading of Infinite Jest. They join Infinite Zombies, which has been doing so for the last two weeks.

    Sonja describes her reading methodology. William boasts that his weblog Human Complex is “Now Infinitely Summerier”. Christine has been posting an “IJ Quote of the Day” on Naptime Writing. Ray says he’ll be writing about Infinite Jest every Wednesday at Love, Your Copyeditor.

    Political blogger Atrios reveals that the title of his blog is taken from the novel.

    And speaking of political bloggers, Matthew Yglesias is reading Infinite Jest on the Kindle:

    I think I stumbled upon an inadvertent flaw in the Kindle. Namely, that when you read really long books—particularly as part of a quasi-group enterprise—you want to either brag about how many pages you’ve read or else whine about how many pages you’ve fallen behind. But the Kindle doesn’t have pages! Just, um, locations.

    So I read 1,100 locations worth of the book. But nobody knows what that means. Normal people won’t even know if that’s a lot or a little.

    In general, the Kindle strikes me as somewhat hobbled by an overly generous view of why people buy books. Not only is there this problematic lack of bragging, but with the kindle edition of the book I can’t have a handsome volume laying around the house as if to say to visitors, “why, yes, I may be a professional political pundit but I’m also a man of culture.” And I’ll have nothing on my shelf. Amazon should at least send you a sticker when you buy a book on Kindle so you can maintain some kind of display wall of all the impressive books you’ve read.

    According to this page, Skylight Books in LA will give you a 15% book club discount if you mention “Infinite Summer” when buying IJ. They also say their facilities are available for meet-ups.

    Here are some other people who were talking about Infinite Summer this week:

    If you have recently written about Infinite Jest, please let us know in the comments or the forums.

  • Infinite Summery – Week 1

    Milestone Reached: Page 73 (7%)

    Chapters Read:

    Chapter Beginning Page Synopsis
    YEAR OF GLAD 3 Hal interviews at the University of Arizona; in a flashback, Hal eats mold as a child.
    YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 17 Erdedy awaits a delivery of pot.
    1 APRIL — YEAR OF THE TUCKS MEDICATED PAD 27 Hal speaks with a “professional conversationalist”.
    9 MAY — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 32 Hal, sharing a room with his older brother Mario, receives a call from the eldest brother Orin
    YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 33 A medical attaché discovers that his wife is out, and so selects an unmarked entertainment cartridge to watch.
    YEAR OF THE TRIAL-SIZE DOVE BAR 37 Clenette describes Wardine, Wardine’s mother, and Roy Tony; Bruce Green falls in love with and eventually woos Mildred Bonk.
    YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 39 Hal and Mario reminisce about their father (Himself) and his death; medical attaché continues to watch cartridge.
    OCTOBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 42 Orin kills roaches and wishes he could get rid of last night’s “Subject”.
    YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 49 Hal smokes pot in the Pump Room.
    AUTUMN — YEAR OF DAIRY PRODUCTS FROM THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND 55 Don Gatley accidentally kills a man while robbing his home.
    3 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 60 Jim Troelsch–a student at the Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA)–is sick; someone has a nightmare about a face in the floor (told in first-person).
    AS OF YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 63 The history of ETA and its founder James Orin Incandenza (father to Hal, Orin, and Mario).
    DENVER CO, 1 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 65 Orin glides into Mile High Stadium in a Cardinals costume; Michael Pemulis talks to his “Little Buddies” at ETA about drugs; Hal relates a dream that he used to have nightly.
    YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT 68 (continues to page 85) Kate Gompert is in the hospital, speaks about the depression her addition to pot engenders.

    New Characters:

    Characters in bold appear to be major.

    YEAR OF GLAD (page 3)

    • Harold (Hal) James Incandenza: Protagonist. Student at the Enfield Tennis Academy; son of James Orin Incandenza and Avril Incandenza; younger brother to Orin Incandenza and Mario Incandenza.
    • Dr. Charles Tavis: Hal’s mother’s “adoptive brother”; accompanies Hal to University of Arizona interview.
    • Avril Mondragon Tavis Incandenza (“The Moms”): Wife to James Orin Incandenza, Mother to Orin, Mario, and Hal. Dean of Academic Affairs at ETA; grammarian supreme.
    • Aubrey F. deLint: ETA prorector.
    • Kirk White: University of Arizona Varsity Coach.
    • Mr. Sawyer: University of Arizona Dean of Academics.
    • Bill: University of Arizona Dean of Athletics.
    • Unnamed: Dean of Admissions, Dean of Composition.

    YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 17)

    • Erdedy – Pot addict, who swears that each pot binge will be his last.
    • Unnamed: Female who promised to deliver pot to Eldedy.

    1 APRIL — YEAR OF THE TUCKS MEDICATED PAD (page 27)

    • “Conversational Professional”: Possibly Himself in disguise.

    9 MAY — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 32)

    • Mario Incandenza: Older brother to Hal; has some sort of deformity.

    YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 33)

    • Unnamed: Medical attaché (first to watch the mysterious, unnamed cartridge), Medical attaché’s wife.

    YEAR OF THE TRIAL-SIZE DOVE BAR (page 37)

    • Clenette Henderson: Relates the story of Wardine.
    • Wardine: Clenette’s half-sister and friend who is beaten by Roy Tony.
    • Reginald: Wardine’s boyfriend.
    • Roy Tony: Dealer; Wardine’s mother’s “man”.
    • Delores Epps – Clenette’s friend.
    • Columbus Epps – Delores’ brother, killed by Roy Tony four years ago (over Clenette’s mother).
    • Unnamed: Wardine’s mother.
    • Bruce Green: Husband to Mildred L. Bonk; father to Harriet Bonk-Green.
    • Mildred L. Bonk: Wife to Bruce Green; mother to Harriet Bonk-Green.
    • Tommy Doocey: Harelipped pot-dealer (possibly the source of Erdedy’s pot).
    • Harriet Bonk-Green: Mildred and Bruce’s daughter

    OCTOBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 42)

    • Orin Incandenza: Eldest Incandenza brother. Plays football, sleeps with “subjects”, hates roaches.

    AUTUMN — YEAR OF DAIRY PRODUCTS FROM THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND (page 55)

    • Donald “Don” W. Gately: Enormous guy (over 6 ft., close to 300 lbs), thief, murderer (albeit by accident), and “active drug addict”.
    • Guillaume DuPlessis: Homeowner killed by Gately.
    • Trent ‘Quo Vadis’ Kite: Gately’s “associate”.

    3 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 60)

    • Jim Troelsch: Ill member of the 18s B squad at ETA.

    AS OF YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 63)

    • Dr. James Orin Incandenza (“Himself”): Husband of Avril, father to Orin, Mario, and Hal. Founder of ETA, filmmaker, inventor. Died in The Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar.

    DENVER CO, 1 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 65)

    • Michael Pemulis: Member of the 18s B squad at ETA; friend to Hal and Mario.

    YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 68)

    • Kathrine “Kate” Ann Gompert: Pot addict, depressive. First seen in hospital.
    • Unnamed: Kate’s doctor.
    • Gerhardt Schtitt: Head Coach and Athletic Director at E.T.A. Old; borderline fascist; friends with Mario.

    Vocabulary: We we originally planning to have a weekly “vocab dump” as part of the summaries, but that now strikes us as unnecessary. For one thing, most readers appear to have have taken to heart the suggestion that IJ be read with the OED at hand. For another, the Infinite Jest Wiki lists most 37¢-words and definitions by page number, and the Infinite Jest Vocabulary Glossary is also available for perusal.

    Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: the Infinite Jest Character Profiles (author unknown), Ben’s Infinite Spreadsheet, Dr. Keith O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.

  • Marcus Sakey: Decoding Infinite Jest; or, Don’t

    Marcus Sakey is the award-winning author of Good People, The Blade Itself: A Novel, and At the City’s Edge, all of which are in development as feature films. His new novel, The Amateurs, comes out August 6th. His website features excerpts, contests, and tips for writers.

    I picked up IJ the same way I imagine a lot of you did—while browsing, I was caught by the cover, the hyperbolic quote, and the heft of the thing. This was 1997, an era when I was more likely to be willing to invest in a doorstop novel. But even then, 1079 pages was going to take some persuading, so I opened to the reviews: “Uproarious,” “Exhilarating,” “Truly remarkable,” “Spectacularly good.”

    Okay. You win.

    My first read of the novel was by and large a pleasure. I’ll admit that there were moments when I wondered if I could trust Wallace to deliver the goods. And at that time, I thought that the book could have benefited from a sterner editor (although the submitted manuscript was apparently significantly longer.)

    Still, I labored through the rough spots, and found more than enough to tickle me and keep me going. But while I don’t want to reveal too much, I will say that when I got to the end, my initial reaction was, “Huh.”

    Not in a bad way. There had been moments of such startling brilliance along the way, episodes so hilariously sad and tragically funny, that I knew even at the time that it was something special. But still, at the very end, there was a “Huh” factor.

    Fast-forward two months and ten books, and here’s the thing—I was still thinking about Infinite Jest. In fact, I found myself seeing it more clearly, getting more seduced by it, than when I was actually reading the thing.

    With distance what at first seemed sprawling begins to come into a more cohesive, if still massive, picture. Wallace is a writer who does not spare you the full force of his brain; in fact, he demands your effort like a brilliant professor who expects that you show up every week, well-rested, on time, and with the reading done.

    However, novels aren’t read that way. They’re read in sips and gulps, sometimes a sleepy page before bed, sometimes a hundred with a pot of coffee. Not only that, but because Wallace believes in complexity, he doesn’t always reveal the structure of things all at once; doesn’t make obvious the nature of the world he’s building.

    But finish the book, let it stew, and it will all come together, I promise. And it’s more than worth the effort. So much so in fact, that about a year later I decided to read it again.

    And brothers and sisters, I’m here to tell you, on a second read, there wasn’t a word I would cut. Once you’ve got a sense of the greater whole, and once you trust Wallace, the thing is fucking genius. I write a very different style of book, but even so, it makes me want to pack it in and go home. He’s that good.

    But I made a mistake the second time. I thought that because I had puzzled out certain aspects, the rest of the book was a riddle, a code I needed to crack. So I went at it that way. I took notes on characters and relationships. I annotated. I formulated guesses about what “The Entertainment” was, and where it showed up, and how what happened at the end played into what happened at the beginning. I visited message boards and forums and the Wallace discussion list. I spent as much time taking notes on the novel as I did reading the damn thing.

    And here’s what I learned: There is no secret.

    Fundamentally, IJ is a novel about two things: the pursuit of happiness, and the impossibilities of communication. Wallace explores those themes and their intersections in a hundred different ways. And because he was a genius who didn’t believe there were answers to these questions, he also contradicts himself over and over and over. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that there are no assertions of importance in the text that aren’t contradicted somewhere else.

    I realize that sounds annoying. But that’s why I’m writing this piece. It’s only annoying if you look at the novel as a code to crack, if you see everything as a clue.

    After a second read, there were many things I understood more clearly. And damn, how I loved it. But could I tell you, unequivocally, “what happened”?

    Nope.

    It’s not about that. There aren’t easy answers in life, and so Wallace didn’t want them in his work. There aren’t single perspectives in life, and so Wallace didn’t want them in his work. The world can’t be summed up in a sentence, and so Wallace not only didn’t try—he demonstrated some of the reasons why the world is the way it is.

    Last year, David Foster Wallace hung himself. I’d never met the man, but it threw me into a funk. After a week of moping about, I picked up Infinite Jest again as a sort of personal tribute, and read it for the third time. Read it trusting him, read it feeling the sorrow and the joy and the sheer intellectual pleasure.

    And finally, I read it right.

  • Poochie

    The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.

    “He was forty, and she was twenty. Big age difference. Especially at that age. But they had a baby, and she turned into a completely different person. She punched him. Kicked him in the privates.”

    Oh, sorry. That’s part of a conversation I overhead this morning in a diner11 as I waited for my order to arrive and tried pretty darn hard to read Infinite Jest.

    I figured since I had to sit through some middle-aged woman’s not-so-elegant discussion of postpartum depression, you should too. Hope you enjoyed it.

    Of course, this is something I’ll have to get used to. I’m not the fastest reader, and I’ve never dealt with such a lengthy book before12 so my method of getting to the end of this thing will be to read it whenever possible, no matter what (possibly loud and obnoxious) company I’m in.

    Diner table. Bus stop. Therapy. Wait, scratch that last one. Or maybe not — considering the themes already touched upon in the first hundred pages of IJ, maybe the pretence that I read the tome in the company of my mental health practitioner will be taken as some deep, insightful tying-in of commentary and commented-upon.

    Which would certainly not be any kind of misrepresentation on my part. I am insightful as balls.13

    This space was meant to be taken to introduce myself to you all. There’s a chance I’m failing. In fairness, I’m a little nervous, realizing that if this were Sesame Street, I’d be the kid singled out as the one “doing her own thing”. My fellow guides are all distinctly proven entities, whereas I’m the plucky newcomer with the lucky bat and the sports metaphor that doesn’t make sense in the context of literature discussion.

    If you’re wondering, I’m told I’m here to provide a youthful perspective, which I can only read as meaning that the other guides are decrepit and irrelevant, and I’m the cool, young chick that’ll bring in the 18-35 demographic we so desperately crave so that we can make muchos advertising dollars off of David Foster Wallace’s back.

    To recap: we’re shills; I’m the only guide worth reading, because I’m young; and having babies makes you hit your husband. I hope you’re taking notes.

  • Fiction’s Dirty Little Secret

    The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.

    When I was in college a novelist I admired made an appearance at my school and I was asked to introduce him. I walked to the podium in front of a large student crowd and gave a brief summary of the author’s recurring themes. Then I sat down and the author came out and told everyone I was an idiot. Not in those words, exactly, but he claimed, with more than a little disdain, that all the things I had said were in his books were products of my limited imagination, and he got a few good laughs at my expense. Of course I was mortified, not only because there were any number of totally crushable English majors in the audience who now had reason to doubt my critical acumen, but also because I was right. Everything I said about his work was absolutely true. I couldn’t figure out why he would deny it.9

    Fifteen years later I was on tour promoting my own novel and sat for an interview with Janet Taylor, an extremely intelligent and thoughtful host for Oregon Public Radio. For the first ten minutes she asked interesting questions and I gave more or less coherent answers. And then Janet said something like this:

    “In your novel, the character of Justin Finn, the child Davis Moore clones from his daughter’s unknown killer so that Moore may one day see what the fiend looks like, is an obvious Christ figure. And as such I find it interesting that you chose to give Justin’s mother the name Martha. Of course it would have been very obvious and over-the-top if you named her Mary. But in the Bible—as you are obviously aware, Kevin, but I’ll explain for our listeners—Martha of Bethany was a frequent host to Jesus and the disciples. And while Martha rushed around cleaning the house and preparing food and washing feet and so forth, her sister Mary of Bethany sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to him teach. Finally Jesus had to call out, ‘Martha, stop what you are doing and come sit next to your sister. These other things you are doing are not important. The only important thing is what I have to say.’ And in Cast of Shadows, Martha Finn, like Martha of Bethany, is so worried about being a good mother to Justin, about caring for him and watching out for him, that she never sees who he really is or understands what he is trying to tell her.”

    It was brilliant. It was sophisticated. It was meaningful. And I wish I had known what she was talking about.10

    But here’s the important thing: Janet was right! Her analysis was terrific. And if we had never met she would always believe that the name Martha Finn was a deliberate and clever allusion to the biblical Martha of Bethany and not the result of that character having been named on the day Martha Stewart was indicted for securities fraud. I’m not a radical relativist when it comes to critical theory but that observation made the book better for Janet, and a writer has to recognize that each person who reads his novel reads a different book. Readers bring their intellect to the page just as the author does and each reader brings different knowledge and experience and history and bias. Each reader understands the book a bit differently. Each reader asks the novel different questions, and as a result each reader gets different answers, which explains why you are crazy for Confederacy of Dunces and your otherwise extremely intelligent attorney wife thinks you’re an idiot for laughing at it.

    Earlier this week Jason Kottke made this important point about Infinite Jest: You’re never going to get half of what Wallace intended the first time you read it, so don’t sweat it. I’ll add a corollary to that: A lot of what you do get, isn’t anything that even occurred to Wallace in the first place. Don’t sweat that either.

    We have a tendency to think of novels, especially novels we admire, as being like timepieces with every moving part dropped in its place with expert precision. I suppose writers would like people to think that sometimes, but even the most brilliant novels are far messier than that. Writing a novel is less like watchmaking and more like baking a cake without a recipe. Or an oven. Or a pan.

    I’ll have more to say about this in the weeks to come because even after only 100 pages Infinite Jest is almost the perfect novel for this discussion, but think of the reader and author as partners. Wallace has constructed this novel with a lot of care and left pieces of the puzzle in ingenious (and unexpected) places and there is great conspiratorial pleasure in finding those clues where others might miss them. But the reader brings his own ingenuity to the project as well and in the many places where Wallace has left gaps, the reader will fill them in herself. Often brilliantly.

    In fact (and I say this in a whisper because it’s the dirty secret of writing fiction) the author is counting on you for it.

  • How Did I Get Here?

    The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.

    Way back awhile ago, Matthew e-mailed me and said, I’m thinking of doing this thing, would you like to do it, too? And I was all, HELL NO. Why don’t you ask mimi smartypants, she’s the secretary/treasurer of the David Foster Wallace Fan Club. It was my way of saying, thanks, but don’t you want a qualified literary opinion-giver along on this trek? I can barely parse Dr. Seuss.

    Then I didn’t hear from Matthew for like three months, so I was all, WHEW! Now I can go back to knitting this sock. But then, of course, Matthew followed up4 and said that mimi had declined — having already read the book three times5 she wasn’t up for number four.

    Then, sensing my reluctance to flaunt my intellectual weaknesses about the Internet, Matthew went on to say a bunch of wildly flattering things about me, like that mine was one of the first blogs he ever read, and that I gave him the idea upon which he built that Nobel Prize-winning physics thing he did about God.

    My only qualification for being an Infinite Summer guide seems to be that I, too, once picked up Infinite Jest and failed to finish it. I didn’t even PAY for my copy, I was working in a bookstore at the time and got one free from the Little, Brown rep. Apart from my anxiety about committing to a Big Book at the time,6 what bothered me most about the book was the cheap advance-copy binding, the way the cover curled up and over itself when the humidity rose above 15%. I eventually donated it to the Planned Parenthood book sale.

    I remember the book being about tennis, which is a sport I enjoy playing once or twice a year. I was varsity in high school, but the coach said that even though I had some talent, I just didn’t appear to want to work very hard.7

    However, as your sherpa, I vow to come up with something moderately insightful to say each week.8

  • Mountaineering

    The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.

    I don’t know why I own Infinite Jest.

    Well, let me clarify. I know the reason I own it: it is, by all accounts, exactly the sort of narrative I most enjoy. I love novels that bend, and then break, and then place into a woodchipper the conventional narrative structure. I adore films where you spend the majority of your time wondering what in the hell is going on. I am helplessly addicted to a TV show that has spent the last five years opening matryoshkas, only to reveal smaller dolls within.

    Reputably, Infinite Jest is all these and more.1 So the reasons for my ownership are obvious.

    What I am unclear on is why I own it. Like, the actual mechanics by which the book came to be in my possession. Presumably someone, at someone point, urged me to invest in a copy, but I don’t recall purchasing it. Or borrowing it. Or finding it on a suitcase in a railway station, attached to a note reading “Please look after this bear of a novel.”

    Indeed, most of my memories of Infinite Jest revolve around bending over to retrieve something off the floor of our computer room–a pen the cat has batted off the desk, say, or a sheet of paper the printer has ejected with a whit too much enthusiasm–and seeing it, lurking on the bottom shelf,2 wedged between Underworld and Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days (the former with a spine suspiciously pristine, the latter looking like it’s gone through the dryer). “Remember that night?” it asks. “The night we spent on the redeye from Washington D.C.? You read 120 page of me, promised we would stay together until the end. What happened?” I avert my eyes, quickly straighten, and flee. This may well explain why the floor of the computer room is two inches deep in abandoned pens and Google Maps hard copies.

    In addition to Infinite Jest, here is a list of other David Foster Wallace works that I have somehow failed to read: all of them. Or at least that was the case two month ago, when I first envisioned this crazy event. Since then I have been wolfing down DFW essays as a golden retriever would a dropped ice cream sandwich.

    Among the first was The View from Mrs. Thompson’s, which contains this train-wreck of a sentence:

    The house I end up sitting with clots of dried shampoo in my hair watching most of the actual unfolding Horror at belongs to Mrs. Thompson, who is one of the world’s cooler 74-year-olds and exactly the kind of person who in an emergency even if her phone is busy you know you can just come on over.

    Honestly, if I hadn’t already announced Infinite Summer, that might have been its end. It’s not the worst sentence I’ve ever seen,3 but I had to go over it three times just to parse, and thought of reading 1,079 pages thrice over the summer struck me as even more insane than the original proposal.

    My trepidation lasted exactly 24 hours, until, halfway through his amazing essay Shipping Out (PDF), I stumbled across this thing of wonder:

    Only later do I learn that that little Lebanese Deck-l0 porter had his head just about chewed off by the (also Lebanese) Deck-l0 Head Porter, who had his own head chewed off by the Austrian Chief Steward, who received confirmed reports that a passenger had been seen carrying his own bag up the port hallway of Deck 10 and now demanded a rolling Lebanese head for this clear indication of porterly dereliction, and the Austrian Chief Steward had reported the incident to a ship’s officer in the Guest Relations Department, a Greek guy with Revo shades and a walkie-talkie and epaulets so complex I never did figure out what his rank was; and this high-ranking Greek guy actually came around to 1009 after Saturday’s supper to apologize on behalf of practically the entire Chandris shipping line and to assure me that ragged-necked Lebanese heads were even at that moment rolling down various corridors in piacular recompense for my having had to carry my own bag.

    Holy great jeezum crow almighty. It is clear that the peaks in Wallace’s writing are an order of magnitude greater than the occasional valleys.

    And based on the first 20 pages of Infinite Jest, at looks as though the peaks in this novel will be so plentiful that altitude sickness will pose the biggest threat. Like a climber headed toward his first summit, I am filled with an excitement tinged with apprehension, and a hope that I have enough oxygen for the journey.

  • Jason Kottke: Forward

    Jason Kottke has written the weblog kottke.org since March of 1998. The archive of his Infinite Jest commentary can be found here.

    Is everyone in here yet? Yes? Ok.

    I’m thrilled to kick off Infinite Summer with this here Forward. Before we get started, I have a disclaimer to offer. Well, actually several related disclaimers which, taken together, should convince you that I am not at all qualified to speak to you about the literary or cultural impact of Infinite Jest and its author on contemporary American society. Apologies if that’s what you’re here for; in that case I can refer you to Dave Eggers’ foreword in the new paperback copy of IJ.

    Now, the first disclaimer: I was not an English major. In fact, I don’t even read that much fiction. In the past five years, I have read The Corrections, Infinite Jest (for the second time), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Pride and Prejudice, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, nearly half of 2666, and that’s about it, give or take some Lord of the Rings. I will be of little assistance in helping you to understand how Infinite Jest fits into the canon of American literature, past or present.

    Writing is something I don’t know a great deal about either. I earn my keep as a blogger, which profession most people assume is synonymous with writing but really isn’t, in the same way that basketball players run but aren’t runners and architects draw but aren’t, uh, drawers. I love Wallace’s writing in IJ and elsewhere but beyond that, I can’t tell you why it’s good, who his writing was influenced by, who he influences, or what the purpose of his complex sentence structure and grammatical tics is. (Or should that be “are”? (See what I’m talking about?))

    Furthermore, I do not play tennis, haven’t suffered from depression, have never been addicted to anything (except perhaps Tetris on the original Game Boy), don’t know the Boston area that well, haven’t attended an _______ Anonymous meeting, and did not go to a small college in New England, all things that Wallace pulled from his life experience and wove together in the IJ narrative. Does Wallace accurately convey to the reader the pressures felt by the exceptional junior tennis player? Does the AA stuff ring true? What about the addiction aspects of the novel? I can help you with none of those questions.

    But what I am qualified to tell you — as a two-time reader and lover of Infinite Jest — is that you don’t need to be an expert in much of anything to read and enjoy this novel. It isn’t just for English majors or people who love fiction or tennis players or recovering drug addicts or those with astronomical IQs. Don’t sweat all the Hamlet stuff; you can worry about those references on the second time through if you actually like it enough to read it a second time. Leave your dictionary at home; let Wallace’s grammatical gymnastics and extensive vocabulary wash right over you; you’ll get the gist and the gist is more than enough. Is the novel postmodern or not? Who f’ing cares…the story stands on its own. You’re likely to miss at least 50% of what’s going on in IJ the first time though and it doesn’t matter.

    And and and! It is a fact that Infinite Jest is a long book with almost a hundred pages of endnotes, one of which lists the complete (and fictional) filmography of a prolific (and fictional) filmmaker and runs for more than eight pages and itself has six footnotes, and all of which you have to read because they are important. So sure, it’s a lengthy book that’s heavy to carry and impossible to read in bed, but Christ, how many hours of American Idol have you sat through on your uncomfortable POS couch? The entire run of The West Wing was 111 hours and 56 minutes; ER was twice as long, and in the later seasons, twice as painful. I guarantee you that getting through Infinite Jest with a good understanding of what happened will take you a lot less time and energy than you expended getting your Mage to level 60 in World of Warcraft.

    And so, readers: Forward. I wish you way more than luck.

  • Battening Down the Hatches

  • Colin Meloy: Why I am Reading Infinite Jest

    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.