Although I’m guessing David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest as early as 1993 or 1994, the year of publication was 1996, at which time I had reached 15 years of age. Muddled memories include Driver’s Ed class; going to every boys’ basketball game because the senior class of 96-97 was super-attractive; emailing friends rarely, mostly to gossip (and email being dial-up and separate from the internet, i.e. Juno); talking on the phone a lot, maybe instant messaging; working full time at Subway during the summer; going downtown to the bay to swim and to watch skaters doing ollies off railings; etc.
Older techno-geeks can inform me if any of the following was in even pre-existent creation in 1996 B.S. (Before Subsidization)¹ : The videophone (okay I do remember this being around) – but videophone leading to a panagoraphobia which opened “huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and delivery”; cell phones, like very small and quite interactive; DVDs /HDTV which he calls “cartridges” but are like High-Definition CD-ROMs and the HDTV is also your computer(!); laptop TPs (teleputers); DVR, nixing the commercials and everything; “Break Free of the Confinement of Your Channel Selector!” –Netflix-type instant-watch; “Aapps, Inc” controls the TV choices; interfacing like Skype programs and webcams (which are really videophones re-imagined); and finally, “Twitter”. I’m kidding about that last one, but in the first chapter of the book, Wallace really does use ‘twittering’ as a verb like ‘chatter’ at least ten times. How could such a visionary-type genius have left us in a world devoid of his revolutionary ideas?
Sadly, I found out about this greatly troubled man only after his death last year. That was when the ‘Infinite Summer’ group started, of people across the world pledging to read his 1100+ page book together throughout the summer. There was a scheduled online book club set up and I was on track with the articles and discussion. Then I slowly dropped behind the page I was supposed to be on, mainly due to the fact that each word, and page, and section of each chapter is dense reading, along with lengthy footnotes comprising the last 100-page section of the book. I stopped around page 240 and the book’s been gathering dust until this most recent month of May (2010 B.S.) when I picked it up again and decided it must be finished.
The main interlaced storylines consist of:
Enfield Tennis Academy – containing prodigies like Hal Incandenza² or Michael Pemulis, elaborate descriptions of the hierarchies of instruction and drills and other sports elaborations that surprisingly don’t bore me. Includes the live-action Risk-like game of Eschaton, which I now wish to play.
Ennet House – halfway house nearby the academy for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. Mainly starring Don Gately, deals heavily with the background of addictive personalities. Especially intriguing to me is the constant debate (excerpted below) regarding its mind-numbing platitudes:
“By AA’s own logic, everyone ought to be in AA. If you have some sort of Substance-problem, then you belong in AA. But if you say you do not have a Substance-problem, in other words if you deny that you have a Substance-problem, why you’re by definition in Denial, and thus you apparently need the Denial-busting fellowship of AA even more than someone who admits his problem.”
Gately: “The slogan I've heard that might work here is Analysis-Paralysis. You can’t think about it like an intellectual thing.”
“AA’s response to a question about its axioms, then, is to invoke an axiom about the inadvisability of all such questions.”
O.N.A.N. – political backdrop wherein through the Great Concavity agreement, the U.S. has a treaty with Canada to give them various parts of New England and consequently catapult all of our trash (Toxic Waste Management) into said areas, through the use of fairly magical dumpsters. This literally makes our streets and country clean, a treaty proposed by germaphobic President Johnny Gentle, a former actor who sounds a lot like Schwarzenegger.
“Himself” – James Incandenza, Hal’s father, a filmmaker (see footnote 24, well over 10 pages of his film titles and descriptions, mainly documentaries, such as interviewing over 200 people in the U.S. named John Wayne) – married to a Canadian and highly involved in the title of this book.
One of the premises argued throughout the political chapters is that of ‘delayed gratification’ – that is, how everyone in America is guaranteed the ‘pursuit of happiness’ in hopes that if we’re all moving toward this goal, everyone will be simultaneously happy, but if we’re all like kids who don’t know when to stop eating candy, we’re all getting sick and making others sick with our American dreams. Consequently, we have thousands of choices, we have ‘freedom’ but no one has taught us how to make good choices, in other words stopping at the limit of the candy/sickness level. Or to use the technology example, when the cable kabal of 504 channels is available, we have 504 choices, but when Netflix-instant-watch is available, we supposedly have the ‘freedom’ to choose anything we want, but we don’t necessarily possess the wisdom or direction to make quality choices. In modern terms, it’s doubtful Wallace would’ve been a fan of the Real Housewives in the Year of The KFC Double Down, Subsidized Time. But he’s probably also referring to my ability to turn on the Weather Channel at 7:20am every morning and select Local Weather and immediately obtain a 30-second long 5-day forecast, which I rather like. All of this I’ve written at having only reached page 470. Full speed ahead…
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1. My favorite is the Year of The Trial-Sized Dove Bar
2. Hal frequently suffers from The Howling Fantods, which would be an excellent name for a rock band.
postscript: Colin Meloy weighed in with similar summarizing thoughts last summer, with or without Pemulis’ yachting cap.
