Page-turning: My thoughts on David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest"

After more than a thousand pages of signature prose from one of America's most distinctive literary voices during the past two decades, I'm left with two prevailing emotions setting up permanent shop in my gut: jealousy and despair.

These feelings have nothing to do with the brilliantly constructed dystopic future David Foster Wallace brings to life in "Infinite Jest," his epic novel published to nearly universal acclaim back in 1996. They have everything to do with witnessing a depressingly intimate look at substance addiction, narrative brilliance and synaptic hyperactivity from a writer, in his early 30s, who showed limitless promise and was taken far too early from this world.

To the uninitiated Wallace reader, Infinite Jest will sound in summation like the ramblings of a madman. The plot, so convoluted it prompted drawings of story maps resembling unpopped blackheads (warning: spoilers), centers geographically around a substance-abuse halfway house and academy for precocious and talented tennis-playing preteens in central Boston following the consolidation of North America into one nation-state. People remain glued to their entertainment screens (in a kind of cultural foresight that could only come from a writer so in-tune with social strata he turned an essay about cruise ships into a discussion of the loneliness of human existence) and the accumulation of garbage along the former U.S./Canadian border has turned the area into an exotic wasteland, where plants tower over humans and giant feral hamsters (yes) roam the countryside.

What keeps Wallace from dwelling in the absurd (that is to say, when he doesn't want to dwell in the absurd - as readers of DFW have come to expect, there are moments of comic hilarity where the absurd is precisely the initiating agent, but only when the author has a point to make) is the development of his characters. The Incandenza family is perhaps the most wildly realized nuclear unit in modern literature, but the pathos does not end there. Every character in the Enfield Tennis Academy (one of the novel's settings, where tennis prodigies - like DFW himself - go to hone their skills as they foster dreams of making 'the show') is fully realized. Michael Pemulus, a substance fiend and mathematical wunderkind, could flesh out his own novel in this fully realized world. This is to say nothing of Donald Gately, the square-headed football player who's reached his "rock bottom" on oral narcotics and serves as house manager at Ennet House, the nearby halfway facility for other substance abusers on the mend.

There is a scene in roughly the final 2/3 of the novel that perfectly encapsulates Wallace's brilliant fiction. The tennis youngsters are assembled on one of the academy's courts playing a game with tube socks, tennis rackets and balls that is essentially a play version of the kind of thermonuclear warfare that haunts Wallace's world on the brink, where the U.S. president is a lounge singer and Canadian officials are falling like flies to a band of wheelchair assassins asserting Quebec independence. Pemulus is the star of the show, developing a mathematical program that determines the payload of each nation and where their weapons caches are stored. Each team selects a "lobber" to send cruise missiles (tennis balls) at the other nations.

It's a tradition that marks every Interdependence Day in the novel, the day when American/Canadian unity is observed and the normal frenzied pace of the academy grinds to a halt. Wallace describes the game, "Eschaton," with a level of horrifying detail, that shifts effortlessly into comic relief as we're reminded these are 12-year-olds playing this game signifying mutually assured destruction. The game crescendos into a schoolyard brawl, hastening the drug testing that brings the novel's to its quasi-conclusion.

I say quasi because Wallace pulls a Tarantino on the reader, leading with details in the first few pages that become of utter importance in the novel's final moments. I read the hefty novel over a period of two months (I blame Grand Theft Auto and the arrival of a certain new feline companion) and was puzzled by the novel's seeming lack of resolution. I had to recrack the first few pages after finishing last night, reminding myself of the puzzles solved (or seeming to be solved) in the novel's opening scenes. A word of warning, then: Infinite Jest will command your full attention. Grant it the respect it deserves.

I've been a fan of Wallace's nonfiction ever since I read the opening lines to "Consider the Lobster" many years ago. I've been telling myself I'm making a grand error not cracking his fiction until now. "Infinite Jest" is a monster accomplishment that will leave you questioning what the role of entertainment is in your life and what constitutes an addiction in this new world of constant media dependence. It is darkly hilarious, deeply insightful, and simply a stunning masterwork of American fiction. Read it now.

Verdict: 5/5 stars

Fear and Loathing on the McCain Trail '00

I just spent the afternoon with David Foster Wallace, reading his account of the 2000 McCain presidential campaign "Up, Simba" compiled in a new edition titled "McCain's Promise" published in 2006. The parallels between his text and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail are too numerous to recount here. The foreword of my text by Jacob Weisberg makes the comparison tacitly and implicitly, but it would take a willful ignorance not to see that the two authors are doing many of the same things.

Each fashions themselves as something of an outsider, preferring the fringe identity of quasi-ethnography to straight political reporting. Wallace makes a point to insist on his resume in all-caps that he is NOT A POLITICAL JOURNALIST, and Thompson shows a proclivity for crashing political gatherings and press junkets while pooh-poohing the general press corps. Wallace's animosity toward politics seems to come from a more general cynicism, as the question of the genuine nature of contemporary politicians proves to be the major focus of his lengthy essay. Thompson, on the other hand, seems to genuinely believe in the redemptive qualities of McGovern, if only because he views Nixon as a flesh-eating monster (or, at least, that's the image Ralph Steadman is compelled to depict visually in the book as a result of Thompson's prose).

Both approach the writing process in a similar post-modern, rambling way. The back of my Thompson edition features praise from Kurt Vonnegut: "the literary equivalent of Cubism: all rules are broken." Wallace, in true Faulknerian fashion, explores the many uses available for the comma. However, when both authors become cogent, their texts become poignant looks at post-modern politics. The melancholy present throughout Wallace's text appears to be a consequence of the unraveling of politics and morality just beginning to rear its head in Thompson's work, which lacks the cynical perspective proffered by the fallout of Watergate, the American exit from Vietnam, and-well, let's just say all the Reagan years. In this way, it's easy to read Wallace as a kind of spiritual successor to Thompson. The chaos remains intact in Wallace's work, but it's gloomy undertones and final assertion that the voter must look inward to see just how far the salesman perception has ruined the political process causes the text to end on a note that is even less hopeful than the election of Nixon in Thompson's (if that's even possible).

I love both works, if only because they provide not just a commentary on what a political journalist should and can be in the modern era of American politics, but also because they insist upon driving home the notion that politicians, voters and journalists are all human beings, fallible and susceptible to emotional responses. Sometimes we forget that.

Movie review of "That Evening Sun" and some thoughts on The Watchmen graphic novel in the coming days.