Our blogger updates on his progress with David Foster Wallace’s behemoth novel of ideas
“A few members of the online discussion kept referring to it, like it was the Bible or something. A definition of the zeitgeist, one person had written … So he was reading it to catch up. He was reading it to be educated, which was, along with self-reliance, his current great aim. To be able to comment knowledgeably on one of the voices of his time … If only it weren’t quite so long, he thought … Maybe he could read just half of it? Would that be enough?” – The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud
“God some people are such pussies. ‘Oh it’s so long…’ ‘Oh the words are too big…’ Just read the damn book. Read it. (Read the goddamn book.)” – CraftyJack, Onion AV Club Commenter
The Infinite Summer bookmark calendar I printed off a couple of months ago tells me that I should be well past page 600. I’m nowhere close. In my first post about Infinite Summer, I described the seventy-five pages per week schedule as “entirely feasible.” I still believe this is the case, though it’s certainly more difficult than I’d imagined. Part of the reason I’ve fallen so far behind is a wide array of distractions, but the larger reason is that I’d figured I could read the requisite weekly pages in a couple of brief sittings. I’ve always been a slow reader, but Infinite Jest has decelerated my already leaden pace. Because of the labyrinthine sentences, because of all the words I need to look up, and because I’m convinced enough of Wallace’s genius to pore over the novel with nearly monastic zeal, I read, almost without fail, ten pages every hour. This means that by the time I finish (and unlike all but one person I know who’s attempted to read it, I will finish) I’ll have spent more than one hundred hours with IJ. That’s more time than most Christians I know have spent reading the New Testament.
I have a bad habit of forcing anyone who’ll listen to endure impassioned odes to my enthusiasm of the moment. Since starting Infinite Summer, I’ve basically shut up about The Crying Light, Lost, and sabermetrics, but can’t stop raving about IJ. People often ask me what it’s about, and when staring darkly off to the horizon and muttering “heartache” doesn’t do the job, I refer them to the first paragraph of its Wikipedia entry (“The novel touches on the topics of tennis, substance addiction and recovery programs, depression, child abuse, family relationships, advertising and popular entertainment, film theory, and Quebec separatism”), at which point they either regret having asked in the first place, or express interest in one-day-perhaps-if-the-mood-strikes-and-there’s-sufficient-free-time-trying-to-possibly-read-some-of-it-maybe. Wallace’s fiction isn’t for everyone, but anyone seriously interested in the 20th century American novel ought to make an attempt at IJ.
This doesn’t mean you have to finish it. To draw an apposite analogy, reading IJ is work in the same way that waking up at dawn to practice tennis shots against a brick wall is work. If you absolutely can’t stand it, and your reasons for doing so are purely recreational, do yourself a favour and quit. But for those who appreciate the edifying grind of the endeavour, the energy and concentration required themselves become a source of enjoyment. Would I love IJ as much if it were 400 pages, flensed of endnotes, and rendered in Coetzee-spare prose? I would not.
I should stress that I believe being convinced of Wallace’s genius is a necessary precondition to making it even the relatively short distance – all right: 314 pages, plus endnotes – into IJ that I have. This can be true for many “difficult novels” – it probably helps to love Lolita before approaching Pale Fire – but, as with so many things, IJ takes it to the nth degree. (There’s a reason Wallace’s writing is so ripe for satire.) There are a couple of different strategies you can employ to convince yourself of his genius. I’ve already recommended starting with his non-fiction, my own path of entry. The critics who moderate the Slate Audio Book Club, which discussed IJ earlier this year, recommended that anyone who’s intimidated yet intrigued should just dive into a random passage. This is terrible advice. Pick the wrong passage, say one of the regrettable ebonics sections, and you’ll likely ruin yourself for Wallace forever. Many other passages work only within the novel’s broader gestalt. Still, most of my favourite passages are sufficiently self-contained to offer an alluring, representative sample. I saw a rather handsome man on the subway reading IJ and noticed that his bookmarks were even shallower than mine. We got to talking, and he mentioned that a friend of his was doing Infinite Summer and had made him read one particular section that he ended up loving so much he knew he had to read the whole thing. It turned out he’d been reading for two weeks and was only thirty pages behind me. (He wasn’t that handsome.)
The passage he mentioned is perhaps the right one to try, both because it might be the best I’ve yet come across, and because it offers a survey of some of the novel’s major themes. It begins on page 200 of most editions, and is comprised of a catalogue of “many exotic new facts” you’ll acquire if “by virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility.” I’ve read this section three times now.
Anyone who comes to the novel these days will find they have a wealth of online material to help push them along the way. The Infinite Summer site is itself, of course, invaluable. I also recommend A Supposedly Fun Blog, written by a group of American political bloggers including Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Conor Clarke. None of them are regular fiction readers, making their decision to attempt the tenth longest novel in the English language seem deeply perverse. For the obvious reason, I’m a few weeks behind on their posts, but of the group only Yglesias seems to muster much enthusiasm for the book itself. Still, every one of them is more intelligent than me and very likely you (“no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that” reads one of Wallace’s “exotic new facts”) and their group blog is well worth an IJ reader’s time.
I had suggested in the previous post that while I thought most of Infinite Summer’s tips for reading were necessary, a few seemed dubious. To elaborate: I find the suggestion that a first-time reader avail herself of secondary sources to be deeply misguided. Wallace intentionally keeps the reader off-kilter, dispensing exposition at carefully measured intervals. While this may frustrate the impatient reader, it is nevertheless an important part of the reading experience. As a perennially laggard undergraduate lit major, I grew used to reading novels after having been exposed to their endings and extensive interpretation, but this is not a state to be embraced. Matt Bucher, who wrote the tips, seems to appreciate this when he writes “we encourage you to take the fingers-in-the-ears ‘LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU’ approach to spoilers.” I imagine he recommends the secondary sources as a lifeline to struggling readers. Don’t you dare take it.
Still, I was right in my suspicion that most of the advice would prove useful. Two bookmarks really are necessary, and at times even less than adequate; of course reading the endnotes is a must, as much as they irk some readers; and it really does help to know your Hamlet, though if you’re thinking of brushing up on the play before reading IJ, you may want to make sure that you, unlike a friend of mine, remember it’s Hamlet, so that you don’t read Macbeth and spend time searching for connections that aren’t actually there.
All of which is to say that if you’re not reading Infinite Jest, you should seriously consider doing so. As the critic James Wood, who was somewhat unfairly accused of casting Wallace as an aesthetic villain in his extraordinary 2008 effort How Fiction Works, wrote in the aftermath of Wallace’s death, “Whatever one thought of his work, it was hard to imagine any serious reader of fiction not being intensely interested in what he was going to do next.” Likewise, it’s difficult to imagine serious readers of fiction not being interested in what he’d already accomplished. Read the goddamn book.
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