The Not Too Distant Future ... Emily Trinks Reviews 'Infinite Jest'

By Emily Trinks | Wednesday, May 1, 1996

David Foster Wallace's 1,079 page Infinite Jest offers a cartoonish absurdity that is rarely found in literature, despite its sometimes tedious length. Whereas recent entertainment is self-referential in a glorifying way, Infinite Jest is a post-modern indictment of rampant commercialization. Wallace creates an American society, not too far in the future, where everything has been sold or subsidized. Time is marked by commercial product endorsements (e.g., Year of the Whopper, Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken). New England has become a toxic disaster, termed 'The Great Concavity,' and Quebecois separatists regard a film cartridge as the most volatile international terrorist weapon. And tennis is war.

The underlying thread tying Infinite Jest together is not new: a movie, eponymous with the novel's title, is rumored to be so entertaining that viewers lose desire to do anything but watch it. People are amused to death. The theme of addiction, and ultimately destruction, through pop culture has been done before. What is new about Wallace's epic are his outrageous characters, slick humor, and refreshing style. Perhaps the only setback is the novel's seemingly infinite length.

The movie 'Infinite Jest,' though never described in depth, heavily impacts those who come into contact with it. The movie's director, James O. Incandenza, is the pivotal figure in the novel. His three sons are a professional football punter with loose morals, a marijuana-smoking tennis prodigy who is memorizing the Oxford English Dictionary, and a severely deformed and slightly retarded young man with film-making aspirations. This is certainly the portrait of one of the most sweetly dysfunctional families in modern fiction. After Incandenza realizes the potency of his movie, he committs suicide by putting his head in a microwave. One of the sons happens upon his father, obliviously noting, 'Something smells delicious!'

Also figuring in the menagerie are Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rolents, literally translated as 'The Wheelchair Assassins.' They are a pair of Quebecois terrorists — one a transvestite, the other wheelchair-bound — who are hunting down the master cartridge of 'Infinite Jest,' code-named 'The Entertainment.'

The sheer size of the novel — its is 3 inches thick — allows for a huge cast of characters, each engaging in his own depravity. A labyrinth of links and relationships between the characters and places creates bridges, spirals, and hairpin turns that require the reader's constant attention. The different arenas — competitive junior tennis, burgeoning drug addiction, and rehabilitation — allow Wallace an opportunity to flaunt his knowledge of those two seemingly incompatible worlds. The grisly reality of drugs as a modern American subculture that Wallace employs makes the novel addicting in its own horror.

The background plot of Quebecois terrorism is both politically imaginative and very funny. Wallace rearranges North American politics entirely; the United States, Canada, and Mexico have joined into the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.) which is dominated by the United States. It is through this newfound alliance that the U.S. is opening its 'experialist' policy; the U.S. is trying to pawn off the northern New England toxic wasteland onto Canada. The Quebecois extremists are threatening severe action against both Canada and the United States if this occurs.

The juxtaposition of the international terrorist threat upon our seemingly friendly neighbors to the north is innovative in itself. By using the movie 'Infinite Jest' as their weapon of choice, Wallace strikes directly at the values of modern American pop culture and the perceived need for constant entertainment. As a piece in the grand puzzle of the pursuit of 'The Entertainment,' the novel comes full circle as pop culture goes from serving as a release to threatening as a weapon.

Above all, Wallace exudes style. What is so remarkable about Wallace is that his approach is visible and enjoyable both on the grand scale and the small. Even though Infinite Jest tends to wander off on tangents about competitive junior tennis and delves a little too deeply into the drug underworld (most readers would require a medical reference text to follow the various altered states in a given scene), every sentence is a pleasure to read. Wallace writes the way that Dali paints; from a distance the entire picture is there to be seen, yet many lazy viewers are content to walk by with the impression, 'I don't get it.' The intelligent man, in his reading, just as in his study of Dali, will examine the work closely and notice the little details that pique the imagination.

The Not Too Distant Future ... Emily Trinks Reviews 'Infinite Jest'

Article Tools

Related Articles