Consider the Reader

Just finished reading "Infinite Jest", just in time for me to have nothing quite as fun to read during my two-week vacation.

It's a bizarre book. Lacking the background to draw good comparisons to other literature, I'm stuck comparing it to movies, which isn't such a bad idea, actually. A lot of the movies it reminds me of actually came out after IJ, so I can't help but wonder if it had some influence.

Imagine if Wes Anderson directed a film of a Chuck Palahniuk novel like Fight Club that incorporated the sort of multi-faceted geo-political intrigue of a film like Syriana or Traffic. Then imagine the story being broken up and told out of order like Tarantino often does. Then toss in some Pythonesque absurdity for good measure and even some elements that you might recall from Max Headroom. Then stop the novel just as everything seems to kind of be coming together, leaving readers to piece together what really happened from indistinct flashbacks and vaguely clairvoyant dreams or hallucinations laced throughout the novel.

The over-achieving and highly dysfunctional Incandenza family that the main thread follows recalls/portends the family in Anderson's Royal Tenenbaums, right down to the crash-n-burn tennis career of one of its characters. The family itself lives on an elite tennis academy James Incandenza (the father) founded after becoming successful with some kind of cold fusion and optical technology. The halfway house setting for the other thread recalls/portends the group therapy sessions and brutality of Fight club, packed with sardonic-yet-revelatory descriptions of AA meetings and recollections of past physical and sexual traumas expressed vividly through a deft use of slang and turns of phrase instead of explicit details.

This is all set in an absurdist near future where the US, Canada, and Mexico have been coercively united under the Organization of North American Nations (forming an unfortunate acronym in the process, one of many in the book). Instead of numbered Julian-calendar years, ONAN accepts corporate sponsorships to determine the name for each year, leading to calendar dates such as "May 19, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment". Interdependence Day is celebrated in commemoration of the union of the three nations instead of Independence Day. Years before sponsored time are referred to as Before-Subsidization time, or BS time. The Internet has given way to the Interlace, whose data are transmitted to tele-puters, or TPs.

A massive cold-fusion accident and toxic-dumping in the US's northeast has lead to the forcible ceding (as in we force the 'nucks to take it) of a massive chunk of the US northeast to Canada, now referred to as the great concavity. Dumping privileges are retained, though, accomplished through garbage catapults located throughout the northeast that launch garbage payloads into the concavity with a funny 'Shoop!' noise.

Getting the picture? And I'm seriously just glossing over everything.

International intrigue comes into play as an extremist cell of Quebecois separatists, already frustrated from union with Canada and now inconsolable from allegiance to ONAN, hatch a plot for a terror campaign to finally gain independence. Infinite Jest, a film made by James Incandenza shortly before he went mad and microwaved his own head, had apparently achieved such a level of entertainment that it was lethally addictive to anyone who viewed it. Viewers surrender completely to it and die after losing control of all bodily functions. The terror cell, many of which are legless and wheelchair bound from a bizarre initiation ritual, hopes to find the one hidden master copy of Infinite Jest and threaten to distribute copies throughout a US they view as helpless to resist the allure of such entertainment.

As the terror plot progresses, the story hops around various points in the characters' lives to develop the connections between them and the various members of the Incandenza family and ultimately to the senior Incandenza himself and IJ. All of this is necessary because nobody can directly view IJ without succumbing to it. Pro- and anti-ONAN bodies are in pursuit of information on it either to use it or to develop an antidote for it.

That's the basic setup, but one can't help but feel as if the plot is somewhat besides the point of this whole 1,079-page tome. There's a story, and you definitely are driven to find out what happens to its characters, but there's so much hopping around that reading it feels more like reading a collection of short stories, monologues, and dialogs. Some parts are in a quasi-screenplay format. One is intended to look like an insurance report that was forwarded around over e-mail by office mates. Wallace is constantly switching the voice in his writings as he switches between settings and characters so that while much of the book is in the third person, it feels first person because the language changes so drastically to reflect the subject of the current passage.

I can't seriously claim any solid understanding of what the real point of it all is -- there have been more than a few scholarly papers on it, and you hear 'great American novel' bandied about a lot by some critics. Most of the characters in the book suffer from some kind of addiction or compulsion, so that's an obvious theme, but the book also touches on other topics ranging from incest to commercialism to American foreign policy.

'Too much' is the overarching theme I get from it. Throughout the book you see things taken literally to ridiculous extremes. ONAN is the formalization of how the US just imposes itself on the rest of the continent. As if air pollution wasn't enough, garbage is now actively lobbed into Canada. James Incandenza is an experimental filmmaker that critics often refer to as audience-hostile with his bizarre style, in one case making a film where a character looks into the camera the last third of the film spouting apologies. Regarded as mediocre, he finally makes a film that is so entertaining it's lethal. The children and teens attending the tennis academy are so totally immersed in their drive to achieve super-stardom in tennis they know little else. Characters are constantly going on drug binges or overdosing.

And ultimately, of course, the book itself. You can't help but look at the massive volume of this thing and its 388 end notes and not wonder if there's a statement to be made in the delivery as well.