inf. sum.
I love this book. I love this book in a weird sort of unconditional way. I love this book like it was a strange, moody sibling with whom I share occasional flashes of real connection, but spend most of my time observing in a kind of dazed bewilderment. My engagement with the characters is pretty unprecedented for me; in that: I’m engaged with them, I adore some of them, am ambivalent about others — but they are in many ways packing too much baggage to just flat out “get.”
There are times when I’ve really hated this book. Like: how much time do we REALLY need to spend getting exposition on the dirty details of Gately’s daily responsibilities? While I’m at it: how much time do we need to spend on exposition, period?
When friends have asked me what the book is about, I tend to shrug my shoulders. Yeah, I’m 650 pages into the thing, but as far as I can tell, we’re still just getting exposition. One thing I’ve learned from reading Infinite Jest: I’ll never read another novel the same again. In the midst of all the head-scratching that this book has inspired in me, I’m always asking myself: “why is this book driving me crazy?” And the answer I come up with has to do with nature of narrative itself: that we rely on our narrators, our authors, to provide us with some sort of propellent force to carry us from page to page. We require our authors to brandish signifiers that will lead to something, be it a satisfying conclusion or a slap-your-forehead sort of dead end. DFW is not so accommodating a narrator. This book is filled with plot red herrings; things that you think will take fire and lead to some sort of real connection between the disparate characters and events that are taking place within these two cloud-festooned covers, but more often than not, those little events tend to simply be more small building blocks, leading to some sort of grand catharsis at the end. At least one hopes. But now that I’ve written that, that doesn’t seem to be in keeping the DFW’s modus operandi.
I love the characters (particularly Gately and Pemulis) but I would posit that DFW intended for the narrator, the omniscient voice, to be a total dickhead. I don’t really trust him. I think he tends towards obfuscation and redundancy. The end notes he provides are maddening when they’re overly verbose and irritating when they’re funny.
And what infinite jest-related post would be complete with out a little wllm shakespeare, yeah? “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Seems to fit the bill pretty well.
