Well, duh (1996)

Funny, I found this book over a decade after it was published, having been exposed to almost none of this "hype" whatsoever---and I still liked it. I don't buy his thesis that its success was due only to the "hype machine." I suppose I respect his opinion---or at least his right to having it---but I simply do not agree with it or with many of the things he says.

> The novel has moved some 60,000 copies and racked up a stack of glowing reviews as thick as it is.

As far as I know, it wasn't nominated for a single major literary award that year (at the very least, it didn't win any), and I wouldn't remotely agree that the reviews were "glowing." A quick search finds two at best ambivalent reviews: [^1] [^2]. Though their comments came later, Harold Bloom and James Wood were highly critical of Wallace, the former declaring him to have "no discernible talent." It feels terribly one-sided to mention only the stack of positive reviews. IJ was by no means a universal critical success.

> ... both [The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest], most importantly, work up an elaborate – and elaborately digressive – plot which deliberately ends as unsatisfactorily as possible.

While I can't speak for Broom. which I didn't finish, I can say that my reading of IJ's ending was that it was not at all deliberately unsatisfactory. In fact, I felt it was the opposite: it's beautiful, and it marks the moment when Gately finally gets out of his recursive cycle of addiction. I think it's where the book (whose structure is itself fascinating---a circle and/or a Sierpinski Gasket) ought to have ended, and while some could say it was unsatisfactory for them, I don't think they could claim it was deliberately so.

> There is first of all Hal Incandenza, a teenage tennis prodigy and marijuana addict who during the course of the book plays tennis and gets high a lot, and then tries to stop getting high – that’s his plot.

Isn't there a bit more to Hal's story? What about the struggle the ghost of his dead father makes to connect Hal to the world and to feelings? To exit his head, as it were? What about Hal's finding that same dad dead in the house up the hill from his school dorm? What about his recession into himself and his dislocation from language, his Kafkaesque inversion?

> Then there’s Don Gately, a former housebreaker and narcotics addict who goes straight before the book even opens and merely attempts to stay that way throughout the course of the novel – that’s his plot.

Nothing of his struggles to pray daily to a God he doesn't believe in, simply in an effort to stay sober for another 24 hours? Nothing of his role as a leader and mentor at the Ennet halfway house, or the scenes where he transcends his identity as a witless muscle-for-hire criminal upon whose head friends would close elevator doors for a laugh to connect with and care for his community? (The scene where he, in a joke apron and chef's hat, he makes pasta for the housemates brought me to tears.) Still nothing of his falling in love with Joelle? Nor of his fight in the resident's defense, his hospitalization, and his transition into a vivid memoryscape of his days as a junkie and crook?

> All of which, I suppose, is just a polite way of saying that if the author of Infinite Jest shut off his word-processor and actually went to a wine-and-cheese party he might find out what the word ‘reading’ really means

He wrote it longhand and was a recovering alcoholic/addict. No word processors or wine parties for him.

Yes, I have in certain ways fallen out of love with Infinite Jest, but I still refute the claim that there was nothing there in the first place. There was something in it for me when I read it alone in rural Thailand over a summer in 2013, and there's been something in it for many other readers I know, too. This wasn't just because we were told something was there, but because we found something there.

IJ's not perfect. It deserves critique, and it is certainly flawed. (Parts of it do make me cringe.) But I admire it nonetheless. It took courage to write a novel that strived towards the real---more, I'm afraid, than it required for this LRB review.

[^1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/13/books/books-of-the-times-...

[^2]: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/03/news/infinite-jest.html

Like many others in the comments, I loved Infinite Jest, for many reasons, but just to go into one in particular, I feel like David Foster Wallace’s viciously smart, sardonic, ironic, and often deeply depressing sense of humor is at its peak in IJ. There are so many things from the book that stick out to me as being memorably funny: the woman with an artificial heart who dies because a purse snatcher takes it, chasing the snatcher for several blocks while yelling, “Stop her, she’s stolen my heart!” while onlookers laugh and think it’s just some sort of couple’s tryst; the party for someone’s dissertation defense where a bunch of pretentious academics are all doing this kind of anti dance consisting of moving as little as possible so as to look like you’re not dancing, but with a kind of jerking rhythm; the description of the 90s TV special about a guy with paranoid schizophrenia afraid that the government wants to inject radioactive fluid into his brain and that he’s being chased by giant machines that will eventually catch him and consume him, who for science is injected with a radioactive solution for a PET scan and then stuck into the giant whirling scanner, a look of horror on his face as he sees his worst fears coming to life; the Canadian government minister who dies because he has a cold and cannot communicate with the person robbing his house that he cannot breathe through his nose; the teen tennis player who wears all black and is called The Darkness, meanwhile the other teen tennis player who tries to get people to call him The Viking but no one does; the whole thing with the wheelchair assassins and “to hear the squeak”; the absurdity of Helen Steeply and the even more ridiculous absurdity of Orin falling for him/her; Avril losing her shit and running around the yard with the mold her son ate held aloft, screaming for help; and so on.

Plus this all often leading into scenes that are just relentlessly tragic. Joelle freebasing way too much cocaine in the bathroom at that same party; Poor Tony winding up having a seizure and swallowing his tongue on the T; the viscerally accurate depiction throughout the book of addiction and depression; Joelle’s entire life story; Himself’s slide into madness and suicide while basically no one tried to help; the short bit of Himself talking to his alcoholic father when he was younger; and so on.

In a way it reminds me of the show Bojack Horseman, with the mix of high brow and low brow humor, unflinchingly dark narrative, and deeply flawed characters.

All of which is to say: it’s not always an easy book, but it’s definitely worth at least two reads, one to get the story and another to appreciate all of the interleaving of the various stories throughout the book.

One thing about long books on e-readers is you don't have the psychological satisfaction of feeling like you're making it through the book (which you can feel by the number of pages that change hands with the paper book)

The 50 page section refers to Pale King I think.

It’s worthwhile comparing the criticism to other works such as James Joyce’s Ulyssess. Take this quote from a review in the NYT:

Few intuitive, sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend "Ulysses," James Joyce's new and mammoth volume, without going through a course of training or instruction, but the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it- even from careful perusal, one might properly say study, of it- save bewilderment and a sense of disgust. It should be companioned with a key and a glossary like the Berlitz books. Then the attentive and diligent reader would eventually get some comprehension of Mr. Joyce's message.

http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/the-very-first-reviews-of...