For obvious reasons I've been thinking about David Foster Wallace and his big book: a book many people hated, some people loved, a book even admirers sometimes couldn't finish. But, you know. Infinite Jest is an annoying novel. Reading through the long stretch of infuriated one-star amazon reviews makes its plain that many many readers have been annoyed; although the more surprising thing is that so many of these readers, having become annoyed and angry with the novel, nevertheless read it all the way through to the end. There’s something in that, I think. This is to say more than the obvious: that it is a wildly uneven piece of fiction, written in prose that is often enjoyable and even brilliant from page to page but which drags monstrously over the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages across which it is stretched. To say that it is overblown and tumorous, that it doesn’t end so much as tail-off, that it is self-indulgent (that it is a kind of self-indulgence raised to the power of self-indulgence) that the characters are unlikeable grotesques, or else flimsy stand-ins. That it's eleven-hundred-fucking-pages long and that al; the pages are printed in tiny eight point fucking type, except for the footnotes which are printed even smaller. All this is true.
[Jonathan Goodwin repudiates the charge of self-indulgence, incidentally, in his understandable desire to defend the book: but this seems me to miss the point. Which is to say, I don't mean 'self-indulgent' as an imprecise, or a throwaway, or even, in context, an especially negative criticism of Wallace. This book is about the distortions of human character, about the tyranny of selfhood, and about what people indulgence under the gravitational tug of their ego. What would Infinite Jest be unless it indulged itself?]
When a writer is criticized a temptation is to reply: ‘but the thing you are criticizing me for is exactly what I was trying to achieve!' Karate, you see, uses the enemy's strength against them. So: ‘your characters are paper thin’: ‘ah, but I was trying precisely to create thin characters!’ ‘Your novel is boring’; ‘I was trying precisely for boring!’ ‘This is a shit book.’ ‘I take that as praise: I was striving throughout to write a shit novel …’
I remember an experience I had as an undergraduate. I was in a seminar discussing Slaughterhouse 5 and one of my fellow students noted that Vonnegut’s habit of appending ‘so it goes’ to any description of a death struck her as intensely annoying. It is annoying, too. One man dies. So it goes. Hundreds of thousands are slaughtered. So it goes. But (quoth the seminar leader) it’s worth at least pondering the possibility that Vonnegut means to be annoying when he rolls out this glib little phrase. And, yes. One of the ways that novel works is precisely by refusing the traditional valences of the representation of death—that it is tragic, for instance; or that it is glorious or heroic, or even that it is comic. Instead Vonnegut styles death as irritating and infuriating, and thereby puts a new and (since, you know, Death is infuriating) fertile spin on his subject.
When I first encountered David Foster Wallace's novel I was going through a phase of thinking that it was competence that was killing the novel as a mode of art. Thousands of new novels are published every year, and almost all of them are written and finished with a professional competence that would have amazed Henry Fielding. It’s a glut. Few of these novels make a lasting impression. Wallace’s novel seemed to me then, and still to an extent seems to me now, one way of breaking this logjam: it is sprawly and uneven on a massive scale, and its weird mixtures of technical brilliance and technical incompetence (what I take to be deliberate, artistic technical incompetence) makes it like no other novel. As if in a world that had previously been flooded only with expertly achieved photorealist art, people were suddenly and for the first time shown a De Kooning.
That is, in itself, a cool thing. Also, it's science fiction, which is also cool.
More. As with Slaughterhouse 5, the treatment bears an organic, if gnarly, relationship to the theme, which is (it’s nothing new to suggest this about Infinite Jest) addiction. Its characters are addicts: addicted (for instance) to drugs or drink, or to the shallow satisfactions of consumer culture, to sport, or to modes of OCD behaviour, or to sex (‘Orin Incandenza like many children of raging alcoholics and OCD-sufferers had internal addictive-sexuality issues’, 289)
Reviewers on the back cover of my paperback copy make this point (‘reading the book is a sort of addiction’ The Spectator; ‘A remarkable satire on American entertainment and addiction … the book’s mixture of maniacal inventiveness and comic brio gradually becomes an addiction itself’ Anthony Quinn, Daily Telegraph) But this isn’t quite right, I think. The point is not that the reader becomes addicted to this novel, although of course she may (and therefore the novel must be exhilarating junk, which Infinite Jest kind-of is). The point is that the novel becomes addicted to itself. It is the self-regard, the narcissism of addiction that is Wallace’s real theme, not the trappings of addiction themselves. Some of the novel’s best moments embroider this theme—the detailed account of the Boston AA meeting during which it starts to dawn on the reader that the participants are effectively addicted to the process of beating their addiction (‘people who cockily decide they don’t wish to abide by the basic suggestions are constantly going back Out There and then wobbling back in with their faces around their knees and confessing from the podium that they didn’t take the suggestions and have paid full price’ 357); or the way Steeply’s father becomes addicted to watching the TV comedy show M*A*S*H (‘Broadcast television. The program in question was called “M*A*S*H”. The title was an acronym, not a command … the fucking thing ran forever, it seemed’, 639); or the way Joelle gets addicted to cleaning (‘Joelle used to like to get really high and then clean. Now she was finding she just liked to clean … she was using Kleenex and stale water from a glass by Kate Gompert’s bed’ 736): that she starts cleaning when high, but then realises that she doesn't actually need the drugs to feed her true addiction.
Then there's sentimentality, something else to which it's too easy to have an addictive relationship. Some deprecate his occasional sentimentality, some have a more ambiguous relationship to it. Some of it is not so much sentimentalism as genuine sensibility (in the eighteenth-century sense). Weirdly offkilter touching stuff. Listening to Linda McCartney singing:
When a writer is criticized a temptation is to reply: ‘but the thing you are criticizing me for is exactly what I was trying to achieve!' Karate, you see, uses the enemy's strength against them. So: ‘your characters are paper thin’: ‘ah, but I was trying precisely to create thin characters!’ ‘Your novel is boring’; ‘I was trying precisely for boring!’ ‘This is a shit book.’ ‘I take that as praise: I was striving throughout to write a shit novel …’
I remember an experience I had as an undergraduate. I was in a seminar discussing Slaughterhouse 5 and one of my fellow students noted that Vonnegut’s habit of appending ‘so it goes’ to any description of a death struck her as intensely annoying. It is annoying, too. One man dies. So it goes. Hundreds of thousands are slaughtered. So it goes. But (quoth the seminar leader) it’s worth at least pondering the possibility that Vonnegut means to be annoying when he rolls out this glib little phrase. And, yes. One of the ways that novel works is precisely by refusing the traditional valences of the representation of death—that it is tragic, for instance; or that it is glorious or heroic, or even that it is comic. Instead Vonnegut styles death as irritating and infuriating, and thereby puts a new and (since, you know, Death is infuriating) fertile spin on his subject.
When I first encountered David Foster Wallace's novel I was going through a phase of thinking that it was competence that was killing the novel as a mode of art. Thousands of new novels are published every year, and almost all of them are written and finished with a professional competence that would have amazed Henry Fielding. It’s a glut. Few of these novels make a lasting impression. Wallace’s novel seemed to me then, and still to an extent seems to me now, one way of breaking this logjam: it is sprawly and uneven on a massive scale, and its weird mixtures of technical brilliance and technical incompetence (what I take to be deliberate, artistic technical incompetence) makes it like no other novel. As if in a world that had previously been flooded only with expertly achieved photorealist art, people were suddenly and for the first time shown a De Kooning.
That is, in itself, a cool thing. Also, it's science fiction, which is also cool.
More. As with Slaughterhouse 5, the treatment bears an organic, if gnarly, relationship to the theme, which is (it’s nothing new to suggest this about Infinite Jest) addiction. Its characters are addicts: addicted (for instance) to drugs or drink, or to the shallow satisfactions of consumer culture, to sport, or to modes of OCD behaviour, or to sex (‘Orin Incandenza like many children of raging alcoholics and OCD-sufferers had internal addictive-sexuality issues’, 289)
Reviewers on the back cover of my paperback copy make this point (‘reading the book is a sort of addiction’ The Spectator; ‘A remarkable satire on American entertainment and addiction … the book’s mixture of maniacal inventiveness and comic brio gradually becomes an addiction itself’ Anthony Quinn, Daily Telegraph) But this isn’t quite right, I think. The point is not that the reader becomes addicted to this novel, although of course she may (and therefore the novel must be exhilarating junk, which Infinite Jest kind-of is). The point is that the novel becomes addicted to itself. It is the self-regard, the narcissism of addiction that is Wallace’s real theme, not the trappings of addiction themselves. Some of the novel’s best moments embroider this theme—the detailed account of the Boston AA meeting during which it starts to dawn on the reader that the participants are effectively addicted to the process of beating their addiction (‘people who cockily decide they don’t wish to abide by the basic suggestions are constantly going back Out There and then wobbling back in with their faces around their knees and confessing from the podium that they didn’t take the suggestions and have paid full price’ 357); or the way Steeply’s father becomes addicted to watching the TV comedy show M*A*S*H (‘Broadcast television. The program in question was called “M*A*S*H”. The title was an acronym, not a command … the fucking thing ran forever, it seemed’, 639); or the way Joelle gets addicted to cleaning (‘Joelle used to like to get really high and then clean. Now she was finding she just liked to clean … she was using Kleenex and stale water from a glass by Kate Gompert’s bed’ 736): that she starts cleaning when high, but then realises that she doesn't actually need the drugs to feed her true addiction.
Then there's sentimentality, something else to which it's too easy to have an addictive relationship. Some deprecate his occasional sentimentality, some have a more ambiguous relationship to it. Some of it is not so much sentimentalism as genuine sensibility (in the eighteenth-century sense). Weirdly offkilter touching stuff. Listening to Linda McCartney singing:
The portrable CD player started in with poor old Linda McCartney as C held Gately and the asst. pharmacist tied him off with an M.D.'s rubber strap. Gately stood there slightly hunched. Fackelmann was making sounds like a long-submerged man coming up for air. C. told Gately to fasten his seatbelt. Urine had turned part of the apt.'s luxury-hardwood floor's finish soft and white, like soap-scum. The CD playing was one C'd played all the fucking time in the car when Gately had been with him in a car: somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings—as in the historical Beatles's McCartney—taken and run it through a Kurzweil remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine. When the fags called the grass 'Bob' it was confusing because they also called C 'Bob'. Poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney just fucking could not sing, and having her shaky off-key little voice flushed from the cover of the whole slick multitrack corporate sound and pumped up to solo was to Gately unspeakably depressing—her voice sounding so lost, trying to hide and bury itself inside the pro backups' voices; Gately imagined Mrs. Linda McCartney—in his Staff room's wall's picture a kind of craggy-faced blonde—imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her husband's pro noise, feeling low esteem and whispering off key, not knowing quite when to shake her tambourine: C's depressing CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic seeming, like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom. [978]
Poor old Linda McCartney. And in this novel, in our various ways, we're all her. Even the compulsive stylistic play, here, doesn't detract: the 'CD' and 'C'd'; the facetiousness of abbreviating the word 'assistant' to 'asst.' and 'appartment' to 'apt.' in this, one of the least abbreviated novels ever published; the overuse of apostrophes: "Beatles's", "backups'", "his Staff room's wall's picture". There's a core reason (to do with our not-very-good-ness) why addiction, and the compulsion to avoid oneself, is so widespread. This CD is the last artwork to which Infinite Jest makes reference. Not counting, of course, of course, the footnotes.
