Infinite Jest

I spent the weekend in Ohio, celebrating my cousin's wedding. I also got very behind in email and RSS. So it wasn't until Monday that I learned of David Foster Wallace's suicide, and the news derailed me a little bit. In full disclosure -- I have never read a single one of his books. I've read some of his essays and a few of his stories and even fewer of his journalism pieces, but I have felt, since first meeting him, that he belonged to me. This is something that I am sure would have bothered him in some way. I realize he is not a thing to be consumed. But I met him, not literally, in Prague, and he became, quite by accident, a character in a screenplay I was working on for a class there, and since then, I've considered him a dear friend who I don't keep up with as well as I should.

That he was one of our most brilliant minds and that he left too soon is without contention. I think it is also fair to say that he left us at a time when we needed him the most. I cannot help thinking about his last days on earth, and the loneliness I imagine he felt before he hanged himself. And when I get to that image -- the starkness of his suicide -- I get physically ill, as I am now.

When I was 25 I bought Infinite Jest and I read something like 33 pages of it. I had never heard of it before. And no one had ever recommended it to me. Rather, I came across it the old fashioned way, in one of the few independent bookstores still open in this country. It was a 10th anniversary reissue with a forward by Dave Eggers. Eggers and Wallace (along with Franzen and Lethem and others) belong to a group of writers affectionately called The Maximalists. And I like every one of them. But Wallace has always been a favorite, despite what little of his work I've read.

So. Jest has been sitting on a bookshelf for over two years. I look at its spine nearly every day, and think loving thoughts about it, and mean to start it again, and don't. But I feel that right now, this very day in fact, there is not a more sensible thing I could do than to climb into bed with it once more.

The book is, in the most general sense, about addiction and entertainment. It's a really big book, about really big ideas, and we are living in what I quite seriously consider perilous days. This election has me, at best, flummoxed. I often feel like I live with aliens, here in my Red state. I wonder if we, as a nation, are really as unserious and cruel and stupid a people as our media and their polls are making us out to be. Ever since John McCain chose Caribou Barbie as his running mate, I have been considering rereading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. But then Wallace died. And left me feeling so alone, that it seems, as I've said, the only thing left to do is pray, get some sleep, continue to register voters, and read Infinite Jest. So, that is what I plan to do. If you need another reason to read this book, here is some of what Eggers had to say in the Forward:

"And yet the time spent in this book, in this world of language, is absolutely rewarded. When you exit these pages after that month of reading, you are a better person. It's insane, but also hard to deny. Your brain is stronger because it's been given a monthlong workout, and more importantly, your heart is sturdier, for there has scarcely been written a more moving account of desperation, depression, addiction, generational stasis and yearning, or the obsession with human expectations, with artistic and athletic and intellectual possibility. The themes here are big, and the emotions (guarded as they are) are very real, and the cumulative effect of the book is, you could say, seismic."

And, later:

"And now, unfortunately, we're back to the impression that this book is daunting. Which it isn't, really. It's long, but there are pleasures everywhere. There is humor everywhere. There is also a very quiet but very sturdy and constant tragic undercurrent that concerns a people who are completely lost, who are lost within their families and lost within their nation, and lost within their time, and who only want some sort of direction or purpose or sense of community or love. Which is, after all and conveniently enough for the end of this introduction, what an author is seeking when he sets out to write a book -- any book, but particularly a book like this, a book that gives so much, that required such sacrifice and dedication. Who would do such a thing if not for want of connection and thus of love?

"Last thing: In attempting to persuade you to buy this book, or check it out of your library, it's useful to tell you that the author is a normal person. Dave Wallace -- and he is commonly known as such -- keeps big sloppy dogs and has never dressed them in taffeta or made them wear raincoats. He has complained often about sweating too much when he gives public readings, so much so that he wears a bandana to keep the perspiration from soaking the pages below him. He was once a nationally ranked tennis player, and he cares about good government. He is from the Midwest -- east-central Illinois, to be specific, which is an intensely normal part of the country (not far, in fact, from a city, no joke, named Normal). So he is normal, and regular, and ordinary, and this is his extraordinary, and irregular, and not-normal achievement, a thing that will outlast him and you and me, but will help future people understand us -- how we felt, how we lived, what we gave to each other and why."