I read the last great American novel.
December 9th, 2022
I've decided to read Infinite Jest for the first time. As we approach the dead of winter, and I find myself in a time of both seasonal and circumstantial depression, it seems like a good idea to get lost in a huge, modern book. David Foster Wallace's work has coincidentally been a welcome companion in various down periods of my life, so I picked up Infinite Jest from its months-long abandonment on my shelves.
I'm doing this liveblog thing because I came across some other people doing this back in the day, and I thought it would be fun to do the same. Although I've been writing for a long time, I'm not very used to publishing anything but my film reviews publicly, so there's a pretty good chance I might go back and edit stuff.
Although I'm a big fan, I couldn't get through his other completed longform fiction book, Broom of the System, so I'm interested to see how he adapts his writing to such a sprawling book.
As for some background, these are the thoughts of a woman in her early 20s who graduated from college last year. I don't have any expertise in literature, grammar, tennis, or Quebec separatist movements. Now that I think about it, and now that I am re-writing this introduction 70 pages into the book, I am actually decently versed in avant-garde film and various addictions. But in general, I'm just a fan of David.
All I'm using is the Infinite Jest wiki to easily refer to terms that come up now and then. I also read Hamlet in preparation, which I don't think was necessary for the purposes of this book, but you should obviously read it anyway if you haven't. Here are some other links that look interesting:
Several More and Less Helpful Things For The Person Reading Infinite Jest
Words, Words, Words: The Infinite Jest Liveblog (apparently controversial among DFW fans because it might be misleading)
The Howling Fantods - David Foster Wallace News and Resources
Infinite Summer and their How to Read Infinite Jest tips which I followed, besides the 'read a reader's guide' part. I have no idea what the point of those books is, they're usually a lot harder to read than the actual text.
December 14th, 2022
It's difficult to know what to say about Infinite Jest so early on, but I figured 100ish pages was a good checkpoint. Clearly, most of what's going on is being set up, but there are a few standout chapters. Everything beyond this point is a potential spoiler!
Infinite Jest is way easier to read than I expected. Only a few parts - off the top of my head, the description of the tennis academy's layout, Schtitt's monologue, and Orin's football team dressing up as birds and flying across the stadium were the only parts where it was hard to comprehend what was going on.
At this point, I am honestly uninterested in much of the Quebec terrorist talk, but I suspect it'll get more interesting as it weaves in with the rest of the stories. Actually, I'm not even that interested in the tennis academy either. I'm interested in everything that isn't the main plot - the little short stories that eventually connect with it. I'm noticing that just like the notebook I used to read Gravity's Rainbow in summer 2020, I'm paying the most attention to the connections between characters, imagery, and ideas. Other than that, the notebook has been useful to keep track of what's going on as I'm working my way through some of the more abstract sections.
I'm surprised by how much this book has to do with marijuana addiction. I saw some confused responses to chapter 2, wondering if weed was a symbol for other drugs or some sort of abstract metaphor about how people can get addicted to anything, but any substance that produces an effect is addictive. It's actually pretty common nowadays, even if people are in denial about it. I believe, similarly to the idea of Canadian terrorists, DFW chose to focus on this because the concept of “marijuana addiction” makes us think differently about the little things we think we intuitively “know”. The fact that weed is thought of as so “chill” compared to other substances makes it all the more likely to be abused. People always bring up that it's not physically addictive, as if that means anything when tons of people are addicted to things that aren't physically addictive either.
Also, it's worth mentioning the vicious cycle of smoking weed that I've seen from countless friends and experienced myself: people smoke to calm down and dissociate, but often freak themselves out instead, but still keep smoking to try to calm down because they think there's something wrong with them and they don't know what else to do. What's more modern than being addicted to something that makes you paranoid, self-conscious, and unable to do anything but mindlessly consume entertainment? There's not much more to be said about how great chapter 2 is, and while I've never been seriously addicted to marijuana, the whole process of shutting your life down, doing it “one last time”, throwing stuff out just to repurchase it, and inventing elaborate lies to people rings painfully true to my experiences with my own addictions.
Another standout chapter is the Wardine chapter. Read with the story immediately following it about 2 high school kids who grow up to be jaded adults, it is one of the saddest things DFW has written. An underrated aspect of DFW's writing is his ability to write honestly about abuse and poverty.
I don't care too much about Hal yet, I feel like he will be an anchor for the rest of the characters. Orin is fascinating and my favorite character so far, and Mario seems like a sweet boy. I honestly don't give a shit about Marathe or Steeply. When Schtitt was introduced, I immediately thought of Udo Kier. While I'm a huge fan of David's short stories and essays, I'm not sure I believe that he can develop characters over a long book. This isn't a terrible thing, though. The characters might not be interesting, but each and every one of the characters is sort of participating in David Foster Wallace's conception of what life is like for people.
The chapter with Katie Gompert in the psych ward is notable to me not because of how sensitively DFW depicts depression, but also how he depicts the doctor treating her. A lot of medical students and professions do tend to treat people like “subjects”, but DFW goes a level deeper with his characterization. The doctor is so concerned with projecting concern and hiding his glee at this “medical situation”, but his true nature comes through in a totally perverse way.
Now that I'm typing this, I realize I didn't think of David Foster Wallace's suicide at all while reading Katie's part, but it is a sad coincidence that what lead to his suicide was most likely a bad interaction between his reliable anti-depressant meds and some food he randomly ate at a restaurant, similar to how Katie is suicidal because of the chemical effect her previously casual marijuana use has on her.
A lot of this book is about how people hide themselves, and are preoccupied with their efforts to hide how they really feel from people. This is something I've had to personally reckon with and is the most interesting part of the book to me so far.
December 19th, 2022
This was a little more difficult than the last section, for reasons I'll get into later, as well as good old PMDD fucking with my concentration. I'm not interested in any of the sci-fi stuff, Quebec took a big backseat in this section, and the focus was more about the pressures of drug addiction and the students living at Enfield Tennis Academy.
Some random short sections I thought were notable:
Mario's brief sexual encounter. I feel like most people have been in situations where someone struggling with personal issues recklessly takes advantage of people…that is basically what the first decade of being sexually active is all about, this blurring of right and wrong, fault and innocence. Like many of the characters in Infinite Jest, Millicent is a small but a tragic one, confused and punished by life.
Yrstruly's Christmas story was utterly INSANE, I hope we return to this guy in the future.
There's a chapter about video chat that predicts a lot of what we're currently seeing happening now with technology: tech becoming more advanced for the sake of progress, this supposedly exciting development creating issues that are fixed with a clunky solution that doesn't address the root problem, people reverting back to the old technology, and finally, this cultural upheaval leading to the people still using the advanced tech being viewed as “passe”...despite the fact that everyone was participating in this unnecessary and damaging thing to begin with - one of the many ways people in this book try to hide their shame from others. Other than the obvious FaceTiming and phone camera filter connection, the rise of Neocities and alternate phones and social media as an imperfect fix is something I thought about a lot after reading this section.
Hal's monologue reveals the pressures of living at Enfield. None of the kids there seem to actually like tennis, and while they are constantly busy, they aren't making a conscious choice to really do any of it. Drugs are an escape from these rigid routines. It may be a destructive action, but it is a personal action. However, looking at all the drug addicts in the book, we see them implement still more rigid and useless rituals to conceal their addiction from others. As long as they don't address your root problem, the problem behind the addiction itself, they seem trapped in these cycles of action and inaction. It'll be interesting to see how Enfield Academy and Ennet Halfway House intersect.
Lyle the pedophile wears a tank top with TRANSCEND on the front and DEUS PROVIDEBIT on the back. This is what Abraham says to Isaac before he intends to sacrifice him to God.
And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.
And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. (Genesis 22:7-10)
The names of the two main areas of this book are EnNET & EnFIELD. Both impose strict boundaries on their residents, Enfield for the purpose of glory, and Ennet for the purpose of redemption. Hal's essay says that the modern hero is a hero of inaction, just like Hamlet. Marlon Brando is not a bull in a china shop like the generation that grew up watching him, but a man who knew how to act with measured sloppiness. Pemulis deals clean piss to the residents of Enfield, becoming apart of the solution to a problem he created, similar to the various masks and filters of the InterLace video communication.
The Incandenza fathers pressure their sons into becoming tennis stars. Hal's grandfather simultaneously wants James to "be a body" but laments that James views him merely as a body, set dressing to his life. We know why Hal's grandfather made his father do it, but why James made Hal do it is still unclear. Near the end, there is a tiny shot at Bret Easton Ellis, which is funny because I was obsessed with Bret Easton Ellis as an edgy teen. I know BEE has talked shit on DFW, and it's apparent that they were aware that their work was totally at odds.
A weird amount of lines in this book are relevant to my current journey recovering from trauma, to the point where sometimes I'll read a piece of wisdom right after having a conversation about it. For example, Hal warns against choosing your words carefully when describing your situation, because the way you frame things can actually invoke fear instead of describe it. Near the end of the chapter, a brief footnote about The Shed details a bunch of catatonics who are institutionalized because they became so afraid of something that they made their fears real.
I'm awful sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if may- be there was any special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself.”
The back end of this section was taken up by the book's first truly difficult scene: the painstaking description of M.I.T's campus, whatever the fuck Madame Psychosis was talking about, and finally, more managable forays into the Incandenza dinner routine, and a description of the Veterans Hospital compound that Ennet Halfway House is located on. I believe page 250 is the mark where people get filtered by Infinite Jest and I can see why. I actually mostly skimmed most of the M.I.T. part because if there's one thing I learned from Gravity's Rainbow, it's that you don't need to understand every single thing, and that parts like this are usually intentionally difficult to read.
December 23rd, 2022
This section reveals the true identity of Madame Psychosis. Joelle van Dyne, Orin's girlfriend and his father's late-period muse, cocaine addict, potential victim of childhood molestation, and potentially dead. We also learn that the last shot of Infinite Jest is a mother apologizing.
The part about the residents of Ennet House all having unfortunate tattoos was interesting because I have a prominent tattoo that I regret immensely. I am currently in the smug at admitting my regret stage, but there is something freeing in admitting I regret getting it. Like, for example, this guy who works at a coffeeshop near me asked if my tattoo was [the band that inspired me to get it] and when I said yes, he got excited, only for me to I guess kind of anti-socially but honestly say that I regret the tattoo, it symbolizes bad times for me, and I don't like the band anymore. His reaction was understandably taken aback, but it felt good to say that I do not like this thing being on my body that I cannot get off, an almost perverse pleasure in admitting that I made a well-meaning mistake that everyone can see. I got the tattoo to symbolize something I thought was beautiful to me, but then almost immediately after getting it done I regretted it, the symbol meant nothing to me, and in fact, the band that gave me the idea to get the tattoo would go on to be intertwined with many painful things in my life, and I geniunely do not even like the band anymore as much as I can divorce it from the hard times it reminds me of. Although I feel this regret, I honestly forget that it is there and only feel that immense regret and shame when someone compliments it. Nevertheless, while realizing exactly why I prefer a misshapen scar to what the tattoo now means to me, I still think I might get it removed one day. For many of Ennet House's residents, their tattoos symbolize things that are shameful and regretful to them. Personally, an ugly scar covering my own personal permanent symbol of horrific times seems more meaningful and relevant to me than the thing itself. Although that might just be the cope speaking.
My friend feu-cosmique and I are reading IJ together, and we talked at length about the horrendous Orin and Hal dialogue in this part. I really dislike whenever DFW gets twee, and the boy-genius snarky thing here is grating to my very soul. I hate when people say “but people don't talk like that!” whenever there is stylized dialogue in a movie or book, but holy shit, it really reads as if the Incandenza brothers are jacking themselves off with their wittiness and devil-may-care attitude. Which I guess is why it was written that way. But STILL.
Anyways, Hal accidentally stumbles upon the grieving process by trying to impress the grief-therapist. He consciously acts out what the therapist wants from him, which turns out to be exactly what happens, but he is aware that he is acting, and is acting like this to please the therapist. I guess it's intentionally left up in the air whether it “worked” for Hal or not. I related a lot to the feeling of “flunking” therapy when I first started and the process of gradually letting go was maddening…but yes, it took reading books about what was happening to me to let go. It seems like Hal's desire to please people and hide his true nature will be his fatal flaw, similar to how the cracks in Orin's life are beginning to show. The tall and injured Schacht agrees with me here, suspecting that Hal will end up paying for his obvious drug abuse that he evidently has failed to hide from his classmates.
There's some more backstory on the Ennet House residents. Emil Minty is yrstruly, and Burt F.S. is the guy his crew attacked for drug money, rendered a quadruple amputee due to the assault. A resident, Hester, has borderline personality disorder. Randy Lenz is a pimp afraid of “all forms of timepieces, and a need to always know the time with great precision”, another great example of twisty neuroticism and OCD. Randy is obsessed with the thing he is afraid of.
Orin comes back into the spotlight in a big way, and we learn his fatal flaw, the credit he is taking out on his life, is that he leans into what he is naturally good at instead of trying to develop his other abilities. Instead of substances, Orin is addicted to sex, and potentially co-dependency. This addiction to something other than a substance, combined with his evident mommy issues is what makes him the most compelling character to me. He doesn't have Mario's innocence, nor Hal's irritating pluck. He's more mired in his problems while also being an NFL player. He likes punting because it is “spiritual: a denial of silence”. It's his way of asserting himself in the world.
His mother Avril and her adoptive brother C.T. are revealed as maddeningly passive aggressive nightmares of people who don't realize that they're psychologically torturing the people they seek validaiton from for being Good People. No wonder Orin has mommy issues.
It's depressing that his relationship with Joelle didn't turn out well, especially because it seems that letting go enough to talk to her, not treating her as a Subject, was a pivotal moment for him. “His dread now transformed into whatever it had been dread of”, and a good thing happened. “He didn't have to strategize or even scheme. Later he knew what the dread had been dread of. He hadn't had to promise her anything, it turned out. It was all for free.”
This part ends with Poor Tony in the throes of withdrawal to a substance that he used to stave off his heroin withdrawal, seizing on the floor of a subway, imagining himself giving birth, helped by his obstetrician father. Autogynephilia is a third-order theme working it's way into the book, and David Foster Wallace's insights into the scrambled male psyche here are just as prescient as the chapter on FaceTime.
Some choice lessons from the beginning of this section:
The further I get into Infinite Jest, the reminder of David Foster Wallace's suicide 10 years later just gets more painful.
December 29th, 2022
I haven't been on any DFW or Infinite Jest communities since starting the book, but my friend who has already read the book told me that somewhere around page 200ish marks "Book II". I didn't understand what he meant until now.
Throughout a really irritating and incomprehensible conversation about Quebec, we get some insight into Orin's relationship with Joelle. He blames her for his father's death, and his unresolved feelings manifest in sex addiction, specifically by having sex with young mothers. Orin is so compelling because he actually seems like a person, unlike Hal. Regarding the Quebec conspiracy I suspect the whole thing is way easier to understand than the convoluted dialogue, and I suspect that it's written to seem more complicated than it is. I learned your tricks from Pynchon, David...
The tobacco Hal started chewing to deal with the effects of his weed addiction is beginning to mess up his teeth...the thing he did to solve another problem is creating a more severe problem of its own.
From pages 306-407, Infinite Jest has not one, but three depressing descriptions of malformed children. Mario is a character impossible to hate, and it's funny that Hal is somehow PRECIOUS when Mario isn't. If I had to guess, this is because Mario is free from neuroses. ETA's residents love their own precociousness and intelligence, the hubris of the Gifted Child.
It pissed me off that The Union of the Deformed talked to Mario about covering his face. I'm interested a lot in this group, and have some ideas about it, but I suspect they'll come into play later in the book. In short, I think these people don't understand that they have to deal with people's stares at whatever real or perceived deformity they have in order to function. Again, they create another problem to solve a problem - neuroses get more anti-social and abstract if the difficult root of it all is not addressed.
Something I caught here: subsidized time ends in the Year of Glad, the same year Hal becomes unable to speak. Hal's great-grandfather is "The Man from Glad".
I'm not into these characters' conversations. They're too didactic, even if what David is saying is true. Yes, America has no direction, and someone didn't teach us how to choose, so we take the path of least resistance...which is usually addiction to something. DFW's criticism of America is a reminder of a time when people had more nuanced thoughts about things like this...well, I'm sure people still have them, but they're not readily available. He's criticizing entertainment, mindless addiction, and alienation, but he correctly identifies the root of it in the failure of the family. The failure of the family is due to the personal choices of the people supposed to nurture and provide.
“Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples.”
The world we live in sees any kind of devotion as stupid and unenlightened., but they provide nothing that really fills that void. Since the book was written, people now use this odd approximation of politics or identity to fill the same void people try to fill with heroin, food, or TV.
I not only speedread but actively skipped any part of the Eschaton game that wasn't talking about Hal or Pemulis. Tl;dr, logic and reason lead to disorder. Okay.
Well, you have to accept the detail in which DFW describes the complex Eschaton game to get the detail of the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I am currently in recovery, so a lot here resonated with me.
Alcoholics Anonymous makes people feel suspicious, unlike the substance or other bad coping mechanisms, which provide complete reassurance. It felt nice to be reminded that it's ok to feel suspicious of getting better, because the things that work are by nature more complex and less instantly gratifying than the thing you're trying to get away from.
The smiley face that Gately envisions as the sergeant of AlAnon is the fear of missing out, the feeling of being lesser than, many faces of the devil all hidden behind a smiley face of FUN. What guides Alcoholics Anonymous is different from fear, I think. It's more of a shelter from the storm. What they learn to be motivated by in AA is the knowledge that none of the “pleasurable” feelings the substance gives you is worth it. Another thing that sounds like a cliche but is a cliche because it's true. If it were easy to fill the void, addictions wouldn't exist. So, in order to recover, you have to give it all up to something other than yourself, because you can't even rely on your will. Your will is what got you addicted in the first place. And as DFW says, the truth is not just un- but anti-interesting. The thing you don't want to look at, or you think is too convenient, is usually the real problem. The difficulty comes in learning to deal with this banal truth without feeding whatever fucked up thing you've constructed to deal with it. As Lyle later says, "what fire dies when you feed it?".
A troubling part of this scene is when Joelle Van Dyne, who is now a resident of Ennet, gets to Don Gately through complaining about the grammar of the AA cliche, "But For the Grace of God". My initial reaction was shut the FUCK UP Joelle, and Don, why do you even care, you don't even know what she's talking about? But then it hit me...Don feels inferior compared to the lawyers, the grad students, the intelligentsia who come into Ennet and throw around big words. His reaction shows how no one is really done recovering, it's a long process to fight against cynicism, in the case of Joelle, and feeling lesser than, in the case of Don. Anything that touches upon whatever your hang-ups are is liable to awaken the spider. This is why all the AA veterans validate the newcomers. They are not only encouraging them, but voicing that they empathize with whatever excuses they're saying in a way that helps them give it up instead of fester inside.
The stories of 2 women in Alcoholics Anonymous is one part of Infinite Jest that I know will stick in my mind for a long time. The women's stories are horrifying, but each story illuminates different ways people approach recovery. The first woman solely focuses on what happened to her, only talking her addiction as an inevitable result of it all, an afterthought compared to her fucked-up childhood. She is self-consciously self-effacing in describing her recovery process. The second woman only focuses on how her behavior has hurt herself and her baby. She has no excuses, and is venting her pain.
The way people blame their behavior on an external force is something that I have really struggled with recently. When I was growing up, I experienced mistreatment from someone who blamed their behavior on trauma, and I learned to disregard my feelings because I thought they were justified, even if the whole family was getting hurt as a result of their actions. It's taken me a long time to realize that regardless of what you go through, you don't have permission to do whatever you want. We have a responsibility to ourselves and others. Since understanding this, it's been hard for me to see people blame the pain they cause on someone else. However, one thing I'm learning is that it's not my responsibility to make people take responsibility for themselves. All I can do is write about how I feel about it in my blog...
Anyways, both women have experienced a lot of pain. Of course, the first woman's behavior, and people who blame their life on things that were truly out of their control, is totally understandable. It's hard to know what to do with what has happened to you, and if it were easy to figure it out, a lot less people would hurt others or themselves. But there's a difference between wallowing in your pain and doing something about it. What a lot of people fail to understand is that in saying that people have a responsibility to try to act right, you are not giving up any empathy for the person who can't do that.
Bernini's Ecstasy of St Teresa statue is a recurring image for women struggling with addiction, and is especially revolting when it comes back in the first speaker's monologue. St. Teresa is obviously such a disquieting image because it walks a thin line between religious ecstasy and sexual pleasure. To be swept away by something outside of yourself, whether it be drug addiction or the cage the first speaker's sister is in, is to be beyond pleasure or pain. After a certain point, drugs do not provide any pleasure, and you do the drug to not feel pain, which also doesn't work. The pains and pleasures of giving yourself up to recovery are much more subtle and rewarding.
I stopped during this part to write my thoughts, as they were already long enough, but yeah, I really don't care about ONAN or Quebec at all. I DON'T CARE! I suspect a lot of the ONAN stuff is uninteresting because conspiracies, knowledge of the real purpose of the CIA, shadow puppet presidencies, anal-retentive face-mask-enforcement, and the effects of entertainment and environmental waste are all...commonplace now. Some of us, no matter the political orientation, are, as Lyle says, aware of the cage.
Johnny Gentle is a funny character. It's easy, if you are a complete moron, to compare him to Donald Trump, but he is explicitly centrist, a shadow puppet for a CIA focused on getting rid of and burying all of the consequences of their actions. It's obvious that there is a conspiracy between Quebec and the head of the Office of Unspecified Affairs.
Lyle's counsel to the students of ETA finally brings the weird imagery of people trying to bring things down to them just to get yanked up into clarity. People think it's easy to get something, so they try to bring it down to us, but they end up getting yanked up by the real weight of whatever it is that they want. And it feels nice to be swept away by something, until you fall down and the weight of the thing hits you over and over again.
During this part of the book, Hal indulges in sugar. It's a one-off thing, just showing how addiction to substances inevitably causes addiction to other things, but one of my goals of 2023 is to deal with my addiction to soda, so I thought it was worth mentioning. Weed smokers turn into lizards when you suggest marijuana is actually a gateway drug, and the truth is that letting yourself form a habit with one substance usually opens the door to other substances and addictive behaviors, no matter how seemingly-benign any of it is. Currently, I'm witnessing the reverse thing happen. As I address the root of my discontents, I'm slowly more able to look at how all of the things I'm addicted to fit together, and now I feel like I might be able to let them go eventually.
Oh my god...wait...this recording of a puppet show within the book is just like the play-within-a-play in Hamlet. Bravo, David. Infinite Jest, the book, is kinda like a movie. Also, Joelle is Ophelia. Nice.
Two last things from this part...we learn more about James O. Incandenza's productions in this part. Found Drama, a type of movie that is so real that it is not even a movie, might be the funniest thing David Foster Wallace has ever written. Medusa vs. Odalisque is a weird experimental movie about how you can be frozen by extreme beauty and extreme ugliness...in effect, they are the same thing: Joelle Van Dyne. The description of the movie reminds me a lot of Rivette's Duelle and Kiarostami's Shirin (which came out way later). And In case anyone is actually reading this and is also reading Infinite Jest for the first time, DO NOT Google Avril Incandenza. I got spoiled-by-auto-suggest-inference on something huge just by looking up her name. All I wanted was to see someone's visualization of what she might look like. Don't do it!
Holy shit this was long. Yes, we're definitely in Book II.
January 1, 2023
Happy 2023! We're back at it again very early in the New Year, and I finished the past 100 pages in record time, 3 days.
Eric Clipperton, an boy who plays tennis with a gun to his head, feels like a central part of Infinite Jest to me so far. Eric is not really playing the game, he's not really winning, and because of this, he is not really a person to the ETA boys. The boys have no choice but to let him win, although they do not lose anything, and he does not gain anything except not killing himself, which is a rule he made up for himself and others that serves no purpose. His tale is a perfect metaphor for the psychological terrorism some people inflict on others, and actually slots in nicely with the previous AA meeting's first speaker. Eric Clipperton and the ex-stripper wear their pain on their sleeves but hold people hostage with it, forcing their own interpretations of their responsibilities, or lack thereof, on others. Perhaps Clipperton kills himself because it finally hit him that the game he was making others play wasn't fair.
Don Gately's frustration with God is poignant and, once again, I'm sad that David Foster Wallace killed himself because I believe God appreciates this part of the book a lot. As he says earlier in the book, your belief in Him is one of the least interesting things to him re you...
This is the part of the book that he expanded on in This Is Water!
This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away.
We also finally enter the minds of the 2 major patriarchs of the Incandenza family. C.T. is a psycho, the modern Hero of Managing Many Different People, the bureaucrat, Claudius, only out for himself. It looks like Mario is his son, which is interesting because Avril and C.T. are not blood-related, yet Mario is malformed in the way an incest baby would be. I find myself wondering what the point of all the deformed children in this book so far. JOI gets his day in the sun (and dust) too. I was surprised that part of the book was written from his POV because I assumed he would be a lurking presence that only other people talked about. The dissociated way in which he recounts a traumatic childhood event felt very familiar. I wish we heard more from him, and I wonder, now that the Hamlet connections are very clear, if he will come back as a ghost. It also appears that JOI is a HUGE figure as far as the ONAN stuff goes. He's involved in optics, InterLace technology (I think), avant-garde film, AND nuclear fusion? Do they get rid of trash via nuclear fusion? WTF is the meaning of all of the annular terms?
Gately's POV shifting to the Antitoi Bros, like a camera panning from Gately's car racing away to the shopfront, was very cool and reminded me of the beginning of Gravity's Rainbow, where Pynchon shifts focus from a train headed to a concentration camp, I think, to Pirate Prentice and his bananas. Lucien, yet another sympathetic disabled character in the book, is introduced and swiftly taken out by the A.F.R. Who are also disabled, now that I think about it.
It doesn't seem like there's much of a mystery or intrigue with ONAN. Well, I'm pretty sure the only missing piece of the conspiracy at this point got spoiled for me...but it also seems obvious if you pay attention to stuff in the beginning of the book. I guess we'll see if my intuition is right.
January 4, 2023
Infinite Jest is now structured in a way to make the reader addicted. Important plot threads break off into cliffhangers, and more time is spent on the details of side characters that end up just as compelling as, say, the Incandenza family. We're getting much closer to the center of the narrative, although I honestly fear that a lot of things might not ever be revealed. Also, as the book gets deeper, an increasing amount of people suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder and various levels of "awareness" of themselves and their problems, which paradoxically prevents them from moving forward. This is evident in three main characters: C.T, Avril Incandenza, and Randy Lenz.
C.T overcompensates for his shyness by compulsively "acknowledging" his limits. He probably think this makes him look like an open and honest man, but judging from how he makes everyone around him uncomfortable, C.T. is actually more like Eric Clipperton. His self-effacement is the same thing as the gun Clipperton points to his head, if anyone were to acknowledge the true meaning of what he is doing he would shatter into a million pieces. He's a control freak, the paranoid king, the postmodern hero who is driven by a perpetual state of panic in order to manage a complex operation. The contemptible way he views Mario in spite of his faux openness says it all about what C.T. is really animated by. C.T. is a modern Claudius, to be sure. No wonder the two sides of his face don't match.
Avril is crippled by OCD, and not just that, but also has OCD when it comes to making her OCD as efficient as possible. And because of her strange way of psychologically manipulating her children into doing things they don't want to do, Orin actually compares Avril to Eric Clipperton. In spite of her efficiency, her life is a series of phobias she isn't even aware of, and she puts her children into physical and mental harm's way by her inability to acknowledge them. During her infamous freakout when Hal eats mold, she doesn't run around in a circle, she runs around in the shape of the perfect rectangle formation she made in her garden. She also has an eating disorder, which is part and parcel for women with OCD. Oh yeah, and she's fucking John Wayne. Is he even 18? Why is she wearing a cheerleader outfit? Don't tell me there's any funny business with Orin...please god...
Randy Lenz makes excuses for himself to do cocaine even in a halfway house, and even frames his antisocial murder of animals in the terms of a psychology textbook. He's so wracked by obsessive-compulsive behaviors, of which he is aware of the genesis of, that he must always be in the north section of a room, and must always travel north.
At this point in the book, the link between family trauma and addiction is clear. Randy Lenz and Bruce Green's walk around Boston was gorgeously written, and, like the two speakers at the AA meeting, came off as two totally different ways of dealing with recovery. Randy Lenz cheats recovery, does cocaine, kills animals, but thinks that his awareness of what he's doing, as well as his rambly external monologue counts for anything. Bruce Green is a man totally locked up inside, a man who has "one fully formed thought a minute", who stumbles into a flashback and has to deal with the difficulty of all he has shoved down coming back to haunt him. Bruce manages to deal with it well, even though he witnesses his friend kill an animal, but Randy will eventually face the consequences of his behavior. His behavior comes back to bite him in the ass, which proves that people cannot cheat AA. It's structured in a way where their problems, even their meta-problems and neurotic "awareness", will always have direct consequences on their life.
One last point about the book and OCD: DFW has some pretty good insights on its nature. OCD is such a paradoxical problem because it's all about control, but the sufferer also does not trust their judgement whatsoever, which creates a strain of rituals, which increases the occurrence of the thing that compels the rituals. I wonder if addiction is basically a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, because a lot of the addicts in this book also happen to have rituals associated with it. Also note that rituals are a part of every day life for the residents of Ennet and Enfield. Rituals can be a good thing if someone else enforces them.
Joelle van Dyne telling Don Gately about UHID was incredibly irritating. Even this far into the book, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to think of Joelle van Dyne. She's lived a hard life, and certainly her status as the P.G.O.A.T makes her a complex character to a female reader...so I guess her way of dealing with her problems is much more loaded compared to the male characters in the book. UHID's ethos might be one of the most insidious things in Infinite Jest. It preys upon a very real fact of life, that it is very difficult for people to control how much they care about how they look, and that the shame people feel about feeling lesser than is the thing that will really control their life. HOWEVER, UHID's way of dealing with it is to just totally give up, to not have a face altogether. Joelle even says that the members of UHID accept their non-acceptance. They do this in lieu of accepting their appearance, and cannot move forward in life.
It's a small line, but Arslan mentions "parting the veil of Maya". I looked this up, and apparently "the veil of Maya" is a Buddhist term that refers to people's ignorance of their essential nothingness. The veil of Maya is an illusion that conceals this nothingness. To part the veil of Maya is to glimpse the truth. It's also worth mentioning that Maya is Buddha's mother.
Speaking of Aslan, the ONAN stuff is FINALLY paying off. James O. Incandenza not only revolutionized lenses, and InterLace technology I'm pretty sure, but also contributed to nuclear fusion. Or whatever ONAN is doing. The trash catapulted into the Great Concavity is actually NECESSARY to control overgrowth due to the efficiency with which this nuclear fusion destroys trash. The mutant animals and babies are actually caused by the removal of waste, not toxic waste, I think. Maybe we need trash in our lives too.
Let's talk about Orin. Orin is a sex addict. He is a sex addict because he is afraid of rejection, and loves being wanted. He loves providing pleasure and the prospect of causing pain, by ruining his Subjects' families. I think he is so attracted to Helen because deep down he knows he cannot have "her", because "she" doesn't really exist. As much as I would love for Orin to be my favorite character, I suspect David Foster Wallace knew his audience of people in their 20s with intimacy issues and fucked up mothers, because Orin's childhood torture of Mario is hard to stomach. Interestingly enough, Orin seems to be continuing the sins of his mother, not his father. Pemulis nearly calls James a cuck at some point in this section, and Avril is a serial cheater. Orin gets a perverse pleasure out of helping mothers cheat on their husbands.
Mario's point of view enters the narrative for the first time, and I was amused to see him as a mouthpiece for DFW's frustration with irony. He makes a good point here, the concept of being embarrassed of what is real is comprehensible to children and the generally pure-of-heart. Cynicism is learned. The prospect of Mario meeting Don Gately, or god forbid, his beloved Madame Psychosis, at Ennet House makes me so excited.
Don Gately is the real postmodern hero of Infinite Jest. He has to keep track of all of the residents of Ennet House in a series of mindnumbingly boring yet difficult routines, he acts as their caretaker, father, and Boundary keeper. He's terrified of life Out There, when his residency is up. What will happen to him? Addiction is an endless struggle, and leaving Ennet will be his first foray into the real world. He kicks ass at the end of this part.
This part's discussion of OCD, flashbacks, and body dysmorphia made these pages quite a difficult read for me. This is a good thing though, and I'm particularly awestruck at the way people's coping mechanisms get more complex as I get further into the book. Awareness of a problem is not the same thing as fixing a problem. Sometimes, this awareness can be the very engine of the problem.
January 6, 2023
Oh god, this is going to end soon. I'm going to finish Infinite Jest next week. I don't want it to end…
Based on the way the narrative is rapidly shifting, I can tell this is Book III territory. Characters are starting to come together, not just physically interacting but their lives start to run together. Random people like Ortho Stice are suddenly developed, and we get an earth-shattering insight into Michael Pemulis' upbringing. Poor Tony is alive, and Kate Gompert hasn't killed herself…yet… Weird things are happening at ETA, could the ghost of James O. Incandenza be emerging? And is Hal slipping because his dad is making him fail, or is it because he's retreating further and further into his head with the weed he's now definitely addicted to?
C.T. is the consummate bureaucrat — he cuts corners on milk, even going as far as making employees put the powdered milk into fake milk jugs, but can't do anything to improve the players' quality of life without months of meetings. I admire DFW's way to write people like C.T. and Avril who are absolutely insufferable people, harmful in a very complex way.
“Ms. Steeples, to my way of thinking, the word "abuse" is vacuous. Who can define "abuse"? The difficulty with really interesting cases of abuse is that the ambiguity of the abuse becomes part of the abuse.”
Through their relationship with their mother, Orin's personality starts to come full circle, and Hal finally starts to make sense as a person. Avril does not realize that she doesn't view her kids as people separate from her. Compare this to the fucked up fathers in Infinite Jest who put immense pressure on their sons to do things, and to surpass them, but only in what they think they should do. Avril prides herself on NOT doing that, but for the sake of her own ego. She says one thing, but her actions mean the exact opposite. She's psychologically torturing her children into doing exactly what she wants, and she doesn't even know she's hurting them. Orin basically gets mindfucked through his mother's selfishness into being like her, but in a more twisted way. He might be giving women pleasure, but he gets off on the temporary narcissistic fulfillment of being exactly what they want…just like Avril temporarily fills the void in her heart by being what she thinks the ideal mom is. Orin's friend says he thinks Avril was abused as a child, and as someone who, according to DFW himself, suffered more concrete abuse than the Incandenza kids, a lot of what Avril unwittingly does reminds me of myself RIGHT NOW. She is a striking portrait of how an abused woman can overcorrect herself into still being a bad mother.
Hal clings to his mother's selfishness because it makes him feel real. Hal is beyond enmeshed, he exists purely as a function of his parents. Orin has developed a complex personality, no matter how fucked up he is, and although Mario is pure, he has an interior world. It's totally different from the nothingness that Hal is defined by. That Hal might be permanently FUBAR seems…poetic. Tragic. Full-circle. ANNULAR? DAVID…?
There's a lot of talk on the purpose of ETA, to strike a fine balance between losing your ego and developing skill in order to transcend yourself I feel like we have probably reached the peak of the ideal of ETA, and we're about to see what it's like when people fail. We already know Hal is going to fail.
Types of depression are explored through Kate Gompert and James Incandenza, in a sort of sequel to DFW's famous short story The Depressed Person. This might be a cliche thing to say…sorry, Mario, but still…it's very clear that DFW was suffering immensely, and even though we can glean a lot from his writing about his personality, his home life, his potential addictions and neuroses, it's impossible to be able to understand, as a non-clinically-depressed person, the depression that killed him. The thing that strikes me about his writing on depression is that it is simultaneously very detailed and dissociated. Does that make sense? His writing on depression reminds me of his essay in the traumatized voice of James Incandenza. He says a lot that is true, a lot that is real, but somehow, there's more in what he does not say than what he does say. How else are you supposed to write about something so extreme and devoid of meaning?
These pages seemed to mostly develop things that might finally culminate at some point, but hey, what do I know? Here's what I would like to know:
I haven't talked much about the Entertainment or DFW's ideas on entertainment in general because they seem fairly self-evident, but in this part of the book he starts talking about how people addicted to entertainment aren't having fun or resigned, they seem frozen between two things. Entertainment makes people want to act, but it's just a lot easier to watch someone else do it. But the viewer still isn't satisfied. The last shot of Infinite Jest is Joelle apologizing in a motherly tone. I repeat, the end of Infinite Jest is a mother apologizing. The end of Infinite Jest is a m—
January 9, 2023
Well. It's coming to an end.
I was wrong about Joelle Van Dyne aka Lucille Duquette. At least I think. She refers to herself as looking like a cokehead in her dream, but much of her friend's confession seems true. If she really was horrifically burned, I'm certain the issue of her appearance was meant to be a reverse red-herring. Her relationship with Orin is one third of the tragic heart of this book. That haunting wedding picture of a veteran burn victim and his wife comes to mind. What exactly were they supposed to do? The blame is on Joelle's family.
Speaking of blame, I think there is a subtle criticism of AA through James and Don's talk. Don criticizes James venting to him, saying that he's being self-piteous and holding resentment...but these things are important to feel. Everything James is saying is...valid. AA requires a delicate balance of self-suppression that may be unhealthy at times.
My favorite part of this jest has been how David Foster Wallace gives the proper amount of weight to family struggles, i.e. the crushing weight and agonizing pain these issues deserve. Most of the characters' lives are a testament to the brutal impact of a small accretion of unnerving things. Joelle's dad doesn't actually rape her, Avril doesn't actually directly abuse any of the kids, and James Incandenza Himself (Hal's twee little nickname for him, as with most things in this book, now makes sense) wasn't abused by his father, either. The footnote agonizing about What Is Abuse If I Wasn't Abused has an answer, at least to my mind: sometimes people can abuse you by exposing you to their own abuse at the hands of others, a substance, or themselves.
The big mystery of the book, James O. Incandenza...is just a checked-out dad who does not know how to communicate with his sons. Orin is just like Avril, and Hal is nothing. Holy fucking shit. His relationship with Hal is proving to be another third of this book's heart. The other third is Don Gately, but his condition is kind of up in the air right now, so I have no comment on him.
I haven't talked much about the big Themes of this book...self-escape, entertainment, hell, even recovery. I suppose I'm just more concerned with the things I've been writing about. In general there seems to be two sides to everything: self-escape can be good if you are devoted to something bigger than you, or bad. Entertainment can be a way for a father to communicate to his son, or turn people into vegetables. Recovery is necessary to thrive, but it involves killing an old part of yourself and being comfortable with discomfort.
I wonder what will happen to Orin in these last 130 or so pages. We now know that he has come full circle. He's just like his mom, right down to the apparent sex addiction. He doesn't understand his dad because, like his mother, he views everyone as an extension of himself. His dad is unreadable in this regard, because, well, James is Himself, he is his father. So here's my question, David Foster Wallace, is he so wrong to distance himself from his mom?
Hal is such a tragic character. I applaud DFW's way of writing a totally blank character on purpose. The psychedelic he does to "rewire his brain", to fix everything, to have one last experience before his piss test, will be his downfall. A life-ruining problem to solve a problem that was a fix for an initial problem that was also supposed to be a fix for a unsaid unknown problem that was caused by his parents and their own hierarchy of problems and problem-fix-problems. If only he went to a real NA meeting instead of that horrific teddy bear thing. Does that group solve anything? Are we just cynical? Maybe people with no addictions have their own matrix of problems that people like me and you can't fathom.
There's some weird terminology used throughout this book that I put into the annoying-twee category, but "eliminating one's map" as a roundabout way of saying "suicide" is now not one of them. The map is not the territory.
The different impressions of James from different characters is proof that one person can represent different things to different people. It's easy enough to say that, nay, it's in fact a cliche, but it's another thing when you recognize that your perception of someone has done a 180 and you're clutching your head wondering How Do People See Me, How Can I Control It, How Could My Perceptions Of People Be Totally Wrong. Don sees James as a formerly bullied kid, a sad-sack nerd...but to Orin, he's the mysterious father he wants to please, to the film critics, he's a cynical prankster, to the optics industry, he's a titan, and maybe to his own father, he's a failure. There's one character we haven't heard from yet. What will Avril have to say for herself?
More information on Infinite Jest the movie is finally given. It was made for Hal. It's ostensibly partly about how his mother failed him by placing him in her "womb of solipsism" that it looks like he will never come out from. The pain of a parent not being able to see their child as separate from them can be annihilating. Enmeshment = death. The movie was made for him to "come outside of himself" to see his father's feelings for him. I guess it's another testament to the force of a parent's love that this is the film that is killing people.
I was gonna go back in the book and comment on the parts like I usually do, but this is long enough and I'M ALMOST DONE! FUCK! I'll end with another comment on James' ghost. His spiel about how figurants, or extras, in entertainment are never heard, reminded me of an ex-friend's supposed insult that I and a few of my other friends view ourselves as "the main character". This term unnerves me because we are already the main characters of our life. What does it mean to be "the main character"? To take an active role in your life, to have a voice? It's a shame so many people don't think this way. James is right, everyone deserves a voice, and I don't mean this in a cloying "equality"-driven way. I mean that you MUST have a story, a voice, and a direction to be a person. Infinite Jest, the book, contains dozens of people's stories. I suspect most of our main characters' will end in tragedy.
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
January 10, 2023
The last hundred or so pages of Infinite Jest are a slow slide into implacable horror. Enfield Tennis Academy is an unfamiliar, ghostly zone. Many characters die. Don Gately is in total stasis, recalling bits and pieces of his tragic and debaucherous life. Hal's narrative voice comes back, now disturbingly dissociated in light of what we now know about his life. The back of my copy of Infinite Jest refers to the Incandenzas as an endearingly dysfunctional family. There's nothing endearing about their dysfunction. The Incandenza family is fucked.
As I suspected, the main story is rather simple. Most of the characters have a childhood with forceful and passive parents. This is difficult to deal with, so they turn to some kind of substance, obsession, or craft to deal with it. The things they use to try to fix the effects of their obsession often create more problems. They either choose to face the facts and start the difficult recovery process, or fall deeper down into self-destruction, whether it be via suicide, psychosis, or substance-induced chronic illness. AA, in contrast, is a place where people well-versed in how fucking impossible it seems to live validate these feelings, provide a support system, and keep each other accountable. There is hope in Infinite Jest, and it is found in the care people give to each other.
A LOT of things are left open-ended. Hell, whether or not the last hundred or so pages of Infinite Jest are actually a slow slide into implacable horror is up for debate. The book is an infinite jest, after all. I'm going to close out this blog with my interpretations of all of these ambiguous things on my first reading. I've read a lot on /r/infinitejest and infinitesummer.org's forum and it's apparent that DFW took a lot of time to ensure multiple valid interpretations for most of the following events, so it's likely that I'll change my mind the next time I read it.
I think Don Gately dies at the end because the Canadians' bullets were tainted with some sort of lethal infection. He gets a fever, begins to see ghosts, and dies, remembering a hellish drug binge where he watched his friends die. It's possible that he could be given the painkillers that he's been trying to refuse, hence the sensation of another time he was forcefully given painkillers, and the beach at the end is his peace with it and resolve to move on from the experience. But my impression was that he definitely died, though, because he doesn't seem to be getting better.
JOI commits suicide because the shame of understanding his obsessions and substance abuse has prevented him from communication with his sons, that he has not ended the cycle of bad fathers, is what kills him. People keep referring to him having a cartridge implanted in his head but I think this was just a poetic description of the idea of the movie in his head to Hal.
Why is Infinite Jest so lethal? Because it's hyper-real and meets the viewer's ultimate need, the need that underlies all needs: love and validation from one's mother. It features a mother apologizing to the viewer, ostensibly for her failures, and the sins of the father which she helped enable. As an aside, I've seen many people say that a father doing bad things and a mother covering it up is "usually how bad parenting goes" which is so unbelievably fucking stupid it triggered me into Addressing People's Reactions. It's just a common dynamic David Foster Wallace is writing about, one he might have been familiar with himself. Anyways, Infinite Jest is so lethal because all the viewer's needs are met through this movie, the things that made the viewer unhappy and their needs to be unmet, the needs people try to meet with substances, addictions, obsessions. Of course, this is a piece of entertainment, just as lethal as any of those substances. Confronting the lack in your life with a system like AA might be difficult, and you might not feel whole, but it's much better to struggle towards happiness than to die stuck in the same pointless cycle, terrified of choice.
Speaking of Avril, I don't think she raped Orin, but she had the same feelings as Joelle's father towards him, hence the weird sex scene with John Wayne. The neurotic abuse she put Orin and Hal through is probably best described as neurotic self-absorbent enmeshment, a mother using her children to satisfy her needs, not viewing them as people. So basically the same way James' father treated him. Her loving exterior is Avril trying to make herself look good. She's so preoccupied with looking good that she can't address any of her fears, obsessive preoccupations, or failures. Does she actually love her kids? "In her own way", sure.
I'm not sure Orin is the one to mail out copies of Infinite Jest, because it's unclear how he would know the movie is lethal. I'm surprised by how much hate Orin gets from readers because he is a sympathetic character to me. Obviously, abusing Mario is inexcusable, but I don't think his breakup with Joelle, his womanizing, or his callous behaviors are that bad. His breakup with Joelle is a sad fact of life, and whatever blame he places on her for his dad's suicide an unfortunate trauma response. He needs help, but instead he seduces women who were going to cheat on their husbands anyway, or else they wouldn't have sex with him. And I can totally understand his distance from his entire family caused by shock, hatred, and shame due to one person's abuse, speaking from personal current experience.
Joelle Van Dyne is deformed. The acid attack is referred to several other times in the book. She says she's the prettiest girl in the world post-attack as a bit of black humor...I believe she even says that she says it as a joke at some point.
Hal's condition at the end of the book is because he gets lost in his own head. People start saying his expressions are out of sync with his feelings shortly after he quits marijuana. Confronting the void that marijuana was attempting to mask, and the fact that Hal is basically just a function of his parents' desires, nothing more, is why he loses his mind. Mario talks about knowing Hal is sad without him knowing, and Hal's repressive state explodes after quitting weed and going to the uncomfortable not-AA meeting where he sees grown men express embarrassing need and act like babies. It's possible him and Pemulis do the DMZ, and I'm willing to say his fear and confusion at this turning point in his life + an extremely potent psychedelic is what truly fucks him up in the end. The mold Hal ate as a child would play into the book's acknowledgement of benign external factors causing your brain to get fucked up beyond repair, but I think it's more likely a red herring.
The thing I thought I got spoiled on is Avril Incandenza being Luria P—, which I don't believe. Orin is a little dense, not realizing Helen Steeply was a man, but I dunno, I really think he would recognize his mother. I'm not sure Avril is actually involved in Canadian terrorism, but she cheats on JOI constantly, and a woman doesn't have to actually be a murderer to make people have the discomforting feeling Joelle gets at Thanksgiving that she could kill her at any moment. I wish we got more insight into Avril, she's the only main character who doesn't get her own scene in the book. It's difficult to come to a conclusion on this for that reason. I've seen people say JOI is the main narrator, which would check out with why we never hear anything from Avril. She's the one person he could never reach.
People keep saying Don Gately and Hal actually dug up James Incandenza's head. This doesn't make sense, although Hal does refer to it in the opening part of the book (which, holy shit, just briefly skimming I really should reread the first chapter). JOI's head EXPLODED, remember, and he is buried in a toxic zone under whatever debris is located there. I am certain this doesn't happen. I think this was a dream shared by Don, Hal, and maybe John Wayne. Don listens to the ghost of JOI and tries to get Hal to understand what his father is saying, but it's too late.
As for my thoughts on the quality of the book, obviously it was great. My main complaint, which is a big one, I guess, is that the geopolitical parts were dull and I didn't care about any of it besides what directly related to the main characters. My favorite characters were Orin, James, Mario, and Don. My favorite parts were Joelle's hellish Thanksgiving with the Incandenzas, the two AA speaker stories, Eric Clipperton's story, James Incandenza's anecdote about his father, yrstruly, and the ending.
This is now the fourth book by David Foster Wallace that I have read at a difficult impasse in my life. I've lived most of my life completely unaware of any vital problems in my life, but this time I read one of his books to intentionally stop thinking about my problems so much. The narrator of Infinite Jest laments the meaning of abuse, and says that in a fucked up way, it's easier for people who were cut-and-dry abused to move on because they at least KNOW it was abuse. The accretion of small, uncomfortable events building up to a general sense of loss, dread, and pain in characters throughout this book rings true. Few horrible things in my life have been one specific violent event that I can point to and package into an easily sympathetic story for others to digest and validate. I think this is why the horrors of each character's home life affects me so deeply, because I am well-acquainted with the feeling of abandonment that drives many people to addictions. Hell, the same feeling is what led me to indulge in some addictions of my own that I'm still struggling with. Right now, I feel a lot like Orin, horrified and ashamed as I understand my past, and wanting to run as far away from it as possible. Along with the important messages about how to live with yourself in this world and recover from addictions, seeing how Orin's hatred for his mother made him end up more or less just like her, and how the way Avril treats her children in the first place is a neurotic funhouse mirror version of abuse from a person who was abused herself, felt vital right now.
Acknowledging that it's impossible to really speak on anyone's reason for killing themselves, David Foster Wallace's suicide does not make the book a failure. He was suffering from the billowing black sail of depression that Geoffrey Day and Katie Gompert talk about. His medication stopped working, and this is what truly killed him. Although I wasn't old enough to know who he was when he was alive, his death is such a terrible blow because he had a lot of knowledge of how hard life is, passion for living life honestly in spite of this, and was great at expressing this for other people to learn from.
This is now the fourth book by David Foster Wallace that I have read at a difficult impasse in my life. Like many characters in Infinite Jest, I've lived mostly unaware of the root of my suffering, going in circles, thinking the things I was doing to avoid suffering was the self-terminating reason why I felt so horrible. This time I read one of his books with the knowledge of many things that confounded me as I was reading Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, Consider the Lobster, and Oblivion. I am 5 months into trauma recovery as of the time of writing. So I don't think it's a coincidence that this is also the first David Foster Wallace book that I feel hopeful after reading, because it kept reminding me: Talk about your feelings. Don't underestimate the power of objects. You can fill the hole your parents left in your heart by devoting yourself to something that matters -- the thing itself doesn't matter much, it's the fact that you're trying to fill the hole with something meaningful that will do the trick. You must learn to deal with shame, because shame is what keeps you stuck. Cliches are cliches because they are true. God is real.
