Book # 176 - Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Well it only took me two months, but I finally finished reading Infinite Jest. It will probably take another week or so for my brain to digest it a bit further. I'm not completely sure yet how I feel about the "ending" either. Brilliant or incredibly frustrating? I'll probably settle on both. For a book with a word count of 543,709 (we're talking War and Peace territory) you'd expect maybe some kind of resolution to the main plot points. But no... instead you've gotta read through the text again looking for little clues on how it is maybe resolved. Or look on the Internet to see people's theories on what happens next. And after reading these theories there are definitely clues throughout the book on what happens but I don't think quite enough to connect all the dots. I still have no idea where the "master" tape was... but the clues are convincing enough to let me accept that a certain character is the one to have first found it and distributed it... but again for that matter the book barely just hints at that conclusion. So yeah I don't know.

The bulk of the "story" revolves around two different locations in a slightly futuristic Boston. The first is the Enfield Tennis Academy where Hal Incandenza is a student whose parents founded the school. Of course there are a ton of other characters there and there is a lot of discussion about tennis, drugs and growing up. Next is the Ennet House, a recovery house for former drug users. The main character here is Don Gately, a reformed thief and addict that is now on the staff of the house. And yes there are a ton more characters that live here and we get several tragic back stories and endless discussions about drug and alcohol abuse. There's also another story line about a video called "Infinite Jest" that reduces the viewer to a state where all they can do is watch the video endlessly over and over again.

The end-notes are also worth mentioning. There are something like 380 of them. They take up 100 pages and are super tiny print. Some of the notes are 10 pages! Flipping back and forth in the text just makes the book even that much longer to get through. Also Frankenstein and The Brothers Karamazov are mentioned. I guess I have to give it an A. There's a passage somewhere in there (which I probably couldn't find again) about how some books are written so that the reader will question their own reading comprehension abilities but also question whether or not the author is actually putting in all the information that should be there. I'd say that's Wallace's way of saying not to worry about the story... there's so much other stuff here.