The End of the Joke
REVIEW: “Infinite Jest,” David Foster Wallace, 1996
There is a certain unspoken contract between a reader and a novelist. The contract stipulates that a reader will essentially suspend disbelief and respect the novelist’s intentions, while the novelist will keep the reader in mind and give the reader what they want. The reader usually wants a coherent story that will entertain. This usually means that the novel should adhere to some conventions like having a well-constructed plot, a clear ending, as well as some moral arc the character or characters follow.
David Foster Wallace, in his brobdignagian novel Infinite Jest, eschews these conventions. Infinite Jest largely does not have a plot. The novel merely begins and ends in two shocking and seemingly disjointed vignettes. There is no synthesis, no cohesive element that truly binds the characters aside from coincidence. At times, Infinite Jest seems nonsensical. Wallace writes hundreds of pages on picayune details about film theory and pharmaceuticals and made-up games but glosses over the details for what could be serious plot points.
In a word, Infinite Jest is maddening. It is nearly 1000 pages of interweaving characters and stories that can seem to drag on for a mind-numbing amount of pages. On top of the sheer length of the novel itself, Wallace tacks on nearly 400 end notes, some of which are more than 10 pages of ten-point font on the most esoteric of subjects.
But somehow, despite the length and over-the-top details and the lack of plot, Infinite Jest is infinitely readable. The writing is brilliant. The characters are idiosyncratic but compelling. The stories being told are wonderful. At a glance, the novel follows the stories of three groups of people, all of whom are tangentially connected in a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon sort of way.
The first group is the Incandenza family, particularly Hal, the prodigal youngest son. Hal’s father, Dr. James Incandenza, was a mad scientist who made “apres garde” art films, established the tennis boarding school Enfield Tennis Academy (which is situated in the fictitious Enfield, Mass., and is supposed to be somewhere between Boston College and Oak Square in Brighton), and committed suicide by sticking his head into a microwave oven. His wife, Avril Incandenza, is an imposing woman who works at ETA and has affairs with her stepbrother, the ETA headmaster Charles Tavis, and an ETA student named John Wayne. There are also three brothers: Hal, a tennis prodigy who has memorized the OED and is deeply depressed and has a crippling marijuana dependency; Mario, who is physically and mentally disabled, is approximately the size of a “fire hydrant,” and has savant-like memory; and Orin, who is the oldest brother and is a former tennis star who now is the kicker for the Arizona Cardinals, is a sex addict, and used to date Joelle van Dyne (“the P.G.O.A.T” or Prettiest Girl of All Time or Madame Psychosis).
Then we have the characters of Ennet House, a recovery house in Enfield, Massachusetts near ETA. Don Gately is an Ennet House alum who grew up on the North Shore of Massachusetts and is a recovering opioid addict. He was a petty criminal until he accidentally murdered a Quebecoise insurgent in Brookline, Mass. during a home invasion. He leads a troubled life and is perfectly happy to toil away as he atones for his sins. Joelle van Dyne, Orin’s ex-girlfriend, a radio deejay with a cult following called Madame Psychosis, and an actor in Dr. Incandenza’s movies, is a resident of Ennet House after she overdosed on cocaine. She wears a veil either because she is severely deformed or is so beautiful that she considers her beauty to be a disability. All of the characters in Ennet House go to Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings every night.
Finally, there is the A.F.R., or Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, which translates to the wheelchair assassins. They are a Quebcoise terrorist group that rolls around in wheelchairs (this is the result of a Quebecoise game where young men jump in front of trains) and terrorize people for crimes against Quebec (I will get to that). The A.F.R. is trying to get their hands on “The Entertainment,” or the “Samizdat,” which is a film made by Dr. James Incandenza actually called “Infinite Jest” (which comes from Hamlet’s soliloquy on a dead court jester named Yorick, whom he refers to as a man of “infinite jest.”) that is so entertaining, so enrapturing, that anyone who views “The Entertainment” is automatically brainwashed and watches the movie until they die. The A.F.R. wants to use “The Entertainment” to wreak havoc and the Office of Unspecified Services (a shadowy organization much like the CIA) is trying to stop the A.F.R.
All that and so much more is taking place in the backdrop of a futuristic world where the United States, Mexico, and Canada merged to create the O.N.A.N. which is led by American president Johnny Gentle, a germaphobic Las Vegas crooner who is kind of a cross between Frank Sinatra and Wayne Newton. President Gentle is the puppet for Unspecified Services Chief Rodney Tine, who was the mastermind behind the Great Concavity, an area in what was formerly Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and upstate New York, that was ceded to Quebec and is now used as the place where the O.N.A.N. dumps all of their trash. The Great Concavity has caused irrefutable harm to Quebec, polluting the area so deeply that people are now born without skulls and there are hordes of giant ferrel hamsters that rule the Great Concavity. Did I mention that President Gentle came to power after President Rush Limbaugh was assassinated, presumably by the A.F.R? Also, the novel takes place in the “Era of Subsidized Time,” where the Gregorian calendar was swapped out for corporate sponsors. Most of Infinite Jest takes place in The Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment, which would probably be around 2015 in the “Before Subsidy” nomenclature.
The plot of the novel is vertiginous and difficult to follow. But, I would argue that this is where the brilliance of Infinite Jest lies. The plot is intended to give us a deeper insight into the psyche of the characters being profiled, as opposed to the psyche of the characters driving the plot, as is the case in most novels. Wallace is using the absurd backdrop to examine the lives of the characters and how they are coping in a satirized, but oddly recognizable, neoliberal, postmodern world.
Infinite Jest, while incredibly long and at points unwieldy, boils down to be a satire on living in a neoliberal world. The O.N.A.N. is essentially N.A.F.T.A. on steroids. Corporations can now buy the year. Shadowy companies and P.R. firms seem to run the government. The government has allowed a garbage company, ATHSCME, to destroy one of the most beautiful parts of the nation, for a profit. The people in this society have largely been forgotten. They turn to drugs and addiction to cope with the reality of a world where monopolistic companies run the world. Even at E.T.A., the students’ wills are crushed, their childhood is destroyed, and they are left as hollow shells all in service of joining “The Show,” or the professional tennis circuit where they will become nothing more than mass entertainment.
In this world of addiction, where the characters are broken, there is Alcoholics Anonymous. While most of the book is laced with sardonic irony and caustic sarcasm, recovery is something that Wallace views with deep reverence. There is almost a spirituality to his writing on recovery programs and addiction more broadly. This is also where Infinite Jest shines brightest. Wallace, who during the early 1990s, spent a period of time at McLean’s and a recovery house due to his struggles with marijuana, alcohol, and television addiction, writes beautifully on the subject of drug and alcohol addiction.
One of the most poignant sections of the novel follows Don Gately, the live-in Ennet House staffer, who is also struggling with recovery. One of the steps in AA is to give oneself up to a “Higher Power,” whatever that may be. But for Gately, when he gets on his knees and tries to pray, all he experiences is “an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with.” In brutal detail, Wallace outlines Gately’s daily turmoil in recovery. He describes how once the numbing effects of booze and drugs exit the system, one then has to deal with all of the mental struggles that caused the addiction in the first place. All of the pain and dark memories come bubbling up, engulfing the entire soul. He describes how recovery is not as simple as putting down the bottle, but is also an eternal battle against one’s own demons.
Wallace’s writing on addiction and recovery is heartfelt and painful. It is also incredibly illuminating. But while his writing on substance abuse and addiction is interesting, I find particularly interesting his discussion of television. In Infinite Jest, broadcast TV has been replaced with InterLace TP cartridges, which is essentially if Netflix constantly delivered VHS tapes that included news broadcasts, movies, TV shows, etc, all of which could be played on a computer-like device that also served as the internet browser and telephone (which has a weird FaceTime/Zoom feature that stresses people out). People mindlessly watch these cartridges all day and all night. They ominously linger in the background of almost every conversation in the novel and it is particularly telling that the villain of Infinite Jest is not necessarily a person, but a thing. It is “The Entertainment.”
To this end, Wallace said the following in a 1996 interview:
“Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise…And the tension of the book is to try and make it at once extremely entertaining and also sort of warped – and to sort of shake the reader awake about some of the things that are sinister in entertainment.”
The critique of neoliberalism, of television, of modern society along with the conversation surrounding addiction makes Infinite Jest a novel that is possibly more relevant today than it was in 1996 when the novel was first published. In 2023, a malaise around the neoliberal system has blanketed our society. N.A.F.T.A., big corporations, countless streaming services, social media, and Zoom calls all feel like facets of our lives that have failed us. Yet, they persist. They are too powerful. This malaise borders on a sense of impending doom, a feeling that permeates throughout Infinite Jest. And while Infinite Jest was derided for being a “Lit Bro” style novel in the 2010s and criticized in the 1990s by critics like the ever-reoccurring Inside Baseball figure Jay McInerney, it is incredibly prescient and laborious and beautiful.
Ultimately, Infinite Jest is an encyclopedic work that is the result of one man’s mission to understand and encapsulate the experience of our contemporary world into a single book. As such, this is not a novel to take lightly. I spent months reading Infinite Jest. At times, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the endless details and footnotes and use of thesaurus words and using “like” as a conjunction (e.g. “That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.”). The seasons changed as I was reading the novel and it never seemed to end. It felt as though I was never making progress. It was almost literary purgation: I was trapped in a book that seemed to be repeating on an infinite loop and I could not look away and I could not stop reading. But now, it is over.
Reading this book, while a gargantuan task, is a wonderful experience. It is almost of if my time reading Infinite Jest was an era of my life that has come and gone. This novel was always in the back of my mind, no matter what I was doing.
And now that I’ve finished Infinite Jest, I almost feel a little lost. I spent months inside the mind of Hal Incandenza, who feels an unimaginable numbness to life. I lived with Don Gately, amid his struggles to stay sober and his troubled past and his fever dreams. I experienced the life of Joelle van Dyne and her overdose and insecurities and complicated familial life. These people were my nightly companions. Wallace structured Infinite Jest in a way that I almost began to feel as though I knew these fictitious characters. They came to life through the vivid detail. And I, like, miss them already.