I finished this book the same day I completed my switch to a flip phone. So it was a timely read for me, given that and also given my quest over the past year to become less stimulated. The experience of reading Infinite Jest, the experience of chugging through the never-ending pages and footnotes, shores up a main theme of the novel: that there’s something to be had when you give up the pursuit of pure pleasure and that there’s something actually obscene - maybe even deadly - about indulgent bliss. The novel trains you to sit through boredom, to align yourself horizontally on the floor and scan through detailed descriptions of tennis drills and bed frames and geography and geometry and facial tics and insane tangents and other shit you don’t even care about, all until your eyes hurt. It trains you to sit through disgust and horror as DFW paints a vivid picture of the repeated raping of paraplegic girl by her father or describes how a chemical solution was required by child services to extricate the dried and congealed goo of a decaying stillborn infant from the bosom of its prostitute mother, who was in-denial about her child’s non-aliveness and carrying about her regular business for weeks in the hot August sun with the corpse pressed against her. Are either of these little images important to the overall arc the story? Of course not. But the voluminousness, the variety, and the anguish involved in reading the book seem to be the point.

Some of us have a difficult relationship with pleasure. Either we lack it or our lives are actively filled with pain, terror, and/or tangible, dreadful emptiness. We need something strong, something intense, something more. Some of us get tattoos because the barest hint of endorphins alongside the pain of the needle is the best feeling we can think of. Some of us drink and go to the gym (one of these being perhaps a bit more productive than the other) not really to feel pleasure, per se, but to seek self-obliteration, the forgetting of the self in either drunken stupor or hard-earned sweat. Some of us go on long, grueling hikes, not for the views, but in order to create for ourselves an artificial sense of relief when they are over. This book is for us. The quick hit of an airport novel does nothing for us. We are hungry. And through the mixture of joy and pain, we can extract something more filling than bare pleasure itself.

Infinite Jest is not a ‘pleasure to read,’ but it is actually a funny book. DFW is insanely imaginative. Sometimes it’s laugh out loud funny, sometimes chuckle funny, and sometimes groan funny. It sometimes smothers itself in layers of irony. And sometimes it’s not really all that funny at all. This is a book that contains the word “chink-ishly,” for example. I understand that the more eyebrow-raising passages are usually written from a character’s own racist perspective, but from the amount of times ‘nigger’ is used in the book (which was published in 1996), you can tell DFW was having a little bit too much fun, ya know?

It’s a very conservative book, to be clear. There’s this theme in the novel about a parental influence that’s needed to discourage people from seeking pleasure all the time, kind of like the role the novel takes on for the reader. (There are several characters in the novel who have long recollections of their obese, childish, alcoholic, drug-addicted, TV-absorbed, abusive, overly-nice, and / or neglectful parents that were unfit to fulfill this role for them.) The novel strongly implies that people need a set of instructions to which they can submit. In AA, which features heavily in the novel, newcomers are given various ‘suggestions’ and told to ‘just keep coming,’ ‘submit to your higher power,’ and ‘take it one day at a time’ even if they don’t think it works or hate the trite cliches or think it’s a waste of time or think they can handle their addiction on their own. But, when they simply follow the instructions of people with more sober-time and just put their head down and do what they’re told, suddenly, like magic, they start to not even desire the substance they were so addicted to before. Almost against their own will, they become changed for the better. DFW seems enamored by this dynamic. And the political implications of this, that the state needs to be this parental influence, to forcefully guide people into being more responsible, are a little eyebrow-raising as well, perhaps?

As an example: the novel’s views on marijuana are a little extreme, maybe purposely and ironically extreme (?), but extreme nevertheless. The incredibly poignant scene with Kate Gompert in in the psychiatric hospital is absolutely ruined when she attributes her depression to a weed addiction. I mean, I know it fits with the theme or whatever, that even the uninhibited enjoyment of ‘benign’ pleasures like weed or TV can be destructive, but, I mean, come on? Wallace starts to sound like Richard Nixon.

And the whole thing starts to seem a bit backwards. The novel is very focused on the individual’s struggle to combat the pitifulness and cowardliness of addiction, including addiction to hard drugs and alcohol but also addiction to weed and ‘interlace cartridges’ and consumer products and consumptive choice. It has characters who are made vacant and stupefied by their addictions, rendered ghastly and inhuman, and it also has characters who persevere valiantly through pain, withdrawal, and temptation. But what is the system that generates these addictions in the first place? Why are many consumer products designed to be addicting? Why do people find themselves in situations where they’re so alienated from any kind of purpose or fulfillment that chemical pleasure seems to be the only thing worthwhile? I’m not sure how Wallace can satirize commercialization, consumerism and over-consumption, and then say that the solution is for each individual to be trained to have a strong will in order to keep all that from corroding their psyche. If the state needs to protect people from uninhibited pleasure, shouldn’t it try to combat the source of the onslaught of stimulus itself? What about the actual powers, incentives, and systems that created the situation in the first place? Isn’t capitalism the ultimate pursuit of pure pleasure, pure gain, pure profit against all else? Isn’t it the apotheosis of the unrestrained hedonism he rejects? I’m with him in that we all need to have the will to say ‘no’ to stay sane and healthy in this world, but we shouldn’t over-emphasize the role of character in addiction, and under-emphasize deprivation, disenfranchisement, and methods of control.

I liked the book though. Infinite Jest is a novel brave enough to say: “people watch TV too much nowadays.” And you know what, maybe they do. Maybe they should pick up a book. Probably not this book, to start. But a book, at least. 7/10.