Review by blueisthenewpink - Infinite Jest

blueisthenewpink 's review for:

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

5.0

challenging slow-paced

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Wow, was this book frustrating! Including the end. A thousand pages of parallel, sometimes intersecting stories, endnotes¹, characters speaking in nonstandard English, some others using a superstandard variant, with unnecessary grammar nazism, all extremely dysfunctional, with some truly horrific stories in their lives, some absolutely abysmal events the reader has to witness irl.

Often, it was like wading through mud, waist-high. It is not a story, it is life. With all its complexity, revolting scenes and quite depressing hopelessness. Also, it was very engaging, I was deeply interested in these stories, most of them at least, still, it was too dense to ever read it quickly².

Following the timeline with all these crazy names for the years proved to be so challenging that I simply gave up trying to understand the order of events after a while. It all started to converge towards the end though and

despite not getting any closure,

the interconnectedness of these fates became clear.

I loved the sense of humour though. Things like “you have to take what Orin says in a fairly high-sodium way” or “Not exactly the swiftest ship in Her Majesty’s fleet in terms of like upstairs” and “the parents apparently being not exactly the two brightest bulbs in the great U.S. parental light-show” not to mention “Pemulis invites Ingersoll to do something anatomically impossible.”.

And the vast vocabulary.

When narrating from one's point of view, even though it's 3rd person singular, the text becomes like that person's thoughts, with mistakes, with forgotten words. Not to the level of unreadability, but the pace, the choice of words tell that we are inside of this character's head now (often not the happiest places).

Most of the text is this way, but towards the end, there is a sudden switch to 1st person singular at times, making it much more personal even though we heard all this character’s thoughts in the 3rd person before. It turns out to be a completely different experience, more involved to the extent that it feels like being trapped in this character’s situation.

It hasn’t always been easy to read, but I grew to care about most of the characters and I definitely salute the accomplishment. I haven’t enjoyed it as much as Joyce’s Ulysses, but I appreciate it just the same.

¹ one hundred pagesª of them (b)
ªlike this
(b) 388 altogether*
* one of them 8 pages long with 6 sub-endnotes, another 5 pages long

²with the only exception of

Don Gately's standing up for the tenants of Ennet House, and the parts after, when I really wanted to see whether he would be okay. And of course I never quite knew. Or I did. But not explicitly.

Content Warnings