69: Infinite Jest

The Infinite Jest procrastion watch is officially over, because I finished reading the book last weekend.

I don't know if I can say that I liked it, although I did find the book compelling. The final chapter's abrupt ending felt almost like a betrayal, especially after the book forced me to jump ahead to the end, over and over again, in order to read the book properly. I knew already that David Foster Wallace is famous for his footnotes and endnotes: when I was in college, I read Shipping Out aka A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, an essay for Harper's that, at the time I first read it, made me want to sprinkle footnotes all over everything like too much salt. (I'm content now to settle with too many em-dashes and parentheses.) Infinite Jest's endnotes simultaneously force the reader into the headspace of whichever character has the book's attention, and force the reader to remember that they're reading a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Sometimes the endnotes manage to serve both those purposes at once. The annoying thing is that DFW was an incredible writer, and knew it.

I found the endnote technique most effective whenever it bunched together half a dozen endnotes in a single paragraph, usually stringing together translations for street names for drugs into their proper pharmaceutical brands. The act of flipping to the endnotes becomes a distracted staccatto back-and-forth, trapping the reader in a kind of halfway state, unable to invest fully in the narrative, and annoyed by the constant reminders of the substances on which DFW's characters depend in order to maintain some sort of grip on the world.

Inevitably, the grip slips. Most of these characters live in a halfway house, stringing together minutes and hours and days until they can cash the time in for sobriety chips. Or else they lose all control, succumbing to the drugs, or whatever else they're addicted to, until the addiction either destroys them or spits them out. These characters are stuck living life minute by unendurable minute, trying to hold on to the promise of any future that might be better than their bleak present. What better reason to keep checking those endnotes, other than the hope that maybe this next one will solve all your problems? More often than not, the solution's just another drug, disappointing because it's such a brief respite, and yet a relief because at least this time the endnote isn't pages long in tiny font.

For all DFW's unflinching empathy toward the addicts who populate the pages of the book, he's still unable to extend full, intersectional empathy to the characters who aren't just addicts. I believed the writing whenever Joelle Van Dyne, one of the book's rare female characters, appeared to be in need of a fix; she's a cocaine addict, and the book includes a scene in which she intentionally overdoses that felt far more believable than the moments that revolve around her appearance (which becomes the crux of a crucial plot device/MacGuffin: she's objectified, and then the book makes that objectification both literal and potentially universe-altering). Another character, a trans woman, is referred to by the gender assigned to her at birth, even and especially when the book recounts events through her eyes.

The fullness of DFW's empathy is reserved primarily for Hal Incandenza and Don Gately. Hal and Don are both tragic figures whose destinies are prewritten for them, simply by nature of the way the book's chronology is laid out for them; the tragedy for both characters–and the reader–is that we don't realize that we've read their fates until many pages after the fact. For Hal and Don, the approach works, because they're both more than and reduced to their respective addictions. For most other characters, the foregone conclusions bend toward farce. Often they're Othered, both by the book and by the characters around them, and in their Othering they become the punchlines to a series of jokes.

The Othering speaks to the thread of alienation and extreme loneliness woven throughout the book. At its best, I felt as though I'd been given a window into someone else's psyche, and I felt both repelled and compelled by the view. I'm glad I read the book. I'm annoyed by it. And most of all, I'm annoyed that I feel the desire to return to it again. I've read it once, and I could tell you what it's about, but I feel like I need to live in the cyclical tedium with the characters again in order to fully understand it the way that they do.

What I talked about:

For Seeing & Believing podcast, Kevin and I reviewed The Starling Girl, an indie movie we missed earlier in the year that we wanted to catch up with. Kevin paired it with a Watchlist pick of Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone, which I liked very much. I feel like we could have kept talking even longer than we usually do about both these movies; it was a good conversation, and we just scratched the surface.

I also joined Josh Larsen and Kathryn Freeman at the Think Christian podcast to talk about The Little Mermaid, in anticipation of the 2023 remake's release over on Disney+.

What I'm reading:

Technically, this is also a "What I wrote" blurb, except it's about what I'm going to be writing (and reading) starting in a few weeks. We've mentioned it on the podcast, but Seeing & Believing is about to change. We're about to hit 400 episodes, and that's a good round number. Kevin and I have decided that we'll stop recording weekly podcast episodes then. This isn't the end of Seeing & Believing, though–we like working together, and we like reading and listening to each other's criticism, so we're launching a Seeing & Believing newsletter. If you've enjoyed listening to the podcast, or if you've enjoyed reading any of my reviews, I'd love it if you'd subscribe. I'm excited for this new chapter.