Book Club is just what it sounds like - a club to talk about books. A whenever it happens discussion between me and any number of friends (or any number of friends without me) on a specific book English class style. This week is Infinite Jest by the unfortunately late David Foster Wallace.

elfboy: Quick disclaimer: my internet sucks here, so I may get disconnected at various points throughout
SlimShaney: Okay…I’ll include that
SlimShaney: First a little introduction: I am Michael Shane, editor/founder/correspondent for this here magazine. Talking with me today is my cohort Jed Cohen also an editor/correspondent type. This section of the magazine will be a monthly discussion between me and Jed (and perhaps later more people) on a book we’ve read in the past month. This month (read - it took me eight months to finish) we’re discussing David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Anything you’d like to add from the start Jed?
elfboy: Hah, the eight months speaks not to slow reading, but rather to careful, close reading
SlimShaney: And the fact that I didn’t read it for about three months from January to April. A span in which my brain melted a little.
elfboy: As did all of ours
SlimShaney: So Infinite Jest is a mammoth 1000 page tome by Wallace. Jed wrote his thesis on this book, so I’m going to let him give the reader’s digest plot summary. Ten words or less (only kidding)
elfboy: Hah, well, I’ll do my best:
elfboy: Essentially Infinite Jest is the story of Hal Incandenza, a tennis phenom and lexical prodigy, and Don Gately, a former drug addict who now works at a recovery house. The story mainly focuses on two locales: the Enfield Tennis Academy, where Hal goes to high-school, and the Ennet House Recovery House, where Gately works and lives. Foster Wallace, in a nod to Dickens, includes scores of minor characters to supplement Gately and Hal, most of whom attend school with Hal, or are in the halfway house with Gately. Now, besides the character-based plots, there is an almost Clancy-like plot involving a videotape that is so pleasurable it kills its viewer. And the videotape, dubbed the samizdat, is kind of what ties Gately to the Incandenza family as well as to many of the minor characters
SlimShaney: I’d like to note, in a nod to Wallace, that I could be masturbating right now and looking at porn and no one would know.
elfboy: And in a nod to Mike’s E.S.P., that is exactly what I’m doing
SlimShaney: Unfortunately I’m not, as I’m in my parent’s dining room
elfboy: Anything else, Mike?
SlimShaney: No, I think that sounds pretty good.
SlimShaney: Okay, so first off, I’ll note that I started reading this book at Jed’s prompt because he said to me one night that it was his favorite book of all time. What originally drew you to the text? And what do you like about it so much now that you’ve read it a few times and written a thesis on it?
elfboy: Well, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve only read the book one and a half times
SlimShaney: Ah. The truth comes out, but respond anyway.
elfboy: So, I guess what drew me to the text was 1) praise from friends whose taste in literature I trusted, and 2) its length. I had (and still have) an attraction to super long books. I remember buying DeLillo’s “Underworld” while I was still in high-school just because it was long. And I didn’t read it until last summer.
SlimShaney: Here that, boys, Jed enjoys the length.
elfboy: Girth too, girth too.
SlimShaney: I, conversely, read mostly short stories. So this was a true marathon for me
elfboy: Right, which are, of course, a difficult thing in their own right. Well, this was the start of a new focus on novels for you, no? Or at least longer pieces.
SlimShaney: Well, I’m going to try both in writing and reader to tackle fiction pieces longer than 25 pages. But now let’s delve into the real critical reading of Foster Wallace’s book. We talked about this briefly in person, but I think we can hash out more here. Every character in Infinite Jest is either morally flawed themselves or has come from some morally flawed background. Child beatings, wife beatings, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, even the minor characters have weird things like their father’s disappearing into a MASH obsession. Is Foster Wallace saying that this is the world we’re approaching? A world devoid of any sense of the moral structure we have today? And if he is saying that there is a new moral code? Who exhibits it in the book? Who is our moral compass?
elfboy: This is actually something I talked a lot about in my thesis, as it concerns the illustrious critic James Wood, who I was actually writing against in my thesis. Wood bemoans the fact that there is a moral void in our contemporary literature. Or at least in certain contemporary literature, of which Infinite Jest is part. The fact that each character is flawed in some respect serves two purposes: one, it gives the reader an easy way of remembering a character, as the proliferation of minor characters and plot digressions can make it difficult to remember which characters are which. This is also a nod to Dickens, who was a notorious creator of “flat characters:” characters who have a superficial characteristic that allows them to be easily identified. This is the more practical reason for having the personal character flaws.
SlimShaney: What about the fact though that it really is every character? Everyone we meet in this book is fucked up. That added with the fact that this book is set slightly in the future (exactly what year is it? The book gives you clues, but I’ve forgotten) makes me believe that Foster Wallace believes that our society, each subsequent generation is going down the shit hole in every personal sense. And also, I should note, political sense. Do you think that’s what Wallace is actually suggesting?
elfboy: Though the book is set slightly in the future, I think he’s very much talking about his contemporary moment, which is the early- to mid-nineties, which seemed kind of the beginning of this heavily medicated, heavily analyzed populace. DFW has a tendency to exaggerate the case — to take everything to the nth degree. So he takes the phenomena of many Americans being in therapy or taking certain medications, or self-medicating (drugs) and just lets it spiral out of control. Hence, you get Pemulis, who’s clearly on his way to being an addict. Or Ken Erdedy, who’s addicted to a supposedly non-addictive drug, marijuana. And then I guess it becomes a behavioral thing rather than a physical thing. But I don’t think Foster Wallace actually believes Americans will descend into this hedonistic, fucked up place, do you?
elfboy: Addendum: Hal is also addicted to marijuana, but it’s something in the behavior, the ritual, rather than the actual substance
SlimShaney: I’m unsure. I haven’t read any of Wallace’s (or as the cool people seem to call him: DFW) other stuff so I can’t really speak to his tendencies. But generally, in a book set in the future where the author takes our present behaviors and pushes them out to the nth degree as you said, I think there is some part of the author that believes we’re heading down that road. I feel that there has to be at least a little bit of belief in order to write this whole thing.
SlimShaney: The drug and alcohol abuse I could understand as just a continuation of a problem, but what really gets me is all the other fucked up things he puts in there. Not just the addiction but the crippling emotional disorders and the walls put up between people and all the shit like that. That’s what really makes me believe the DFW believed to an extent that our society was on its way down the shitter so to speak.
elfboy: I mean, I don’t think Foster Wallace has a bright view of the future necessarily, but I also don’t think it’s as bleak as it might seem. We discussed this in person as well, but the most redemptive character in the book seems to be Gately, who has triumphed over his addiction. And ends up almost sacrificing his life for his charges at the Recovery House
SlimShaney: Perhaps the ignorance is bliss type character in that he is the BIM (big indestructible moron).
elfboy: Right, but then I actually don’t think he’s as ignorant as he could be. Even Joelle acknowledges that he’s not as dumb as he makes himself out to be
SlimShaney: Yeah. Absolutely. Especially because pretty much every time we’re told about Don Gately it’s from a third person limited point of view so everything we see and hear and think about Gately is really his own view of himself.
SlimShaney: Now here’s a question, who is our narrator in the book?
elfboy: Right
elfboy: Now that is an interesting question. One which I spent an entire chapter of my thesis on before abandoning and rewriting it.
SlimShaney: Obviously it jumps around a bit and we get a first person narration from Hal at times, but other times the narrator references an “I” that isn’t clearly a character in the story or any noticeable character
elfboy: The book is for the most part in third-person narration, but that narration is heavily infected by the character it’s focused on. You think there’s an “I” that’s not a character in the story? Like DFW himself?
SlimShaney: Or just some abstract narrator. There’s a point I believe towards the end when DFW is describing the players getting ready for the Canadian warm-up match to the What-A-Burger and he uses an “our” without referencing an I earlier in the piece (and Hal isn’t there). I’d try to find it, but everything’s impossible to find in this book.
elfboy: That is true, and that is a scene I can’t quite remember
SlimShaney: But I definitely think there is a narrator outside the characters who are actually in the book.
elfboy: That’s funny, because I thought the book was pretty self-contained. In that there were no extra-textual elements. Or that if there were, they rarely showed up. Though DFW does make use of meta-fictional devices, I don’t think he ever “shows his face” so to speak to comment on the characters.
SlimShaney: I don’t think it was distracting to the book, but it was something I picked up on (perhaps falsely). I’m trying to find an instance.
SlimShaney: I don’t think it’s necessarily DFW as this abstract narrator, but I think sometimes there is a character telling us the story who we don’t necessarily know, if that makes any sense. Like when they’re in the locker room, I felt like the narrator was there as another kid in the academy but not necessarily one we were familiar with. It’s a device some writers use to pull the reader into the action a little more.
elfboy: It’s certainly possible. I guess I saw that as a very subjective third-person narration. A narration that’s very present, and affected by the characters, but that isn’t necessarily another character.
SlimShaney: HA! I found the section. p. 964.
elfboy: Hah, okay, I’ll take a look
SlimShaney: I’m scanning it. Again I might have been wrong. Note to any potential readers of book - it might make you dilusional.
SlimShaney: p. 966 - third line - middle, “A couple of us remarked how Hal wasn’t eating the usual customary Snickers bar or AminoPal.”
elfboy: Right. I definitely see what you’re saying, and I’m trying to figure out who it is, if anyone at all.
SlimShaney: Yeah, point being that it could be no one. It could just be a device to bring us closer to the story.
elfboy: Okay, so I guess the book is still self-contained, in that DFW is never commenting from outside the story: the third-person narration is either heavily infected by the characters in question, or he’s masquerading as a character. Which also speaks to fluidity of narration in Infinite Jest: because even in that section you described, it kind of moves back and forth between a very present third-person and a more removed, but still infected narrator.
SlimShaney: I’d agree with that. He definitely doesn’t insert himself as a god type narrator.
elfboy: Do I dare drop the postmodern bomb here?
SlimShaney: Metastic!
elfboy: Hahah, exactly. But this seems a classic postmodern technique: having a fluid point of view or narrative distance that is constantly shifting.
SlimShaney: As well as his play with linear narrative. Very po-mo.
elfboy: Speaking of which, I love the random vignettes thrown in in the voice of a random character, like the broken argot of Clenette Henderson. I always wondered if he wrote a chronologically coherent version of novel, and then just cut things up and rearranged them
SlimShaney: Ha. That would be interesting. I once wrote a really time shattering short story that I did the opposite to. I turned it into a coherent narrative. It was much better. But, two good things to go on right there. First, the vignettes. I’m glad you brought them up. A lot of them I thought were funny and gave useful character information, but sometimes I was just like, why?
SlimShaney: For example, right after that section I just had you looking at, there’s an entire vignette on the trainer. What was the point of that? We end our story at the Tennis Academy with an anecdote about the trainer. A character we’ve barely seen before and never see again. Also I had a similar problem with the end of Gately’s narrative. I’m not saying that I need everything to be wrapped up nicely, but why end on random characters and stories? Gately and Facklemann’s story at the end just sort of confused me. I found myself curious as to why I was being told this when I already knew all of it.
elfboy: Well, I think the way I argued for them in my thesis was a tendency in postmodern literature for inclusiveness and egalitarianism. Basically, I don’t think DFW necessarily wants to privilege any character over another, although he invariably does, and he wants to give each of them a say in the narration. He’s obviously not thinking about furthering a plot point with the vignettes, though I do think they enrich “flat” characters.
SlimShaney: So you really think that’s the only reason he tells us the whole 100 page (maybe not 100) story about Gately and the Faxster? ‘Cause that’s a goddamn lie (<-- line from book for those who care)!
elfboy: You get their voice, and a snippet of their singular story. This is embarrassing, but I don’t remember the section you’re referring to.
SlimShaney: Cingular. The new AT&T
SlimShaney: I know part of it is right at the end. It’s literally how we end the book. From p. 972 on at least. Also pp. 934-938, and I believe the whole story starts back at p. 923 with the introduction of one Pamela Hoffman-Jeep and Gene Fackleman.
SlimShaney: Note to readers: I finished this recently. Jed since finishing this a while ago has also read Vanity Fair as well as others I’m sure. So forgive his forgetfulness. I’m a little more recent with the book.
elfboy: Right, I just stumbled upon it as well. Well, I here must admit my ignorance, I had completely forgotten about this entire facet of Gately’s story
SlimShaney: And it’s an interesting facet and vignette and everything. I just don’t understand why DFW chose it as our last image of him
elfboy: Looks like I’ma have to finish my second reading. Well, I think Foster Wallace’s reasoning there is that he’s eschewing typical storytelling. He sees no reason to end the story in a specific way.
SlimShaney: Yeah. I mean I guess that’s really the only reason one can have
elfboy: Especially since the book kind of doubles back on itself
SlimShaney: This is true. I guess I might just be a sucker for conventional story telling. Although, another problem with putting that particular vignette in that particular place is that I think we learn something important about Gately that changes his defense of Lenz and makes it seem even more “heroic” or whatever. So my point is why put something at the end that furthers the character? And if the answer is just “Because I’m fucking with regular methods of story telling” then I think that’s a little bit of a cop out. Then again DFW probably thinks I’m a cop out.
elfboy: Isn’t there something to be said for an experimental technique for its own sake? I think the other thing about Infinite Jest, which Wood also harps on, is the immense amount of storytelling in the novel. There are stories everywhere, whether they contribute to the overall story or not. So in this case, you get a story about Gately and Facklemann (a story I can’t remember), which clearly enriches Gately’s character, but does nothing to tie up the story
elfboy: Which also reminds of this Derridean visualization of the text as a tapestry. Though there are interrelations and coincidences, it’s anything but a coherent, linear thing. So you can have threads going off in different directions, etc.
SlimShaney: And as a teacher once told me “There’s a reason it will always be called experimental fiction.” We weren’t talking about DFW but there’s something to be said for that. While this book is great and interesting, it is in its essence experimental.
elfboy: Well yes, but I don’t think Infinite Jest, apart from the length, is inaccessible.
SlimShaney: Experimental does not necessarily mean inaccessible. But it does mean, a lot of the time, that it will be remembered more for its “daring” narrative techniques than its actual narrative.
elfboy: I agree, which is really a shame, because not only is DFW breaking rules of conventional narrative all over the place, he’s incredibly clever, he’s funny, he’s an extraordinary mimic. He’s doing things with language, drawing on Burgess and Joyce.
SlimShaney: I agree. I think he has some great things to say and notices some really interesting things about how people relate to each other (I especially like all the nicknames that he comes up with) and how the world is made up. But he does definitely hide it within the complex tapestry, as you said, of vignettes, footnotes, side characters, etc.
elfboy: Right right. I mean, I won’t discount the comment that what DFW really needed was a good editor, but I love it for its excessiveness. Just like I love Ulysses for its excesses, or Underworld for its excesses. Tom LeClair, who’s a big fan of postmodern literature and an ardent defender of DeLillo, wrote an entire book on this called “The Art of Excess,” which defended these novelists and their mammoth novels. Interesting stuff: he’s really into systems theory
SlimShaney: Did DFW even have an editor? I was very curious about that. Because I liked the excessiveness too, but to a point. Excessiveness for the sake of excessiveness I think is where I got a little annoyed.
SlimShaney: Note to readers: Jed is much more well read than me (than I?).
elfboy: Hah, not so much…if we start talking about Carver I’ll be completely outdone, and I’m not sure about the grammar.
SlimShaney: Well, interestingly enough, Carver does seem to have a similar view of the world in that everyone in his stories were alcoholics and divorcees and mysogynists and on and on.
elfboy: Misogynists
SlimShaney: Below me.
elfboy: Hahahaha
elfboy: Well, there you go, you can populate the longest novel and the shortest story with extremely fucked up individuals and still get art
SlimShaney: But we digress. Back to the book. As Jerry Seinfeld might say, what’s the deal with the footnotes?
elfboy: Well, there’s the interest in breaking up linear narration, as we discussed before
SlimShaney: Note to readers: Shortest short story ever: “For sale: Baby’s shoes. Never used.” - By Raymond Carver.
SlimShaney: But at certain points the footnotes are the actual narration.
elfboy: Right, which I also think might have been DFW acceding to his editor who thought the book was just too outrageous, and told DFW to relegate certain things to the footnotes, which are supposed to be supplementary information, but which occasionally provide much needed background
SlimShaney: Interesting. But the entire filmography of James Incandenza? I thought that was a bit much.
elfboy: Well, the cool thing about that is it’s a microcosm of the entire book. Read through it again carefully and you’ll see that the plot summaries of each of the films echo the plot of the book as a whole. I can’t remember who figured that out, but it works.
SlimShaney: And here’s one thing that really annoyed me actually. When DFW would footnote something with “[some character] did not really say this” or “These were not [some character]’s exact words.” I wanted to punch him in the face when he did that.
elfboy: Right. I’ve noticed trends like that in a lot of contemporary fiction. Eggers’ novel “You Shall Know Our Velocity” has a complete turnaround akin to that, where the secondary character contradicts the narrator’s entire version of events. It’s manipulative, yes, but I again think it’s a commentary on the subjectivity of storytelling, and it forces the reader to choose who he or she believes. Sort of like a choose-your-own-adventure
SlimShaney: Hahaha. I’ve heard that Infinite Jest was originally blocked out as a chose your own adventure but then they decided it was a little too hardcore for children. (JOKE)
elfboy: Hahah, you don’t think kids could get down to drug addiction and remorseless animal killings?
SlimShaney: See, I didn’t really see it like that and maybe it’s because I wasn’t looking at it from a critical point of view and more from the point of view of the type of writer that I am myself in that I just found it unnecessary. Most of the time when DFW would use a footnote in the way I described above, I thought it was obvious that it wasn’t the characters words and nothing really needed to be said. It just paused the story for me as I flipped to the back of the book and tried to find the footnote.
elfboy: I agree with that. I mean, I feel like you either look at it like an imposition, or kind of a funny thing. I was both annoyed and humored by it
SlimShaney: I suppose I was simply annoyed by those ones, but others I found funny. Though I always thought it impeded the progress of the story.
elfboy: Just a tip to readers: when I was reading through the book a second time, I had a bookmark for my place in the main text, and a bookmark at the last footnote I checked. It makes it much easier to flip back and forth.
SlimShaney: Note to readers: I did that without Jed’s advice on the first read because I’m smarter and more practical than him.
elfboy: Note to Readers: Mike went to Gallatin, where nothing is practical.
SlimShaney: About the remorseless animal killings, I felt like that part of the story was so much more violent than the rest, and in fact after that I thought the book got a more violent and vomitaciously descriptive. Did you notice that or was it just my imagination?
elfboy: I did notice that as well. I guess that’s what happens when the AFR gets down to business although the Antitoi killing happens in the first half, and that’s pretty violent. I believe there’s a railroad spike involved
SlimShaney: Yeah. I don’t know. Maybe it was just the fact that Lenz was killing innocent animals that made me more attuned to the violence in the rest of the story.
elfboy: Right right and there’s the scene when Gately accidentally kills that Canadian diplomat, which is a pretty macabre scene.
elfboy: Alright, should we wrap this up? ‘Cause I’m wicked hungry
SlimShaney: Haha. And we’ve been going on for almost two hours.
elfboy: I mean, I could talk about this book all day
elfboy: The question is whether people would want to read about it
SlimShaney: Probably not, but who cares.
SlimShaney: Okay, we’ll close it off here with one last thing. If you could talk to DFW, what would you say to him regarding Infinite Jest?
elfboy: What would I say…I guess I would say, “Stop wearing a bandanna in all your jacket photos”
SlimShaney: My jacket doesn’t have him in a bandana.
elfboy: Really? Then I guess he’s already beaten me to the punch
SlimShaney: Yeah. The 10th anniversery edition.
elfboy: Did you read the Eggers’ introduction?
SlimShaney: No. Not yet. And by not yet…I mean I probably won’t. Actually, maybe I will. It’s not that long
elfboy: I mean, it doesn’t really provide anything new about the book, but it’s interesting to read one respected contemporary writer on another. And “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” plays a lot of the games that Infinite Jest does, though it’s a little more self-consciously whiny
SlimShaney: Right. Another one I haven’t gotten to. But anyway, I would say to him, “Go fuck yourself you pretentious bastard.”
elfboy: Nice
SlimShaney: And I think that’s all the time we have today. Next time we’ll do what Jed, Wonder Boys?
elfboy: It’s certainly an easier read and I’ve been meaning to reread it, so if you’re down…
SlimShaney: I’m reading it now and enjoying so let’s do it. Till next time. Read Wonder Boys, too, and then this discussion might make more sense next time.