What Books Must I Read Before Reading Infinite Jest
1 Infinite Jest is ready in a nearly future in which the Gregorian calendar has been supplanted by a sponsorship arrangement. Most of the action of the novel takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment [Depend is a real brand of adult nappies]. Other years are sponsored by: the Whopper, the Tucks Medicated Pad, the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the Perdue Wonderchicken, the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, Glad, Dairy Products from the American Heartland and the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Piece of cake-To-Install-Upgrade for Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems for Habitation, Office or Mobile.
two The central plot MacGuffin, such as it is, is the search for the missing principal copy of a videotape known as "the Entertainment": this is a film, made by the avant-garde moving picture-maker James Incandenza, then ridiculously entertaining that anyone who sees information technology will be compelled to sentinel it over and over over again, and having lost all interest in eating, drinking and basic sanitation volition in due course elapse. Incandenza himself died when he killed himself by putting his head in a microwave oven.
iii The main settings of the novel are a tennis academy – Enfield Tennis Academy – and a halfway house for recovering addicts called the Ennet House Drug And Alcohol Recovery Firm ("redundancy sic"), which is next door to information technology. The chief counsellor at the halfway house, and one of the novel's main protagonists, is Don Gately. Gately is a very large man: "the size of a immature dinosaur, with a massive and almost perfectly foursquare head he used to amuse his friends when drunk past letting them open and close lift doors on". (Gately was based on a man Wallace met in recovery chosen Big Craig, who as well did the lift-door affair.)
4 The Acknowledgements page includes the following: "Besides Closed Meetings for alcoholics only, Alcoholics Anonymous in Boston, Massachusetts, as well has Open Meetings, where pretty much everyone who'due south interested can come and listen, accept notes, pester people with questions, etc. A lot of people at these Open up Meetings spoke with me and were extremely patient and garrulous and generous and helpful. The best way I tin think of to testify my appreciations to these men and women is to decline to thank them by proper noun." Wallace himself, as the notation doesn't mention, was a recovering alcoholic.
5 Wallace was very good at tennis, boasting in later life that he had been "nigh swell". His game peaked early on in high school, however, and his habit of overthinking every shot slowed him down. In his senior year he was ranked 11th in the Middle Illinois Tennis Association. The terminal tournament he won was the 18-and-under doubles at the Central Illinois Open in 1980.
6 The Us has been incorporated in the novel into ONAN, or the Organisation of N American Nations, consisting of the US, Canada and Mexico. Wallace shares Thomas Pynchon'due south enthusiasm for light-headed acronyms. Joelle Van Dyne, the radio host Madame Psychosis, was the PGOAT (Prettiest Girl of All Fourth dimension) before she was disfigured past acid and joined the UHID (Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed). Nosotros also come across the USOUS – a government bureau chosen the United States Role of Unspecified Services, and the AFR, or Les Assassins des Fauteils Rollents. The latter are a deadly fellowship of legless French-Canadian "wheelchair assassins". Moments before suffering a vehement death, their victims are said to "hear the squeak". The AFR are trying to obtain the "Entertainment" in order to use it as a terror weapon.
7 Though in that location'south no excuse for terrorism, the AFR have cause to be disgruntled. In the novel's world, the Usa – in search of somewhere to put its rubbish – has practised "experialism". That is, it has forcibly donated a whole scoop of its northern territories – Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and some of upstate New York – to Canada, and flung all its hazardous waste product into it. The Dandy Concavity (Canadians call it the Smashing Convexity) is at present thoroughly irradiated and dismal, overcast past a "drooling and piss-coloured depository financial institution of teratogenic […] clouds" held at bay by powerful fans. Across the concavity rampages an enormous, "tornadic" herd of radioactive feral hamsters, descended from 2 domestic hamsters named Ward and June, gear up free past a boy from Watertown, New York in the Twelvemonth of the Whopper.
8 Infinite Jest is structured, Wallace shyly confessed to an interviewer in 1996, to imitate a mathematical object called a Sierpinski Gasket. A Sierpinski what? This is a fractal construction created when you recursively subdivide an equilateral triangle into ever smaller equilateral triangles advertisement infinitum – so iii triangles fit into the primary triangle with their vertices at the midpoints of its sides, and in turn they subdivide into three more triangles, and so on. "Its chaos is more on the surface," he said. "Its bones are its beauty." So there.
9 The volume was very intensely hyped alee of publication – with the publishers sending out teaser postcards reading "Infinite Pleasure" and "Infinite Author". It was already into its sixth printing a calendar month afterward publication. Wallace himself didn't like the original embrace (which showed a blueish sky with clouds). He said it resembled the safety booklet on an American Airlines flight: "The deject system – information technology'southward near identical."
10 Non everyone loved Infinite Jest when it came out, though. Dale Peck (and then reliable a sourpuss that a book of his collected volume reviews was entitled Hatchet Jobs) called it "swollen, irksome, gratuitous and – perhaps particularly – uncontrolled". Harold Bloom called the volume "simply awful. It seems ridiculous to take to say information technology. He can't think, he tin can't write. There's no discernible talent […] Stephen King is Cervantes compared with Wallace." Bloom's own work is described in Infinite Jest as "stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit", listen y'all.
eleven Wallace invented a game probably fifty-fifty harder to play in the existent world than Quidditch. Eschaton, as played across vi tennis courts by his cast of pot-smoking maths-whiz tennis prodigies, simulates a global thermonuclear war. Lobbed tennis assurance stand up in for ICBMs. Lawn tennis shoes stand up in for nuclear submarines. Boom areas and damage are calculated by a statistical computer, and the hateful value theorem is evoked to the bafflement of muggle readers. Eschaton can exist seen being played in the video for "Cataclysm Song" past the Oregon-based indie band the Decemberists.
12 If you call back Infinite Jest – at ane,100-odd pages – is a long book, be advised that it started longer. Wallace wrote to a friend that "the fucker's cut by 600 pages from the first version". He proofread the book, according to DT Max's fine biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, "with loose pages of Space Jest spread out in front of him, watching the moving-picture show Beethoven over and again on a TV/VCR combo from Hire-A-Center". He claimed, variously, to take caught 47,000 and 712,000 typos. Beethoven is a motion-picture show about a St Bernard dog.
thirteen Speaking of dogs, among Wallace'due south more disgusting personal habits was that he allowed his pet dogs to eat food out of his oral cavity: "They pretend they're kissing you," he said, "only really they're mining your oral cavity for food." Wallace also liked to beverage coffee with teabags dunked in it.
14 Wallace was almost always photographed wearing a bandana. He wore it not every bit a fashion statement, but considering he was decumbent to anxiety attacks and intensely self-conscious about how much he sweated. He told a friend's child that he wore it to terminate his head exploding.
15 Infinite Jest has never been filmed. A number of its key scenes, however, have been recreated in Lego past an 11-yr-old. With the assistance of his English language professor father, Sebastian Griffith built models of more than than 100 scenes from Wallace's novel. You tin find his work at brickjest.com. It is unlikely to be bettered.
16 The (rather hostile) portrait of Avril Incandenza (AKA "The Moms") in the novel is based on Wallace's own mother Sally Foster. Avril is the co-founder of the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts. Sally was a stickler for right usage, and would mutter in supermarkets when she saw "X items or less" above checkouts. She minted the neologisms "greebles" (bits of lint) and "howling fantods" (heebie-jeebies), both of which announced in Wallace's piece of work.
17 The title, as any fule kno, is from Hamlet: "I knew him, Horatio, a swain of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy." It wasn't Wallace'due south simply engagement with infinity. In 2003 he published a book called Everything and More: A Meaty History of Infinity. A professional mathematician reviewing it described it every bit being "laced through and through with blunders of every magnitude".
18 Space Jest has been subject to some pretty detailed attention from fans. There is an enormous searchable Wiki, and on his website Space Jest by the Numbers, Ryan Compton has calculated that Wallace used a vocabulary of 20,584 words in the 577,608-word text. The start 35,000 words of the novel, he added, contain four,923 unique words, "more than well-nigh rappers but still less than the Wu-Tang Association".
19 Wallace killed himself in 2008, and suicide – along with addiction – is a major presence in the novel. It is ordinarily chosen "eliminating your ain map" or "felo de se".
20 The antic silliness of Infinite Jest masks an intense moral seriousness. Wallace (in an implicit rebuke to the "deviling pack" writers of the generation above) repeatedly spoke out against irony: "Postmodern irony and cynicism has become an end in itself, a measure out of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what'southward wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There'southward some nifty essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage." Interviewed shortly after Infinite Jest's publication, Wallace said he had "wanted to do something sad".
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/26/infinite-jest-david-foster-wallace-20th-anniversary-20-things-need-know
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