Infinite Jest

[Erik]

... who has read it and can weigh in on how enjoyable it was?

im about a quarter of a way through and geting cold feet. I have some other books that I KNOW are going to be great calling me, so Im seeking council on this.

[dave from knoxville]

... who has read it and can weigh in on how enjoyable it was?

im about a quarter of a way through and geting cold feet. I have some other books that I KNOW are going to be great calling me, so Im seeking council on this.

I read it twice. I would not say I enjoyed it as much as I appreciated. I chuckled occasionally, and his grasp of language is obvious in many passages, but enjoyed is not a word I would use.

I was recovering from a bad car wreck at the time, and stuck at home for nearly 6 months. No way I get through it during a work period.

[masterofsparks]

I just finished it a couple of weeks ago. It took me about 4 months to read, though I have the excuse that my obsession with the presidential election kinda ate up most of my time during a lot of that period. I'm glad I stuck with it. I will say from experience that the first 250 pages or so are the hardest, so once you pass that threshold it gets easier. I'm not really sure I understood what he was going for (especially after listening to his interview with Michael Silverblatt where he talks about the book in terms of fractals and how, structurally, it's a modified Sierpinski gasket), but in the end I was quite moved by the book. I can't say how much of that is my knowledge of DFW's suicide shading the book's dealings with sadness and death. In other words, I don't know if I would've had quite the emotional reaction if I'd read it before he died. In any case, I liked it enough to pick up a couple of his other titles.

[Ike]

I just finished it a couple of weeks ago. It took me about 4 months to read, though I have the excuse that my obsession with the presidential election kinda ate up most of my time during a lot of that period. I'm glad I stuck with it. I will say from experience that the first 250 pages or so are the hardest, so once you pass that threshold it gets easier.

Yep.  The first couple hundred pages are brutal.  After that it becomes, for me, the greatest book I've ever read. 

NOW, I readily and wholeheartedly see the "trick" of his work.  It is, at it's core, self-satisfying and ridiculous.  But the core of this book, the beating heart of it, is a character that is so pure and sad and willing to actually change that you can't help but want him to win.  Succeed.  There are two or three spots that made me put the book down and gain my composure, too. 

I've read it 3 times now.  It was an annual read for me for a while there.  The FIRST time I read it took me, on and off, about 6 months.  The 2nd time it took about a week. 

Girl With Curious Hair is very, very good as well. 

I was, and am, very upset at his death.  I know he's a joker,  I know that in my heart, but when someone creates something so moving, I can't help but be bummed.  I felt similarly when Helen DeWitt went bonkers.  Her novel The Last Samurai had a similar effect--just devastating at times. 

Wheelchair Assassins...jeez...

Ike

[Erik]

Thanks guys.

Yes the "fractal writing style" thing makes sense, as nuts as that sounds. I was just wondering if these pieces ever came together to form a moving whole. Because, when he does write some heart into the characters, it's pretty amazing.

ok. im going to give it an honest go.

[masterofsparks]

Thanks guys.

Yes the "fractal writing style" thing makes sense, as nuts as that sounds. I was just wondering if these pieces ever came together to form a moving whole. Because, when he does write some heart into the characters, it's pretty amazing.

ok. im going to give it an honest go.

I wouldn't say a traditional plot ever arises, but before it's all over you'll see that each of the pieces butts up against the others in some way or other.

[Ike]

Thanks guys.

Yes the "fractal writing style" thing makes sense, as nuts as that sounds. I was just wondering if these pieces ever came together to form a moving whole. Because, when he does write some heart into the characters, it's pretty amazing.

ok. im going to give it an honest go.

I wouldn't say a traditional plot ever arises, but before it's all over you'll see that each of the pieces butts up against the others in some way or other.

Absolutely agree.  People are on drugs, have to deal with that, and there's the ultimate drug out there (which isn't a drug, really) that kills you it's sooooo good. 

That's a horrible one-sentence synopsis of the book. 

Again, Cloud Atlas works in a similar way--something of a plot surfaces through 6 different narratives/plots.  If you have read that book, I'd say it's similar in that it requires some trust. 

I'm very, very happy people have read IJ.  For years I knew no one who'd read it. 

Ike

[J. Garbage]

It doesn't really conclude but just is its own thing that is huge and worth reading I think.

[akaJudge]

read it twice, and it's one of my top five all time faves.  yes, it's challenging and I read several other books while reading Jest, but none of them made me laugh as hard.  I'm not a Lit. major, so I won't offer any genuine criticsim, but I found that the book's rewards were well worth the effort.

[Bryan]

I read it twice, too. Despite its size, it pretty much demands a return visit, and is more fun the second time around.

It's kind of a young man's book - I don't know if I could have managed it if I weren't in my early 20's when I read it. Not that anyone's asking, but his essays are probably a better starting point. His fiction is all pretty difficult.

[Ike]

I read it twice, too. Despite its size, it pretty much demands a return visit, and is more fun the second time around.

It's kind of a young man's book - I don't know if I could have managed it if I weren't in my early 20's when I read it. Not that anyone's asking, but his essays are probably a better starting point. His fiction is all pretty difficult.

Yep.  Young dude lit., written for young dudes to read.  I pull it out periodically and read through passages, and as I get older it hits me very differently.  The terror of the Wheelchair Assassins, for instance, didn't really strike a chord with me when I was younger.  Now, though.  Fuck....that is some scary stuff.  Wheels creaking up behind you....

Ugh!

Honestly, read Cloud Atlas as well.  Honestly, here. 

[Pat K]

Read it, enjoyed it, and definitely know that if I read it a second time I would get much more out of it, but I just don't know if I'll ever be able to pull the trigger on picking it up again. As good as it is, it IS a slog.

[franks.]

Read it twice and loved it. The first hundred pages or so were kind of rough to get through but only because the book isn't exactly arranged chronologically. Yeah, there's that fractal structure, but I'm too dumb to understand that. I don't want to say anything about the plot or the structure because figuring that out is part of what makes it such a fun thing to read. I will say that Wallace puts a lot of heart into the characters in this book. And the more you learn about his life, the more some of the characters seem to be drawn from his experiences.

Once I'd finished it, I went back to see what I'd missed and ended up reading it all over again... over the course of a little while, with some other books read in between. It's going to take a few years before I can think about reading it again, though I'd love to. I was very upset about his suicide. Still am, honestly.

Anyway, Cloud Atlas is also a humdinger. The literary agent stuck in the old folks home by his sister (I think that's how it went) was my favorite little part of that.

A good, short book sort of in this vein is Spaceman Blues by Bryan Slattery too.

[mcphee from the forum]

It's both so funny and so sad. The portion of Infinite Jest about suicide seems really poignant considering his own death. I guess that's a very obvious thing to say. very sad. I guess that's obvious too. Here's the passage:

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

In a similar vein, I'd recommend William Gaddis's The Recognitions to anyone who enjoyed Infinite Jest. It's probably a more difficult book (much more difficult, I'd say) but it's equally funny and especially rewarding for multiple readings (just persevere through the first 100 pages or so and you're golden). The Recognitions is probably my favorite novel ever. I re-read it every two or three years.

[mcphee from the forum]

Oh and I wanted to chime in on Cloud Atlas a little: I thought that book was neat. But nothing much else. The structure is clever but it doesn't really work as well as I hoped as I read it. It would've been interesting if each section had informed/been informed by the previous/following a bit more. But the relationships felt pretty tenuous and forced to me. I enjoyed reading it, but the structure is so inventive I wish it had been used for a better book.