Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately--the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws.

The "Infinite Jest" of Infinite Jest--that video cartridge that causes a viewer to become so entertained, they give up all will to live and become catatonically glued to their screen, even to the point of starvation and death--is called, by the Quebecois separatists and American operatives who search for it "the Entertainment." Entertainment is the subject--if anything can be said to be the subject--of this sprawling novel, itself a kind of Infinite Jest, meant to draw you in and keep you trapped. Like Finnegans Wake, it loops, bringing you from the "end" to the "beginning." The cycle starts afresh, and good luck getting out of it.

Although Infinite Jest sprawls over 1000+ pages and perhaps a couple hundred characters, it seemed to me that, ellipse-like, it has two main foci: the Enfield Tennis Academy, perched on a high Boston hill, and Ennet House, a recovery house for substance abuse addicts at the base of the very same hill. (The similarity of the names is surely no coincidence; maybe someone's written about what it means for the tennis kids to be "in" the "field" while the addicts are "in" the "net.") Enfield is the home of Hal Incandenza, whose father James, former head of the academy and amateur filmmaker, created the Entertainment prior to his suicide. Ennet is the realm of Don Gately, a recovering addict and warden of the halfway house.

The irony is that Enfield is as filled with addicts as Ennet: Hal and his pusher accomplice Michael Pemulis have saturated the academy with dope, and Hal himself is hopelessly addicted. The only difference, except that of class, between the academy on the hill and the halfway house beneath it is that the residents of the halfway house are in recovery. Quietly courageous beefcake Gately is, perhaps, an alternate version of Hal who emerged in different social circumstances; no coincidence, I think, that it's Don to whom Hal's father appears, in a hospital-induced fever, like Hamlet's father's ghost. ("A fellow of infinite jest," after all, is Hamlet's description of old, dead Yorick.)

Drugs and sports are both a kind of entertainment. The big theme of Infinite Jest, as I understand it, is the way we can be betrayed by the pleasure centers of our brain. Entertainment intensified becomes competition, becomes addiction; "The Entertainment" is a symbol of the harms we visit upon ourselves in the name of having fun. The novel emphasizes this, I think, in a million little ways. The new supranational order that forms the novel's political backdrop is called the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N., a rather crude but on-theme joke about Onan, the figure known for being the Bible's most infamous masturbator. And the president who presides over this order is a former crooner named Johnny Gentle--DFW probably would not have been surprised by the number of 21st century world leaders, from Trump to Bolsonaro to Zelenskyy, who got their start as television actors. 

The politics-as-entertainment bit is underscored by Eschaton, the tennis-slash-nuclear-holocaust game that might be the novel's most enduring image. In one way, Eschaton is a classic Borgesian "map vs. territory" joke--by hitting a player with a ball, are you striking against something that exists in the world of Eschaton, or something outside of it? When it snows on the Eschaton map, is it snowing in the Eschaton world?--but in the context of the book as a whole it's another instance of geopolitics getting mixed up with the muddiness of entertainment. The consequences of this muddiness in the world of Infinite Jest are grim: New England has become almost entirely a toxic wasteland. The need to be entertained, too, opens up opportunities for capitalist grifters: in this world, years are named for corporate sponsors; Infinite Jest takes place mostly in the "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment."

Infinite Jest is so capacious, so many-layered, has such an anything-goes spirit, you would think it wouldn't be able to surprise you. But I was genuinely surprised by the appearance of James Incandenza's ghost, or "wraith," who, we learn in the novel's late chapters, has been hanging around trying to push Hal toward some kind of personal growth. James, we learn, created "the Entertainment" for Hal, as a way of drawing him out of himself. Hal is cerebral, a skilled talker and wordsmith, but feels very little; he had no relationship with his father to speak of and feels nothing for his mother, not even anger at her sexual affair with the academy's #1 teen star. The immense world of Infinite Jest is suddenly contracted, and it becomes--as maybe it always was--a story about one dysfunctional family. The alcoholic James was never able to communicate with Hal when alive, but in death he hopes to pass some wisdom onto Hal at last. Entertainment, Wallace says, is good. It can be perverted and misused; we can become overly attached to it, even addicted; we can become blind to its boundaries, but ultimately, it allows us to connect with the world. To feel something.

I have to admit, I'm not a huge fan of the way Wallace writes. I have a soft spot, actually, for the sections of Infinite Jest (and in his short fiction) where he tries on other voices, ventriloquisms, even when they sometimes border on--shall we say--political incorrectness. He had that gift really great writers have of being able to listen to people and reproduce the particularities of their language. But his own natural language strikes me as flaccid, recursive, overstuffed with numbers and abbreviations, with jargon and bad jokes. It has a natural ugliness that accurately reflects something contemporary, but which is ugly nonetheless. But it's perfectly pitched for this weird, wild, unwieldy story, and I felt more captivated by it by the end of the two weeks it took me to read Infinite Jest. Like Brent suggested, I had to flip back to the first thirty pages to really understand the import of the ending--which leaves Don and Hal both largely incapacitated, and the wheelchair assassins of Quebec about to descend on the tennis academy in search of the master of the killer tape. I could feel Wallace inviting me to begin the novel again, to get caught in its net. But I'm ready to move on to something else.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

She could no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present grief.  Tomorrow would bring its own trial with it, as would the next day, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be be borne.  The days of the far-off future would toil onward; still with the same burden for her to take up and bear along with her, but never to fling down; for the accumulating days and added years would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame.  Throughout them all, giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of a woman's frailty and sinful passion.  Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast--at her, the child of honorable parents, at her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman, at her, who had once been innocent--as the figure, the body, the reality of sin.

A student that I deeply respect told me at the end of the year that she hadn't enjoyed reading The Scarlet Letter.  That's sadly typical, I think--even students who like reading don't often like to read Hawthorne, who is an accomplished stylist but also a ponderous and stuffy one.  I told her that I had felt the same way about it when I read it in high school, but it wasn't until I was an adult that I learned to appreciate it, when I realized just how profoundly weird it is.  The lurking Satan-allied witch Mrs. Hibbins, the comet shaped like an "A" in the sky, the destructive, yet difficult to describe force that Chillingworth exerts on Dimmesdale--it's all bizarre.  Of course, we live in a world where Hester Prynne's "A" has become the dominant image of social ostracism, but for those who can approach The Scarlet Letter fresh, it's am immensely rewarding book.  (And much better than The Marble Faun.)

Moreover: Is there any book by a male writer in the history of American literature with a female protagonist as strong as Hester Prynne?  The letter on Hester's breast is meant to reduce her to a symbol, a warning sign--to make her a literary trope instead of a person.  Reading it now, I was struck by how that ostracism, by alienating Hester from her society, makes her a better person:

For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticizing all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church.  The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free.  The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.

Hawthorne is pretty down on Puritan society, and in part Hester's strength is a result of her alienation from it.  But comparing her with the Reverend Dimmesdale, her partner in crime, reveals just how strong she already is.  As he yearns to unite his public face with his private one, and undergo the kind of atonement that keeping his adultery secret has denied him, he withers into a sickly mess.  Many critics have noticed the flipping of gender roles here, and I think that's an important contrast even to today.  How many films and television shows have you seen just this year in which a principal female character, no matter how strong she otherwise may be, requires saving by another male figure?  Here, Dimmesdale clings to Hester when he can, so much that the rescue plot--their escape back to the Europe--is her plan, and it only fails because of his own weakness.

Ultimately, the symbol of the "A"--and the symbol of Hester--refuses to remain unchanged.  Her life of solitude and hard work causes some to interpret it as "able," and critics have subsumed many other "a" words into it as well.  (My favorite is "America.")  Hester herself is something of a Moby Dick--the symbol that keeps slipping in meaning.  But Moby Dick can do it because he is inscrutable, unconquerable; Hester can do it because she exerts ownership over herself in a way that Dimmesdale never could.  She refuses to be inscribed upon, to be turned into text, and in this way The Scarlet Letter is a powerful assertion of individualism against the community.

Here's Brent's review from earlier this year.