Early Book Review - Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace committed suicide about a year ago so I've been meaning to read some more of his stuff.  A while back I read a collection of his essays called Consider the Lobster and Other Essays and really liked it.  The best ones are the title essay about what happens to a lobster as it's boiled alive and another about his experience at the AVN Awards, the "Academy Awards of Pornography".  The latter essay is interesting in that it's written under two pseudonyms, as if two people wrote the article together.  Maybe I should do that with this blog and make up someone and attempt to write in a completely different persona.  That's actually something I can't do well as a writer, you know, put myself completely in the shoes of another character and not write it like it's me.

Anyway, back to Infinite Jest.  With my time in jury duty and reading afterward, I'm only at page 127, so it's not the fastest read, but in my defense, the print is really small.  So far, I'm fascinated and confused.  I would compare it so far to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (one of my favorite books) because it's kind of a sprawling world and there's a video that kills people, kind of like The Ring.  I guess I would also compare the beginning to Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man just because I'm kind of confused by it all.

On a side note, I wanted to challenge myself with Joyce but after the first chapter, I decided I needed to buy the Cliffs Notes.  The girl at the register at the bookstore was actually chastising me for needing them.  Can you believe that?  I can't imagine reading anything by Joyce without some kind of annotated copy or book notes or something.  There are a few reading companions to Infinite Jest, but they don't have a single copy in any of Minnesota's libraries.  I feel like it'll take some modern lit class to make students read the book before those companions make it into libraries, but he's dead now so that should elevate his work, right?

On another side note, I learned from The Man Who Loved Books Too Much that libraries have a lot of first printings of books and book thieves will often steal from libraries.  (Side Note 3: Elvis Costello's Everyday I Write the Book has just started playing on my Pandora.)  The copy of Infinite Jest that I'm reading actually is a first edition, but it's only worth $20 on eBay.

Back to the book.  A lot of it takes place at a boarding school specializing in tennis instruction and some of the students go on to become tennis pros.  Except the founder was also a filmmaker.  And it follows one of his sons, who likes to smoke pot, but only in private.  Very weird. 

And there are lots of drug references.  The number of prescription drugs I've used is very small, but this book is a catalog of every possible prescription drug that's ever been abused.  Each time a new drug is brought up, it gets its own footnote.  Wallace tends to have lots and lots of footnotes in his writing. 

And I'm going to quote an atheist joke from the book now, mainly because I don't hear too many atheist type jokes: "What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic?"  "You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog."

I can hear the groans right now.  But anyway, this was kind of a fun post to write.