David Fosterwallah

[Dkipen at aol.com]

Dear Listermints:

I've been holed up incommunicado reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
for weeks, with my only outside lectation being tantalizing subject windows
of Pynchon postings I haven't had time to read the rest of. I just finished
my review, which is due tomorrow and should run in the LA Times next month
unless it stinks and they hate it and buy me off and never assign me anything
ever again. Yes, I'm always this rational about my freelance career. 
 Then it hit me. The witty, wised-up readership I kid myself subscribes to
the Times really exists only on the Pynchon-list. So I've designated you all
my focus group. If you've got a minute, please read the following and let me
know what you think. Please be cruel. Thanks.

                                       The Doorstop's Here

	A hellaciously gifted young writer named David Foster Wallace has just
written a huge new novel called ``Infinite Jest,'' and somebody really ought
to smack him with it. 
	It takes a special kind of nerve to write a book with roughly the mass of a
medicine ball, and then end it so abruptly and unsatisfactorily that the poor
reader perversely finds himself wishing it longer. But Wallace's limp coda
only disappoints because the preceding three-and-a-half inches of ``Infinite
Jest'' have succeeded so well at projecting a world of brain-scalding
complexity and authentically hysterical, drink-milk-at-your-peril humor.
	Here's Wallace doing a high-school tennis announcer whose ``quest for
synonyms for beat and got beat by is never-ending and serious and a continual
source of irritation to his friends...Lamont Chu disembowelled Charles
Pospisilova 6-3, 6-2; Peter Beak spread Ville Dillard on a cracker like some
sort of hors d'oeuvre and bit down 6-4, 7-6...Diane Prins hopped up and down
on the thorax of Port's Marilyn Ng-A-Thiep 7-6, 6-1, and Bridget Boone drove
a hot thin spike into the right eye of Aimee Middleton-Law 6-3,
6-3...Felicity Zweig went absolutely SACPOP on P.W.'s Kiki Pfefferblit 7-6,
6-1, while Gretchen Holt made PW's Tammi Taylor-Bing sorry her parents were
ever in the same room together 6-0, 6-3...''
	This is comic overkill of the foremost possible water, the sort of stuff
good for 
reading aloud to one's more indulgent friends -- ``Wait, just one more'' --
taking care to 
leave out expressions like ``SACPOP'' that Wallace doesn't see fit to explain
until 100 
pages later, in a slapstick set piece so funny you forgive him immediately.
The tennis 
passage is also symptomatic of another of Wallace's bad habits, namely, too
many 
characters too quickly introduced and never adequately differentiated -- not
a bad 
metaphor for the whole high school experience,, come to think of it, but also
a hallmark of too many fat books one finds in used-book stores with their
first couple of chapters thoroughly begrimed and the rest in near-mint
condition.
	``Infinite Jest'' should find a kinder posterity in just about any near
future except the hedonistic one where it takes place, sometime early in the
next century. Books don't count for much in Wallace's dystopia, the only one
mentioned being a copy of William James' ``Varieties of Religious
Experience'' long since hollowed out as a stashbox.
	Just how early in the next century this all is can't be pinned down, as the
Gregorian calendar has long since made way for Subsidized Time, which takes
the concept of commercial sponsorship to its logical terminus by
rechristening 2001 or 2020 A.D. or whatever, as the Year of the Perdue
Wonderchicken, the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, &c. This tactic is
mysterious at first, a scream when Wallace lets you in on the joke, and kind
of a pain by the time he beats it into the ground. Mercifully, he starts
abbreviating them after a while, then changes his mind and goes right back to
spelling them out.
	The novel begins with Hal Incandenza, its tennis prodigy antihero, suffering
a 
mysterious seizure during an Arizona college interview early in the Year of
Glad, as in 
trashbags. We then flash back to the rigorously regimented Enfield Tennis
Academy near Boston, Hal's and our home off and on for the bulk of the book.
E.T.A is the brainchild of Hal's late father, J.O., a man of high and wide
attainments, last but not least of them artfully cutting a large hole into
the door of a microwave oven, inserting his head, and letting it rip.
	J.O.'s place on campus and in Hal's mother's bed has fallen to a shady
relation, giving rise to the suspicion, reinforced by the book's title, that
what we've really signed on for is some hypermodern pastiche of ``Hamlet.''
This holds water as far as it goes, viz., until Wallace starts cross-cutting
between the Academy and its Enfield neighbor, a dilapidated halfway house for
dipso- and other maniacs. At this point, a fresh scenario pokes its head out
of the verbal thicket: that ``Hamlet'' is just a red herring, and that
Wallace is really concocting a sort of elephantine variation on ``Entropy,''
Thomas Pynchon's classic short story of contrasted chaos and asceticism.
              Wallace's other novel, ``The Broom of the System,'' has already
elicited cries of ``Pynchonesque!'' from diverse quarters, some of them, to
be sure, using the adjective in its usual sense, i.e., as reviewer's code for
``I didn't finish it,'' others so besotted with Pynchon that they see his
scat everywhere, but a few finding genuine similarities. Both men do share a
head for science, a stomach for gross-out humor, a great ear, and a soft spot
for the word ``maffick,'' but Wallace definitely has the lower opinion of
sloth.
	This emerges from a third thread in ``Infinite Jest,'' one that pulls it
beyond the 
realm of homage to either Shakespeare or Pynchon. Hal's father, during his
avant-garde 
filmmaker phase, has somehow made a movie so enjoyable as to be 100% fatal.
All 
viewers unfortunate enough to catch even a snippet of this lethally popular
production, 
which ironically shares its title with the novel, instantaneously live only
to see it again and again, lapsing into a persistent vegetative state from
which only drool-drowning will ever deliver them. All copies have now gone
missing, and the post-NAFTA Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.)
is ineptly racing to find them before they can fall into the Wrong Hands,
namely those of a splinter group of legless Quebecois separatists in
wheelchairs.
	If this starts to sound a mite daffy, it's also deadly serious. Like
``1984'' and ``A Clockwork Orange,'' both of which he unmistakably invokes,
Wallace's critique of a future society whose only grail has become the
hangoverless bender, the infinite jest -- the neverending Year of Glad --
rings so true and contemporary that it's almost late.
	In a way, of course, it is. Everybody from Neil Postman in ``Amusing
Ourselves to Death'' to 10,000 Maniacs in ``Candy Everybody Wants'' has
tilled this ground before. What keeps it fresh is Wallace's prose style, a
compulsively footnoted amalgam of stupendously high-toned vocabulary and
gleeful low-comedy diction, coupled to a sense of syntax so elongated that he
can seem to go for days without surfacing. At times he appears determined to
end each sentence with a preposition or not at all, with perhaps a slight
edge going to not at all. A Wallace sentence finally draws to a close amid
reluctance and relief, like a hitting streak. Half the time you'll want to
pitch the damn book clear into the next room -- with or without benefit of
doorway -- but the other half you can actually feel your attention span
stretching back out to where it belongs.
	Then, contrary to the occasional renegade suspicion, it ends. Little gets
resolved, least of all a reason for Hal's first-chapter seizure, although at
least three good guesses come to mind. Several well-developed characters and
one improbably touching romance all come to naught. Pynchonesque, some will
say, but with Pynchon, he's playing with the whole idea of narrative closure,
not thumbing his nose at you for giving a damn. 
	Finishing ``Infinite Jest,'' one feels less played than toyed with. Still,
better to be toyed with by a genius than pandered to by some second-rater
who'd write a few hundred pages and then give up. And Wallace has a toybox to
do Pandora proud.

My best, such as it is, to you all,
David