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I don't know if there is anything I can say to con anyone I think should really read this book--and at this juncture in my life I'm leaning toward ... (show more)
I don't know if there is anything I can say to con anyone I think should really read this book--and at this juncture in my life I'm leaning toward that being everyone--into doing so. There are so many articles out there at this point, written both before and after Wallace's death, that there is little I can contribute to an already vast accretion of accolades for a work which will for some time, I think, suffer people pawing through it, hoping like gold diggers to discover hints of what was to come in Wallace's personal struggles with depression.
I was in a position to do just that, since I only came into contact with the book as a function of his death--a day after Wallace's suicide, I received an angry email from an old high school teacher informing me of this fact, with no explanation. So I found the book, had it shipped to Japan, and disappeared into it for hours at a time when the country and culture I felt so very much marooned in receded enough to let America, Wallace's America but also one I knew once too well, one which could be polished to too-perfect a sheen by my distance from it.
That is all I feel qualified to bring to bear on this review: my own very narrow angle of approach to the book and its impact on that angle. For the first 500 pages, maybe, I snorted at the gratuitously vague description I happened onto (long after purchasing it) on the back, which claimed Infinite Jest was about "the pursuit of happiness in America." What bullshit, I thought. Out of contempt for the tagliners, not the book or its author. And it's true, it's a copped-out phrase, but I don't know how else someone slapped with the task of summing this up would go about it. Because the pursuit of happiness here...is as fraught with loneliness as was the America I left behind, that I allowed myself to forget was so lonely. Again, my angle is very limited, but that was the single most necessary thing this book refused to let me forget or bury in nostalgia or culture shock or whatever else is supposed to assail someone who left everything familiar 3,000 miles away. In an interview on Salon.com Wallace says "There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone -- intellectually, emotionally, spiritually." I find it difficult bordering on impossible that somewhere within those 1,029 pages there is not an aha moment for everyone. For me, for example, it was the descriptions of the feeling that settles on us at dusk, that 4-5PM juncture where the shadows are long and footsteps hollow-sounding and you're not yet eating or cocooned in the unjudgmental night, but instead your day is ending, and you are forced to ask yourself how did you spend it, was it remotely worthwhile, or did you squander it, just like you could potentially squander tomorrow and the next day and the next...
That is just one moment, but it is there, for me, and there are so many thousands of others that can speak to so many thousands of other people. That's not WHY one should read the book, for those little aha moments. But that's the only way I know how to sell it to people in a way that might make them believe me. Something it's important for people to note, I think, is that contrary to Michiko Kakutani's assertions, the length and breadth of the book is not there to impress or sound stodgy or trumped-up or full of itself. Wallace doesn't drop phrases or words or references to make himself feel lofty and the reader like an ass. Pages up on pages of footnotes provide you with the information you might not already know (which covers a lot, given his attention to detail) but not in a condescending manner. He's giving you the tools because he wants to give you access to this, this real world that you are allowed, encouraged, to feel in all its realness, be it bitter or euphoric or literary or strewn with pop-culture references. He's not there to mess with you, or at least, if he messes with you, it's in a way that you need to be messed with. You desperately and truly need it, even if it hurts, and is at times difficult to read, not out of a density of prose but of feeling injected by that prose. Of all the injections you will receive in your life, this--wherever it comes from, be it from this book or elsewhere--has got to be one of the most important. This feeling. And your awareness of it. (show less)
