A review by wille44
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
4.0
The thing that struck me most about Infinite Jest was it's strong desire to be complex and readable simultaneously. Throughout the book Wallace can be seen grappling with this dichotomy, and impressively succeeds at striking a good balance. His sentences roll and meander further afield than most but his syntax remains consistent and straightforward. His vocabulary can trend towards the erudite or medical, but is rarely without contextual understanding. His novel is massive and fractured and meticulously interwoven, but his chapters are self contained and easy to read. His plot in mostly inferred and rarely spelled out, but that isn't really the point of the book anyway.
The core of infinite jest is addiction, but even more so why people are driven to addiction in the first place. The parallel threads of tennis academy and halfway house illustrate the impetus for addiction and the end result, and the reader is bounced back and forth along what is really this single thematic thread. Ennet House is the strongest part of the book, especially it's main character Don Gately. It's an absolutely heartbreaking deep dive into the often fatal lows of drug addiction, and the constant, exhausting battle of living in sobriety after reaching that low. Wallace's imagery and deep psychological dives into the minds of addicts are the harrowing highlight of Infinite Jest.
The tennis academy is a microcosm of modern life, living under stress at all times while trying to manage a seemingly zero sum existence, relationships, and one's own happiness. Here Wallace attempts to unfurl the loneliness, the isolation, and the familial breakdowns that can lead to addiction, and he tries to illustrate both the lure of drugs and an underlying message about the failure of entertainment to bridge gaps between people and heal us of our loneliness and unhappiness. If this all sounds a bit messy, it is. Wallace loves to provide incredibly detailed minutiae about his world, and while the drug recovery is gripping and thematically relevant, and his continental and assassin intrigue can be long winded but ultimately is what little concrete plot we are given, his third pillar, lengthy diatribes about tennis, wears thin. The tennis lacks the thematic weight or fun dystopian flavor of his other fixations and often drags.
The Incandenza family, the main characters of the tennis and somewhat main plotline itself, are all rather stilted and strange and often a bit too inhuman to be believable, although Wallace still manages to make their scenes work well, often through his supporting characters who are generally very funny and entertaining in their own right. In the end Infinite Jest has enough momentum to justify it's length and is actually fairly easy to read, and is certainly worth doing so.
The core of infinite jest is addiction, but even more so why people are driven to addiction in the first place. The parallel threads of tennis academy and halfway house illustrate the impetus for addiction and the end result, and the reader is bounced back and forth along what is really this single thematic thread. Ennet House is the strongest part of the book, especially it's main character Don Gately. It's an absolutely heartbreaking deep dive into the often fatal lows of drug addiction, and the constant, exhausting battle of living in sobriety after reaching that low. Wallace's imagery and deep psychological dives into the minds of addicts are the harrowing highlight of Infinite Jest.
The tennis academy is a microcosm of modern life, living under stress at all times while trying to manage a seemingly zero sum existence, relationships, and one's own happiness. Here Wallace attempts to unfurl the loneliness, the isolation, and the familial breakdowns that can lead to addiction, and he tries to illustrate both the lure of drugs and an underlying message about the failure of entertainment to bridge gaps between people and heal us of our loneliness and unhappiness. If this all sounds a bit messy, it is. Wallace loves to provide incredibly detailed minutiae about his world, and while the drug recovery is gripping and thematically relevant, and his continental and assassin intrigue can be long winded but ultimately is what little concrete plot we are given, his third pillar, lengthy diatribes about tennis, wears thin. The tennis lacks the thematic weight or fun dystopian flavor of his other fixations and often drags.
The Incandenza family, the main characters of the tennis and somewhat main plotline itself, are all rather stilted and strange and often a bit too inhuman to be believable, although Wallace still manages to make their scenes work well, often through his supporting characters who are generally very funny and entertaining in their own right. In the end Infinite Jest has enough momentum to justify it's length and is actually fairly easy to read, and is certainly worth doing so.