Don Gately's exhaustive discussion of Boston Mass. AA and their different meetings and going to different groups for "commitments" and all that remind me of something. Hal and the Enfield Tennis Academy's players going around for tournaments. Yeah, on the surface, the latter's competitive while the former's more collaborative and social. But the tournaments, as described in the book, are definitely social and involve a lot of bonding between members of ETA's away team.
Wallace has Gately go into such painstaking detail about the different cliques within the AA group, though, it's hard to not see that bunch and Hal's ETA milieu as mirrors of each other. Getting into "The Show," the full-on pro circuit, seems to be pretty high stress and something that drives a lot of the pro tennis players discussed in the book to drugs or booze. At the very least, both the AA group and the ETA crowd are in the "In Here" to the "Out There" that is everything aside from either. In that sense, both are closed worlds.
As the plot slowly gets dredged up (we're talking hand crank-driven dredging here), it's becoming clearer and clearer that Infinite Jest is about its characters far more than the socio-political intrigues that make up its plot. To that end, it's definitely a book about these characters inner lives, about the contents of skulls that a Danish prince might have, in an earlier time, held aloft and soliloquised to. But can we really know these Yoricks?
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