Speaking up for more

I want to finish Infinite Jest. Not just at some indefinite point in the future - I want to finish it as soon as I can.

It hasn't sapped my desire to do anything else like the titular "Entertainment," but it's coming really close to doing so. I can taste the end in each endnote read from the final page of endnotes. I can smell the end on each of the last fewer than 100 pages' breath as it puffs up with each page turn.

Good writing and a compelling story working with interesting characters (I feel like I can totally ID with a bunch of them, Hal (and, to some extent, Mario) in particular) aren't the only causes for this desire to see how it all ends. My drive to want to read the rest of this great (but slow to start) book comes from its sheer size.

The first few hundred pages were dull. I admit it. But that's just because they're spent ponderously setting everything - everything - in place. Those pages set up the important settings, characters, their situations, their basic characteristics, their relationships, various subplots, the very world in which Wallace set the story. And it's one rich world.

It's a richness that owes something to its being something of an alternate one to ours rather than one that's completely original. Especially from here in 2013, things like subsidized years seem within the realm of possibility - though the less likely unification of North America would need to happen first. If such a unification ever did happen, hopefully it would be under better circumstances than the Northeastern states and parts of Quebec becoming an impromptu dump for a failed garbage rocket. Though, whatever the reason for North American unification, I hope that Quebec would resiliently resist any attempts to be assimilated into the larger North American Nation.

In a shorter book, none of Infinite Jest's world richness would be possible. It just wouldn't blossom in the same hypnotizing way that it does here. That's why I feel like I can't wait to read the book's final 85 pages.