On First Meeting Those of Infinite Jest

At the behest of a close friend, I've started reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. At over 1200 word-packed pages, this is a novel worthy of the word "tome." As such, I'll reflect on it in this blog whenever I've read enough of it to comment. So, for the next two months (give or take a few days), there will be some Infinite Jest entries peppered among those about the books from my Book List.

The first fifty pages of Infinite Jest (and, probably the rest of it) read like the frantic thoughts roiling through the minds of people in distress. People who are distressed by how they believe people perceive them, by waiting for a dope supplier, by being torn from routine, by a death in the family, by the brutality of broken homes. There's very little plot in these first fifty pages. But the characters that Wallace conjures up are incredible. 

Only a handful of pages in (let's be honest, once I had a grasp on what was even going on), I felt I could empathize with Hal. Although the book has a number of characters so far, Hal's more or less the protagonist, and he is definitely one whom I'd follow into the strange social-scape in which the book is set. 

However, because the book's so light on plot so far, Wallace's corporate-sponsored calendar and world (with notes of the post-apocalyptic) has only bled through the edges of the story so far. The book's setting has jumped from the American Northwest, to Arizona, to England, to Quebec, but in each there are hints that it's our world save for some occurrence that altered the way things turned out. 

It's daunting to know that so much of the book is left (plus, some 200 of the book's 1200+ pages are full of endnotes), but I feel like I need to find out how it all unfolds.