What can you say about something that you've been with and have intimately learned about for five months (especially when you thought it would only be a two month affair)?
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest cannot unfortunately live up to its title.
As I neared its end and felt the number of pages between me and the start of the at-first daunting endnotes shrinking until there was but one left, I kind of wished that the book could live up to what Wallace had called it.
Why would I wish for such a book to go on even longer?
Because so much of what happens in the book's main plot is left untold. Point of fact: The biggest event in the book, the presence of the AFR in the place of the Quebecois juniors at the fundraising ETA match is not given any page time. Not even in the slightest.
Looking back at what I can now proudly say that I've read, the best way to describe Infinite Jest's composition is that Wallace wrote a bunch of third person biographies/memoirs for characters living in a strangely familiar future and then shuffled them together, making sure to set a handful of events out of chronological order. It's not just the fact that the book's first chapter is chronologically its last (and thus, should be read after the grisly final Gately scene to really complete the book) that leads me to this analysis, but because as a whole it is a character-driven novel. The main plot, the struggle of various organizations to get the film that makes people neglect everything but watching it, is secondary to everything else going on. Instead, the characters populating this plot take center stage, just as if the book's main plot were some obscure historical event visible only on the periphery of old autobiographies.
Such analyses aside, Infinite Jest is a book that rewards its completion with so much more than a sense of fulfilment and accomplishment.
It leaves you with a feeling that you know the seedy, drug-laced, consumption-crazed (B.S.) 1990s more intimately than if you merely grew up during them in the confines of a small town.
It leaves you feeling that you know the characters that Wallace draws out.
Most of all, it leaves you feeling rewarded.
Not just because you've read one of the top 10 longest novels in the English language, nor just because you've read one of the most truly literary books in the English language. It leaves you feeling rewarded because, thanks to Wallace's incredibly detailed descriptions and characters, you have just experienced so much humanity that you are more of a person than you were when you first picked up this tome.
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