Throwaway characters

As I get further into River of Stars, I'm reminded of Infinite Jest. The plots of the two books are wildly different, their settings strike up a stark contrast, and the authors' writing styles are definitely at odds with one another (though also similar, at least in their using a distinct "oral storyteller" voice).

What really reminds me of Infinite Jest, though, is how Kay keeps introducing new characters (some of whom are only around for a chapter or less).

However, using these varied perspectives isn't working for me. As I read onward I'm interested in learning more about the world that Kay has created through the varied viewpoints in which he presents it, but aside from Ren and Lin I feel very little attachment to his characters. Conversely, I found myself getting invested in nearly all of Infinite Jest's characters.

The reason for this investment being that Wallace really shows you his characters' inner workings through the ticks and habits that each had. Unsurprisingly, Kay does that quite well with Lin and Ren, but the other characters that are introduced just aren't clicking with me. They are, however, building the book's world quite nicely. Though I can't say that it's a grand new world with interesting people in it.

Jest ended

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.

The ever-tightening iris wipe

What gives away the fact that Infinite Jest is winding down is its increasingly tightening focus. Aside from some brief looks into other characters, the story's bounced back and forth between Gately and Hal for the last 50 or so pages.

Though their sections remain distinct. Hal's are in first person, after all.

Actually, I still think there's something to Hal's sections being in the first person. The difficulty in nailing down what this choice of perspective means comes from the fact that Hal stars in a third person role in most of his earlier scenes throughout the book. With all the talk of J.O. Incandenza's films and his attempts to keep his audiences aware that they're watching something, it's safe to say that the shift to first person reflects Hal's growing awareness of being watched, of taking control.

That the first person sections happen mostly after Hal's "Abandon[ed] All Hope," (1064) suggests an anti-drug message. At the least, these things happening concurrently suggests that reality can only be seen clearly when the mind is drug-free. Though, the clarity of Gately's recovery bed reflections and Hal's move to first person at this point in the book adds a layer to that analysis. Instead of needing a drug-free mind to see reality, opened doors of perception are those that have been actively clouded and then unclouded.

100% real Jest

I was told that nothing in Infinite Jest is filler. But only on my way from page 911 to 934 have I seen this aspect of the book truly in action.

Dr. Wo, Gately's past, even the sentence-long section about Lyle levitating - they all get resolution while we watch Gately in his hospital bed.

That last one is the weirdest of all, though. If I'm right, while Lyle meditated he peeked in on Gately and licked his forehead. It's what Lyle does with those that come to him for advice. As far as I can tell, he takes it as a kind of reward. Or Lyle uses the sweat he licks from seekers' foreheads for some sort of psychic link or mind-meld with his subject.

In any case, when Lyle appears in wraith form along with J.O. Incandenza, Lyle's licking Gately's forehead is an act that holds a lot of promise. Although the book's main text is quickly running out of pages so I'm not sure if anything more will come of it. I'm also running out of endnotes.

So the big question for me right now is how can all of the book's 900+ pages of momentum be stopped in less than 50 pages? Some of the pages to come are no doubt as dense as a wordsmith's anvil, but even then 50 pages that dense wouldn't be enough to resolve everything that's been raised.

Curious density

Hal has gazed into the abyss and the abyss has very clearly peered back. That is the best way to summarize his experience at the purported NA meeting he'd gone to where he'd seen the sorry state of Kevin Bain. What Hal felt in that moment is now rushing through him completely undetected.

Though this feeling or sensation is causing effects that Hal is aware of. His painful, panicked hyper-awareness of everything going on around him as he heads back up to check the Ortho-window situation, for example.

But why is he possibly losing control of his expression?

Is Hal coming to a state comparable to the one those who watch "the Entertainment" end up in?

Adding to these questions is Gately's side of things. As with Hal we're given more background in these pages, but at a drip-brewing rate.

The current (and penultimate) chapter is among the longest yet. However, at the same time, this chapter implicitly refuses to answer the questions it raises since it's delivered in several fragments. I still have trouble pulling myself away from the book, but reading these sections is anything but passive entertainment.

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.

A raising, snow-ladened wind

Of all things, what's just happened in Infinite Jest brings the SNES version of Harvest Moon to mind.

It's currently snowing on the morning of 18 November in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, and the way Wallace focuses on this weather is evocative for me of the 16-bit farm/romance simulator. His descriptions of the snowfall and the coldness of the outside world call up the same feelings as that game's background music for the last season of the year. That's what I think the relation comes down to.

But this part of the book's apparent obsession with weather is also odd in and of itself.

Aside from the odd mention of rain or cold or sunshine here and there, I don't recall weather ever being so foregrounded in the book. The weather's just been there. But now it's been given nearly center stage. Hal is still front and center as the last few sections' "I" after all. 

Things with Hal are coming to a head, it seems. He contradicts what his wraith of a dad told Gately about his being perpetually silent, claiming that he would speak but his dad wouldn't hear. Though later it's implied that Hal's face is starting to express without his conscious consent.

Along with Gately dreaming about the alleged point of J.O. Incandenza's Infinite Jest (V) (based on nothing other than his knowing Joelle V.D. (who happens to star in the film)), it's pretty clear that this book is bound for a whirlwind wrap-up.

Gately and the ghost

Today's post is sponsored by Grammarly. Use Grammarly to ensure that your writing's error-free because sticks and stones can break bones, but poorly edited words hurt more.

Infinite Jest has had some dense sections. There have been whole parts where pages and pages get flipped without a paragraph break in sight. The most intense so far (probably because it's clearer just what's going on) is the part wherein Gately is visited by a series of people while in the Trauma Center of a hospital. These visitors include the wraith of the late J.O. Incandenza. At least, that seems to be the earthly identity of the wraith that appears to Gately as he dips in and out of consciousness.

The wraith reveals his issues with his dad, mentions a childhood in the Southwest and on the West Coast, and that, of all of his offspring, his youngest son is the most like him. The wraith also talks about his career as a film maker. In fact, specific mention is made of a certain entertainment of his, too. A final project designed to pull his youngest son, whom he thinks is falling into figurant silence, back into the spotlight of life. A film that will make the son speak out again, even if only to ask for more. The whole scene is extremely revelatory about "the Entertainment," the film known as Infinite Jest (V).

At a guess, this whole business with the wraith related to the ghostly interventions found in Hamlet.

Why guess that?

Well, for starters, the novel's title is a nod to that play of the Bard's. Gately also remembers that it's Tiny Ewell's favourite Shakespearean play when Tiny Ewell visits him and vents about being a third grade extortionist (810-814). Then, when Gately has a bunch of words that he's never encountered before flash through his mind "Laertes" and "Yorick" are among them (832).

Indeed, there is more in this scene and in this section than words and characters, David.

Notes on fading out

Infinite Jest continues to let its plot unravel. Its notes also continue to get more involved. Curiously, though, there are (so far) two sections that aren't included in the main text, but are, instead, notes. What's really weird about these sections' placement is that their content is pretty essential to the story. 

One noted section shows a conversation between Hal and Pemulis, and the other shows Pemulis' meeting with DeLint, Nwangi, and Watson. In the first, the two are discussing Hal's withdrawal from marijuana (aka Bob Hope), and Pemulis tries to convince him to take something stronger under the thinking that Hal'll need it less than his regimented daily Hope. The second scene pretty much wraps it up for Pemulis, as his narcotics use and pre-drug test sterile urine selling are found out. What's more, the cause for his being found out is that ETA's top player took the tenuates that Pemulis was keeping for himself. 

As is pretty plain, some major stuff goes down in these noted sections, and it's not like they aren't set up by main text, either. We see Hal taking his concern with his withdrawal to Ennet House and a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. There's also a whole bit where Pemulis is talking Todd "Postal-Weight" Possalthwaite through an existential crisis. 

So, as far as I can tell, the reason that those noted sections are in the back of the book because Wallace is trying to have Pemulis fade out of the story. After all, he's Hal's enabler, and if Hal goes off of drugs completely as he plans to do, it seems that Pemulis would lose his function.

Of course, I'm half expecting one more main text section from Pemulis' perspective. Maybe a meeting with Avril, or his bidding farewell to Hal.

Infinite charm (eventually)

Wallace writes about a film that's so entertaining its viewers can't turn away. His book is coming dangerously close to being the same. I'm about 180 pages from the end and if I could I'd just sit and read until it was finished.

As a book of whopping length, one of Infinite Jest's appeals is its vast contents. Because the book has so much going on, it's easy to theorize and postulate about what's coming next. Actually, this same depth through length quality is present in almost all of the books considered "English Classics." The room to speculate combined with broad targets for a reader's hypothetical darts gives a reader a great deal of impetus to keep reading; finding out that you were right (or even just onto something) is incredibly exhilarating.

Though there is a difference between predictability in a story and those that invite such speculation. More often than not those that are predictable fall into the trap of hewing too close to the everyday. Such stories can offer you a perspective you might otherwise be without, but their subject matter is simply dull.

Though a good story doesn't need anything supernatural to lift it out of the everyday, it just needs to be in a different shade of the common experience. Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness is a great example of a book about the everyday (in modern "literature" what's more everyday than quirky families and coming of age tales?) that is nonetheless entertaining and insightful.

Infinite Jest is a few more shades off the common and everyday, and is all the more enthralling for it. Once it gets going, anyway. It's kind of like Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

The car that runs on consequences

Irrefutable evidence that Infinite Jest's main text is written from its characters' perspectives can be found in note 315. This note states that the main text's "living staff" is Marathe's mishearing of "live in staff." That the writer of the book's endnotes is aware of such a thing is quite revealing.

But the book's last section isn't just home to such a note. This section sees the net around the plot loosely close about the narrative's shape. Marathe is about to find Joelle and might have come across the master tape of "the Entertainment." Plus, there's the real threat of the night staff's seeing and succumbing to "the Entertainment" while reviewing newly donated cartridges. The book's main thrust has real consequences now!

That is, though "the Entertainment" was watched earlier in the book, we had no idea what it was when it killed the doctor and those who looked in on him. Some 600 pages later, we know just what "the Entertainment" is, can do, and what some groups' designs on it are. So now "the Entertainment" is laden with consequences, and those make the book's motor run. Actually, with just over 200 pages to go, it's set to tear, full tilt, down the plot Autobahn for the remainder.

Long tall mystery cocktail

Infinite Jest's biggest draw is that Wallace creates so many mysteries. Not necessarily about events, but about characters. Of all of his figures the best example of a character rich with mystery is Mario Incandenza.

Mario is the youngest of the Incandenza brothers*, and not quite normal in any way. He's a person with a lengthy list of maladies and deformities - so lengthy, in fact, that it's hard to visualize just what he looks like. On top of that, any section from his perspective has this odd sense of childhood longing about it, as if Mario is the personification of Hal's feeling like he's missing someone he's never met before.

This mystery laden character is nonetheless the richest on in the book. Along with his utter uniqueness, and the paradoxical ease with which you can identify with him, I think the book's length is another major factor in Mario's draw. After all, anticipation and gradual pay off are two important elements in any good mystery resolution.

Speaking of mysteries and their resolutions, the book's title is indirectly explained on page 765. Yes, "infinite jest" is what Hamlet describes Yorick being a man of in that old Shakespearean gem. But, Wallace adds a spin to the phrase when Avril (the Moms) explains to Mario that people afraid of certain emotions could fear them because they seem bottomless - infinite.

Infinite Jest is now considered an encapsulation of the 90s. If there's one thing that characterizes that era, it's a sense of needing to be politically correct, to make sure you offend no one. This felt need lead to self censorship, and a lot of people taking themselves way too seriously. Wallace upends that and dares to laugh at everyone for 1000+ pages: Alcoholics, addicts, the disabled, sports proteges, women, children, teachers, executives, the government, the homeless - everyone.

But he does so in a way that makes his jesting deeper, a long form comedy nuanced with characters and subplots. Then he makes the book's subtext into a text in the form of "the Entertainment," a thing so infinitely entertaining people die from watching it. Plus, this transformation happens over the course of the novel.

It's definitely no mystery as to why the book's so long.

*[Correction: Mario is actually the middle child of the Incandenzas. His true place in the birth order only deepens the mystery around him, particularly because Hal, the true youngest, seems to be physically usual.]

Further notes on narrators

It's been a while since I came across them, but another two of Infinite Jest's endnotes offer clues to the book's narrator. These two are 293 and 294.

Both of these notes refer to a section of the book that follows Joelle van Dyne. One note offers an explanation of Joelle's background in such a way that it's clear that the note's not written by Joelle (293). The other note offers a parenthetical addition to one of Joelle's thoughts. This latter one makes its writer/speaker seem omniscient. The earlier one is definitely in the third person, and comes from an outside perspective.

So, assuming that all of the notes are written by the same person, it seems that the book's master narrator is someone outside of the story. Yet, there's at least one note that is a regular section unto itself (sections being from certain characters' perspectives), suggesting that if all of Infinite Jest's notes are written by one person,that person isn't just omniscient, but also in control of the characters themselves. In other words, the note writer is simply the author himself.

This figure isn't necessarily David Foster Wallace, however. He could be yet another character whose background and description are built by what's annotated and what's not.

Wondering how the loop will close

In most novels the plot is dropped into the reader's hands like grains of sand out of an hourglass of unfathomable size. By their 2/3-3/4 mark, their readers have most of the sand in their hands and don't need to be told how much was in the hourglass to begin with.

Infinite Jest practically dumps a beach's worth of sand on its readers before the plot is revealed. But, Wallace has filled the book's first 700 pages with so many characters and scenes that the revelation of the Wheelchair Assassins' motive really isn't as disappointing as it otherwise might have been. Not to mention that from the first scene at Antitoi Entertainment it's been plain that those Assassins were after the master tape of "the Entertainment."

Still, knowing that the book's first chapter is also it's last has me wondering just how things will come full circle.

Where the novel begins

I've been warned from the start that Infinite Jest's plot doesn't really kick in until around page 700. Having passed that point, I can confirm that this is mostly true.

It's definitely so in the sense that the section about Hal sitting alone and watching Interlace cartridges is the perfect place for the average reader to start. That is, this section is the one that would probably open your standard "coming of age" paperback. It's a scene that introduces a range of characters, has one that could be a main character, and has quite the hook: the film Blood Sister: One Tough Nun.

BS: OTN is one of James Incandenza's films. Rather than the usual art house, indie stuff J.O. did, BS: OTN is a piece of grindhouse schlock about a nun in a tough, street-wise Toronto order who tries to continue said order's tradition of saving repentant toughs. It sounds like an incredibly ridiculous piece of film, full of violence and cheap movie blood, and all tied up with a far too convoluted story. Nonetheless, it grabs your interest and holds it tight.

The section's ending with Hal's flash of memory helps to build plot momentum to boot. What significance might that particular child actor have?

Parallel institutions

It's hard to believe, but another character is introduced, this late in  the game. This character is Pemulis' brother, a prostitute. As of now he's just offered an extra perspective on an event and on Pemulis.

But that event is small, and the abuse their "Da" doled out is of a different flavour of that which other parents doled, but had similar toxic effects.

More interesting are the constant parallels Wallace draws between ETA and the Ennett House. Most recently Hal and Gompert are the ones running parallel, both sharing similar feelings of anhedonia. Neither of them can feel joy at the moment.

Emotional likenesses aside, I wonder if there's a larger point being made here, something like: inborn sport talent is as dangerous as substance abuse. It might sound odd, but this point neatly aligns with ETA's teaching goals. Preparing their students for the pros and for the celebrity they face will help them to keep control in the outside world. As a halfway house, it's Ennett House's job to do the same for its residents, at least re: keeping control in the outside world.

Another ETA philosophy break

Curiously, little happened in the last 16 pages of Infinite Jest. That's been the book's m.o. for the most part, but after so many pieces had been falling into place in previous sections, I was sure that more would continue to do so.

There might be something to the under 14s' subterranean garbage clean-up and rodent hunt. But right now, the pay off was just the discovery of rancid food.

The continuing view of the Hal/Stice match from the perspective of one Helen Steeply brought more to the table. Particularly in its feeding out a lot more info on Hal and ETA's philosophy. This sections' end, where it's implied that DeLint says Hal's game is being held back by too good a memory, does bring closure to why he's struggling. But it does so in the same way that an elastic band stretched over a lidded, screw-cap jar height-wise does. Hal's being emotionally distracted is definitely an open secret at this point.

What Poutrincourt, the woman Steeply has suspicions about, has to say nicely clarifies the ETA philosophy, though. Apparently, Hal's physical game could easily be on par with ETA top player John Wayne's, but because Hal finds trends in his game he constructs projections of what will happen next in them. These projections then constrict his play. Wayne's lack of memory for points and plays, on the other hand, allows him to keep his game fresh all match long.

I don't know much about tennis, but really appreciate ETA's philosophy around how the game should be played. Plus, I think there's a connection between J.O. Incandenza's motives to make "the Entertainment" and this philosophy. But that's just a hypothesis for now.

Briefly on endnotes

Infinite Jest's endnotes are  a huge part of the novel's fun.

Admittedly, they don't seem as such at first, but I've found myself anticipating the latest longer note with bated breath. Each time I come across the superscript calling me to the back of the book, I wonder if it will perhaps be the one. It felt like a strange sort of indulgence, something that shouldn't be enjoyed, but was.

Though, maybe note 269's being all about the Incandenzas helps. Having such a subject makes for a rich reading experience, after all.

The ever tightening net

After several previous in-book mentions, the match between Hal and Stice ("The Darkness") came up in Infinite Jest. Was it as exciting as all the build up suggested? Did I get the sense of a psychic imbalance in Hal from the way that he played? 

Not really. 

Honestly, action scenes are difficult to write in a compelling way. The scenes of pure chaos that Wallace wrote for Infinite Jest definitely work, and work well. Part of the reason for the success of these scenes is that they're describing events without rules, unlike an organized and systematized game. Plus, any conflict so bare as a fight or a free-for-all is much easier for the lay reader to follow. 

Thankfully, though, Wallace knew that not everyone who read this book would know as much about tennis as he did himself, and so there are enticing embedded sections throughout the description of the Interdependence Day match. Some of these sections run for a line, others for a paragraph. But what makes them obviously important is that they're about character locations. Taken together, these digressions from the game (aside from the snippets of conversation between Steeply and DeLint) offer a list of who is where while Ortho and Hal play. 

Though one of Steeply's thoughts suggests that the reason that he's at ETA is because it's somehow featured in "the Entertainment." This thought reads thusly: "It was unlikely that any one game figured much in the Entertainment" (658). Maybe this is meant more generally, and a section of "the Entertainment" involves a montage of various games being beautifully played. 

Whatever the case may be, things are starting to gain focus, and that net widely cast over the plot from early on in the book is finally tightening around its target.

Further thoughts on Infinite Jest's central editor

Infinite Jest is a work that heavily relies on characters. One way that Wallace makes these characters stand out is through eye dialect. When a character like Marathe is speaking, his syntax and word choice are what you'd expect from a Quebecois. Though, it is a bit of a caricature.

Nonetheless, writing in so many voices in dialogue and in narrative description, gives Infinite Jest the flavour of a collection of interconnected scenes and anecdotes. Not to mention the book's endnotes. Including errata and extra information with a book underscores its compiled nature, lending further strength to the argument that the book has a central editor rather than a central narrator.

Of course, Infinite Jest's not the only book to have multiple viewpoints. Each entry in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire features several perspectives. Yet, the books in that series read much more like a traditional narrative. Equal emphasis on character and plot is definitely a factor in the traditional quality of that series. So too, is A Song of Ice and Fire's being an epic fantasy series; such works traditionally have an extensive scope, including their cast, and so A Song of Ice and Fire fits into its genre handily.

Aside from being "literary," Infinite Jest has no genre. Thus, a drive to classify it, and my sense that there's some central editor rather than central narrator behind it all.

The possibility of a central editor seems especially likely after seeing endnotes like 264 (on the word "recircling" (643)): "Sic, but it's pretty obvious what Marathe means here."