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Infinite Jest is about suicide, which gets mentioned 56 times, or about once every 20 pages. So it's tempting, given that - spoiler - Wallace totally demapped himself, to see it as a suicide note. But it's about all this other shit too, right? Addiction, and mothers, and the weight of potential, and assassins in wheelchairs, and tennis. If Wallace had suddenly become a tennis star instead of dead we would look back on this book and be like man...we should have seen that coming. That shit was all about tennis.

Nobody really wants to like Infinite Jest, because it's a fixation of all the most annoying dudes you know. But it is a super good book, unfortunately. Here's how to like it.

DFW was super good at actually writing
Check out two similar scenes. In one, Hal & Orin have a long phone call where they tackle a bunch of important family history, and during most of it Pemulis is standing around getting impatient because Hal is supposed to go do something with his friends, and it adds this weird indirect tension that makes the scene pop. In another scene, Pemulis goes into this long-ass description of annulation, which is some kind of expository "this happens in the future" shit, and it would be boring but the kid he's talking to is blindfolded and has to pee wicked bad (don't ask) and again there's this palpable tension from the weirdest source. What this is is a magic trick. It's a pretty good one.

Wallace doesn't avoid his pop influences. Dude The fight scene featuring Gately - as far as pure plot goes, the climax of the book - is straight up thrilling. Riveting. If Wallace wanted to (and had like a million fewer demons), he could have just been a potboiler writer and sold a million books.

He's a virtuoso and he gets virtuosic sometimes, okay. There's a lengthy scene in the cafeteria, describing things like the way muscles look when they chew, that's just..."Okay bitches, here is some motherfucking writing." He describes basically the entire cafeteria, its social structure, everyone in it, the history of the things on the walls, down to the way chewing works muscularly...look, I love which happened solely because Eddie Van Halen was capable of doing it. Go on with one's bad self, right? You can't do it, so shut up. You're watching something happen here.

He was very smart and everything
The math in IJ is generally accurate; here's of the few mathematical errors in it. Wallace wrote a nonfiction book about infinity and I guess reviewed a couple of math books; he knew his stuff. And there's the dizzying display of medical expertise on display, which made me suspect he was pre-med at some point. (He was not.) A real old-school polymath here, huh?

And of course he was pretty good at English...here's on his apparently famous syllabi (links to actual PDFs included in article). And here's including the note that "my spellchecker is telling me that 129 of these words aren’t real words." Not sure if that number is accurate - spellcheck often misses difficult words - but we can all confirm that he did make words up with impunity.

It's pretty much fun to read
Ending spoilers: (view spoiler)[It ends fine, shut up. You know as much as you need to. What, you've never read a book that didn't end with that freeze-frame shit from Animal House? (hide spoiler)]

Okay, I was a little disappointed at Chekhov's Giant Mutant Toddler's failure to appear. Although I guess that was just Gately anyway? Whatever: I wanted a literal Giant Mutant Toddler.

It's as good as it's supposed to be, and with the weight of its reputation that's really good. It's funny and terrifying and and Wallace lays himself right open: it's an absolute refusal to be coy or ironic or guarded. It's a rock-you-on-your-heels book. It's the shit.

This is my point:
Infinite Jest took me two full weeks longer to read than fucking Bleak House did, and Bleak House has many more slow parts. This isn't a minor commitment; it's a whole relationship. Infinite Jest wants to meet your parents, and it's gonna be awkward because it's got this weird shit about mothers. But it is worth it, honest.

PS if you want to see what Eschaton looks like, here's Thanks Nicole for pointing me to it.

* Read this book on Kindle. Don't worry about the footnotes. I mean, read them, but don't worry about it being hard on Kindle; it'll be fine. More importantly, Kindle will let you look up all the words you don't know, and if you think you know all the words you are an asshole. And the point is, "opi" is probably not a word but if Wallace can make shit up so can I, which isn't true.