Well, duh (1996)
Funny, I found this book over a decade after it was published, having been exposed to almost none of this &quot;hype&quot; whatsoever---and I still liked it. I don&#x27;t buy his thesis that its success was due only to the &quot;hype machine.&quot; I suppose I respect his opinion---or at least his right to having it---but I simply do not agree with it or with many of the things he says.<p>&gt; The novel has moved some 60,000 copies and racked up a stack of glowing reviews as thick as it is.<p>As far as I know, it wasn&#x27;t nominated for a single major literary award that year (at the very least, it didn&#x27;t win any), and I wouldn&#x27;t remotely agree that the reviews were &quot;glowing.&quot;  A quick search finds two at best ambivalent reviews: [^1] [^2]. Though their comments came later, Harold Bloom and James Wood were highly critical of Wallace, the former declaring him to have &quot;no discernible talent.&quot; It feels terribly one-sided to mention only the stack of positive reviews. IJ was by no means a universal critical success.<p>&gt;  ... both [The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest], most importantly, work up an elaborate – and elaborately digressive – plot which deliberately ends as unsatisfactorily as possible.<p>While I can&#x27;t speak for Broom. which I didn&#x27;t finish, I can say that my reading of IJ&#x27;s ending was that it was not at all deliberately unsatisfactory. In fact, I felt it was the opposite: it&#x27;s beautiful, and it marks the moment when Gately finally gets out of his recursive cycle of addiction. I think it&#x27;s where the book (whose structure is itself fascinating---a circle and&#x2F;or a Sierpinski Gasket) ought to have ended, and while some could say it was unsatisfactory for them, I don&#x27;t think they could claim it was deliberately so.<p>&gt; There is first of all Hal Incandenza, a teenage tennis prodigy and marijuana addict who during the course of the book plays tennis and gets high a lot, and then tries to stop getting high – that’s his plot.<p>Isn&#x27;t there a bit more to Hal&#x27;s story? What about the struggle the ghost of his dead father makes to connect Hal to the world and to feelings? To exit his head, as it were? What about Hal&#x27;s finding that same dad dead in the house up the hill from his school dorm? What about his recession into himself and his dislocation from language, his Kafkaesque inversion?<p>&gt; Then there’s Don Gately, a former housebreaker and narcotics addict who goes straight before the book even opens and merely attempts to stay that way throughout the course of the novel – that’s his plot.<p>Nothing of his struggles to pray daily to a God he doesn&#x27;t believe in, simply in an effort to stay sober for another 24 hours? Nothing of his role as a leader and mentor at the Ennet halfway house, or the scenes where he transcends his identity as a witless muscle-for-hire criminal upon whose head friends would close elevator doors for a laugh to connect with and care for his community? (The scene where he, in a joke apron and chef&#x27;s hat, he makes pasta for the housemates brought me to tears.) Still nothing of his falling in love with Joelle? Nor of his fight in the resident&#x27;s defense, his hospitalization, and his transition into a vivid memoryscape of his days as a junkie and crook?<p>&gt; All of which, I suppose, is just a polite way of saying that if the author of Infinite Jest shut off his word-processor and actually went to a wine-and-cheese party he might find out what the word ‘reading’ really means<p>He wrote it longhand and was a recovering alcoholic&#x2F;addict. No word processors or wine parties for him.<p>Yes, I have in certain ways fallen out of love with Infinite Jest, but I still refute the claim that there was nothing there in the first place. There was something in it for me when I read it alone in rural Thailand over a summer in 2013, and there&#x27;s been something in it for many other readers I know, too. This wasn&#x27;t just because we were told something was there, but because we found something there.<p>IJ&#x27;s not perfect. It deserves critique, and it is certainly flawed. (Parts of it do make me cringe.) But I admire it nonetheless. It took courage to write a novel that strived towards the real---more, I&#x27;m afraid, than it required for this LRB review.<p>[^1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1996&#x2F;02&#x2F;13&#x2F;books&#x2F;books-of-the-times-a-country-dying-of-laughter-in-1079-pages.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1996&#x2F;02&#x2F;13&#x2F;books&#x2F;books-of-the-times-...</a><p>[^2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1996&#x2F;03&#x2F;03&#x2F;news&#x2F;infinite-jest.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1996&#x2F;03&#x2F;03&#x2F;news&#x2F;infinite-jest.html</a>