So a bunch of folks are reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer and blogging about it. Infinite Summer kicked things off and A Supposedly Fun Blog is the stomping grounds for IJ musings from a bunch of political types.
I feel kind of funny reading the things everyone has to say. It’s an iconic book now, the kind of thing you read partly to say you’ve read it, and it’s famously long and complex. And the footnotes. The footnotes.
But that wasn’t my experience of Infinite Jest. It’s absolutely not the kind of book I’d normally pick up and read, but for some reason I did back in 1997. I have no idea why. I’d never heard of the book and I’d never heard of David Foster Wallace, so I didn’t suffer from any preconceptions that I was making a statement by diving into it. I was completely naive. And I loved it. It was long and complex — I could only read about 50 pages a day because my brain just gave out after that many pages — but I never found it pretentious or overly difficult, two adjectives often associated with it. (A little bit difficult, yes, but a friendly kind of difficult.) To me, Wallace was having fun with the vocabulary he used, not showing off. I got a huge kick out of the endless footnotes. And once he finally explained what the chapter headings were about, things started making a whole lot more sense. (Granted, that doesn’t happen until you’re a couple hundred pages in, but hey — that’s less than 20% of the book!) If you’re interested, my original 1997 thoughts about IJ are here.
I don’t think I’m up to the task of rereading it this summer, but I’d recommend it to anyone who asks. When you’re done, be sure to read the first chapter over again.
