Infinite Jest
is a 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace. The lengthy and complex work takes place in a semi-parodic future version of North America, and touches on substance addition recovery programs, depression, child abuse, family relationships, advertising, popular entertainment, film theory, Quebec separatism, and tennis, among other topics.
The novel includes 388 numbered endnotes (some of which have footnotes of their own) that explain or expand on points in the story. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Wallace characterized them as a method of disrupting the linearity of the text while maintaining some sense of narrative cohesion.
The novel was included by Time magazine in its list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923.
As of 2006 (ten years after its publication), 150,000 copies of Infinite Jest had been sold and the book has continued to sell steadily.
Wallace was 33 when the novel was published.
Title
The novel's title is from Hamlet, Act V, Scene 1, where Hamlet holds the skull of the court jester, Yorick, and says, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!
Wallace's working title for Infinite Jest was A Failed Entertainment.
Setting
In the novel's future world, the United States, Canada, and Mexico together compose a unified North American superstate known as the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. (an allusion to onanism). Corporations are allowed the opportunity to bid for and purchase naming rights for each calendar year, replacing traditional numerical designations with ostensibly honorary monikers bearing corporation names. Although the narrative is fragmented among several years, most of the story takes place during "The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment" (Y.D.A.U.). On the orders of U.S. President Johnny Gentle (who had campaigned on the platform of cleaning up the USA while ensuring that no American would be caused any discomfort in the process), much of what used to be the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada has become a hazardous waste dump, an area known as the "Great Concavity" by Americans and the "Great Convexity" by Canadians.
The novel's primary locations are Enfield Tennis Academy ("ETA") and Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (separated by a hillside in suburban Boston, Massachusetts), and a mountainside outside of Tucson, Arizona. Many characters are students or faculty at the school or patients or staff at the halfway house; a conversation between a quadruple agent and his government contact occurs at the Arizona location.
Plot
The plot partially revolves around the missing master copy of a film cartridge, titled Infinite Jest and referred to in the novel as "the Entertainment" or "the samizdat". The film, so entertaining to its viewers that they lose all interest in anything other than viewing it and thus eventually die, was the final work of James O. Incandenza. He completed it during a stint of sobriety requested by its lead actress, Joelle Van Dyne.
Quebecois separatists are interested in acquiring a master, redistributable copy of the work to aid in acts of terrorism against the United States. The United States Office of Unspecified Services (U.S.O.U.S.) is seeking to intercept the master copy of the film to prevent mass dissemination and the destabilization of the Organization of North American Nations. Joelle and later Hal seek treatment for substance abuse problems at The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House [sic], and Marathe visits the rehabilitation center to pursue a lead on the master copy of the Entertainment, tying the characters and plots together.
Subsidized Time
In the novel's world, each year is subsidized by a specific corporate sponsor for tax revenue purposes. The years of Subsidized Time are listed here:
- Year of the Whopper
- Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
- Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
- Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
- Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
- Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/Int erLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile [sic]
- Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
- Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
- Year of Glad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest
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David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an award-winning American novelist, short story writer, essayist, professor of English at Illinois State University, and professor of creative writing at Pomona College. Wallace is widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which was cited as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 by Time magazine.
Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years". With his suicide, he left behind an unfinished novel, The Pale King, which was subsequently published in 2011, and in 2012 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which was not awarded that year. A biography of Wallace by D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, was published in September 2012.
Death
Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself on September 12, 2008. In an interview with The New York Times, Wallace's father reported that Wallace had suffered from depression for more than 20 years and that antidepressant medication had allowed him to be productive. When he experienced severe side effects from the medication, Wallace attempted to wean himself from his primary antidepressant, phenelzine. On his doctor's advice, Wallace stopped taking the medication in June 2007, and the depression returned. Wallace received other treatments, including electroconvulsive therapy. When he returned to phenelzine, he found it had lost its effectiveness. In the months before his death, his depression became severe. The same year Wallace had checked into a nearby motel and taken all the pills he could obtain, ending up in a local hospital. His wife kept a watchful eye on Wallace the following days, but on September 12, after his wife left their home, Wallace went into their garage, wrote a two-page note, and neatly arranged the manuscript for The Pale King before hanging himself on the patio.
Numerous gatherings were held to honor Wallace after his death, including memorial services at Pomona College, Amherst College, University of Arizona, and on October 23, 2008, at New York University—the last with speakers including his sister, Amy Wallace Havens; his agent, Bonnie Nadell; Gerry Howard, the editor of his first two books; Colin Harrison, editor at Harper’s Magazine; Michael Pietsch, the editor of Infinite Jest and Wallace's later work; Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker; as well as authors Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Mark Costello, Donald Antrim, and Jonathan Franzen.
Themes and Styles
Wallace's fiction is often concerned with irony. His essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", originally published in the small-circulation Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, proposes that television has an ironic influence on fiction writing, and urges literary authors to eschew TV's shallow rebelliousness: "I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fictionists they pose terrifically vexing problems." Wallace used many forms of irony, but focused on individuals' continued longing for earnest, unselfconscious experience and communication in a media-saturated society. Literary critic Adam Kirsch said that Wallace's "self-conscious earnestness" and "hostility to irony defined a literary generation".
Wallace's novels often combine various writing modes or voices, and incorporate jargon and vocabulary (sometimes invented) from a wide variety of fields. His writing featured self-generated abbreviations and acronyms, long multi-clause sentences, and a notable use of explanatory footnotes and endnotes—often nearly as expansive as the text proper. He used endnotes extensively in Infinite Jest and footnotes in "Octet" as well as in the great majority of his nonfiction after 1996. On the Charlie Rose show in 1997, Wallace claimed that the notes were used to disrupt the linearity of the narrative, to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the entire structure. He suggested that he could have instead jumbled up the sentences, "but then no one would read it".
According to Wallace, "fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being", and he expressed a desire to write "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that could help readers "become less alone inside". In his Kenyon College commencement address, he describes the human condition of daily crises and chronic disillusionment and warns against solipsism, invoking compassion, mindfulness, and existentialism.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace
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