The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to Surpass Infinite Jest (2009) | Hacker News Reader

The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to Surpass Infinite Jest (2009)

newyorker.com

47 pointslermontov50 comments

If anyone is daunted by Infinite Jest but undaunted by the fad of hating DFW, definitely start with his books of essays & journalism. IMO they're a lot more rewarding and enjoyable than his novels.

I think E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction is essential reading. (PDF link: https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf)

Also String Theory (which is a collection of essays about Tennis).

Also, is there a fad of hating him? Do his books have controversial content (like Ayn Rand, for example, who divides people)?

If there's a fad, it's a small one. My sense is that people have been more critical than they were immediately after his death, but that's not really hating, just retrospection.

It's people who look at a book that's 1100 pages long (1600 if you use standard font/page sizes), and call it pretentious.

Is it? Sure, but that doesn't make it any less of an absolutely insane/enjoyable journey. There are parts of this novel that absolutely shook me (the parts on addiction/suicide, and the "that if..." part on the halfway home), while others had me in tears laughing (the parts on the insurance claim for the brick layer, the part about the camera phones, the "heart thief"... etc).

Thanks for replying! After I asked here I googled around and saw DFW had some mental issues resulting in odd behavior. I then wondered if that is why there was a hating fad.

About pages, one of my childhood experiences was a popular girl getting everyone to laugh when I checked out one of Asimov's foundation trilogy books from the school library. Unfortunately she and I are close friends today so there is no "what goes around comes around" story to report :)

Infinite Jest is pushed in everyones face as an example of what a novel "should" be / best book ever written (yea right) and he has an evercrooning group of adorers who make Pynchon fans look reasonable and sane.

Personally I find it him to be turgid and overwrought but I get why people enjoy him and come back. His essays are entertaining but I've never gleaned any great insight or inspiration from him.

Wait, what fad of hating him?

He was like essential hip college freshman reading, which often comes with being hated for being popular, weird, abstract, etc. I havn't actually read the book, but I've certainly heard about it.

Well, before my latest attempt to quit Twitter, it seemed like a widespread opinion among kool kids from both the left & right that liking DFW was middlebrow posing. Just my definitely skewed impression.

Well, there was the movie about him that came out a year or two ago. I'm sure that contibuted to the spike, but honestly 95% of the people I've seen reading Infinite Jest in public are somewhere in the first 20 pages, and that's been the case since the mid 2000s. I don't think reading literary fiction to look cool is anything new.

“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?”

Apparently it's too soon for criticism? I'm not sure what fads have to do with it, other than fads being convenient to minimize or dismiss; this piece of elegant sandpaper is for example six years old:

http://exiledonline.com/david-foster-wallace-portrait-of-an-...

Like any other subculture / virtue signal which gains in popularity, there's a strong group for DFW and a strong backlash against from both sides. One side rejects the signal due to its popularity ("only dilettante freshman losers love DFW, REAL enthusiasts love REAL lit") and the other rejects the signal due to its accessibility ("these hipsters think they're cool just because they've read something, anyone could buy the book and do that!").

We see it in programming, too - "only newbie idiots love Ruby, Rust 4ever" plus "this damn hipster Rust brigade is ruining programming, Java is still just fine!"

Don't forget the hate from the positivist-minded STEM crowd and right-wingers, who both have a reflexive dislike of anything with a whiff of postmodernism about it.

I've heard a few people say that everyone has this on their bookshelf but hasn't read it. It always sounds like people think it's on the bookshelf to look impressive. I read it and it was probably the funniest book I've ever read.

"Besides frequently losing itself in superfluous and wildly tangential flights of lexical diarrhea, the book suffers under the sheer burden of its incredible length."

http://www.edrants.com/the-infinite-jest-review-that-dave-eg...

The depth of the tangents and jargon in IJ are an aesthetic DFW adopted to counter the clever minimalism so popular in commercial speech of the late 90s. He called it maximalism.

The burden is to some extent intentionally constructed; the reader must flip back between 2 bookmarks to read it at all since there are over >10% of the 1000 pages are footnotes located at the end of the book. It seems to be a meta-satire of two voices always present in late 90s US anti-depressant ads and the fine print that was always read quickly at the end. This burden forces the reader to constantly consider the "fine print" reality of the authors voice behind the fictional nonlinear narrative he is presenting you through the voice of other characters.

The form of the novel reflects the content of the message it presents, this is feature not a flaw.

The paragraph after the one you quote reads... "if you can come to terms with his dense and labored style, the rewards are often tremendous. There’s no doubt that Wallace’s talent is immense and his imagination limitless. When he backs off and gives his narrative some breathing room, he emerges as a consistently innovative, sensitive and intelligent writer."

I found Infinite Jest extraordinarily compelling, hilarious, and endlessly entertaining. I wouldn't go as far to say that it was "hard to put down". The book will fatigue you at points, as there is such a density of ideas within a single page that you need to just step back for the day and take it all in. But I was inevitably drawn back every time to sit down and open Infinite Jest again and again. Maybe it was the prose, or the endearing and terrible characters that DFW make all come to life, or the sprawling mystery plot. I love the way DFW makes these small, minute observations of life that always seem to make me go "yeaaaah I can relate too!" So many unforgettable moments in that book, including the section about marijuana, and the chapter of the kids playing tennis analogized with war.

I love the way DFW makes these small, minute observations of life that always seem to make me go "yeaaaah I can relate too!"

We need a word for that, in English. I had a very close friend that had an uncanny ability to find things about any situation that I would gloss over, but when he pointed it out, I would realize that I had missed seeing it but I completely agreed with it. And, weirdly, this friend also committed suicide.

The word is insightful.

I think "empathizable" Igor "relatable" are better candidate, though they lack the sudden quality that parent post has.

I'm sorry about your friend. That is sad to here. It sounds like he was a bright light during his time here.

I have to admit I'm skeptical of online hype for books like this. The last book I read that had this much love was Gravity's Rainbow, and that book seemed to have much less to say than it promised. It seemed to me it was just written in an intentionally difficult way to make it harder to notice that nothing much happens.

I wonder how the critical reception to The Pale King will evolve over time. In my opinion it's been a bit over-esteemed by fans of DFWs work. It really does feel incomplete, and not just in a Brothers Karamazov sort of way. It lacks a center of gravity, and I never really felt a strong connection with any of the characters. By the end of Infinite Jest the book had become something greater than the sum of its parts, and I didn't really feel the same thing happening with The Pale King.

The only part of the book that I feel comes close to the greatness of Infinite Jest is the 100-page 'As the world turns' chapter. But then, I don't think that chapter necessarily benefits from being a part of the book, and could just as easily have been published as a stand-alone piece.

I really enjoyed The Pale King, and felt that had it been finished it would have been one of my favorite books. The chapters with the David Wallace section in the IRS are _really_ funny.

I liked the Pale King but found it lacking. There's only really one idea there that i can recall: There's nobility in doing the boring / essential work required of you. That's a far cry from Infinite Jest which is overflowing with ideas about society and how an individual deals with it.

Isn't that the nature of the thing though? If he could have completed it, you'd be reading a finished novel. You'd have to kind of squint and try to look through the trees to the set of places he might have been heading.

show of hands, how many HN readers have tried to read Infinite Jest and never made it all the way thru?

Heh, guilty, although I do get farther and farther each time. Last time I made it almost halfway before I stopped.

The issue is that I'm a "distracted reader" and tend to leave books half-finished. Unfortunately, the likelihood of this happening is a function of the book's length and density: if I can read it in a day or two, there's no time to get distracted, but Infinite Jest is both long and slow. Someday, though.

I did. I found it a very complex book densely packed with allusions obscure references. I didn't understand it completely. I plan revisit it someday after reading a synopsis (if my 200+ store of unread digital books will permit me :) )

The author of the article keeps referencing DFW's use of marijuana but stops short of condemning it. I think it's worth stating that it can not have helped his health.

I made it about 125 pages. I wanted to like it, but the endless digressions and footnotes wore me out.

FWIW, I didn't like it for the first 300-400 pages either. But it very quickly became one of my favorite books. Its worth sticking it out to the end.

>300-400 pages

>very quickly

How good can a book be if it starts off bad and stays that way for so long, most books would have already ended?

I never said it starts off bad. DFW just makes a point to make the book inaccessible. It isn't meant to attract a wide audience, but many good things are initially dismissed because they aren't easy.

Infinite Jest is worth getting through. It's not easy or pleasant, but it's something I'll always remember vividly.

I got through it by treating it like a mystery novel. I really did want to find out what the heck was going on both on a plot level as well as where these character arcs were headed. In a superficial way, none of that really gets a good conclusion by the end, but by reading a lot of analysis and discussion by fellow readers I agree with Wallace when he said that most of the story is there, you just have to do considerable reading between the lines. To me, that's thrilling.

I did make it through, mostly, I didn't get the sections about the Québécois separatist group so might not have read those in as much detail as the others - everything else I loved.

Mind you - I've never re-read it which is something I usually do a lot with books I really love (must have read Anathem 7 or 8 times).

I never would have made it through IJ without my book club. That was our inaugural book and now we're around 15 books deep. One thing that was particularly effective for us was to meet every week, but reading shorter sections. For a book like IJ where it's easy to miss things, this is really useful. Weekly meetings are tough, but it's with a great group of friends and missing a meeting only puts me about 3-5 hours of reading behind.

It took me two or three "false starts" before I worked up enough inertia to make it all the way through. You need to get about 200 pages in before it "clicks". It's also a very different kind of reading. You read to absorb, not to comprehend.

In a completely-unrelated comparison, there's a line from John Scalzi's Old Man's War that rings true when reading Infinite Jest: "The secret, I found, was to stop fighting it or attempt to organize the information the way I was used to getting it, in discrete chunks of verbal speech. Just accept you're drinking from the fire hose and open wide."

Raises hand. I only made it 50 pages in. I didn't understand it, or didn't find anything interesting in it. I don't doubt that there's something there. I just couldn't get to it, or perhaps there's something about my perspective vs his that makes it hard for us to "communicate" and it translates as not compelling.

I made it all the way through.

I wish I hadn't.

I got 200-300 pages in twice before finally, on the third try, getting over the hump, after which I couldn't put it down, and in fact re-read it a couple years later. I think the key to enjoying it is thinking of it less as a singular linear story, and more as a large portfolio of short stories, many of which can be assembled more or less linearly to tell a mostly cohesive story (though many of the other stories are peripheral to the main thread). This might sound ridiculous, but DFW was a masterful composer of short stories, and once you adapt to enjoying each little section of IJ on its own terms, the whole becomes much, much more enjoyable. Thrilling, even - I frequently found that the more dull or challenging a given short story was, the more powerfully it ended. There's something almost musical about how he could slowly mount tension (as tedium, or difficulty, or obscurity) to an almost unbearable pitch, only to sublimate it in the end. My .02 anyway. I know many people find other people's enthusiasm for his work annoying, but I'm not totally sure why. They're just stories. There's nothing fundamentally toxic about it.

IJ is really one of the most wonderful books ever written, it was a long read but extremely rewarding. I love how it comes full circle, you get to the end and want to read it again. But most amazingly the central event of the plot is completely absent and up to the reader to figure out. The digital version makes the footnotes much much easier.

Has anyone made an easier to read online version of Infinite Jest? With pop up footnotes so you don't have to flip pages?