I just finished Infinite Jest.
David Foster Wallace is a master of the craft. His command of the English language is uncanny, and it’s such a joy to read his work. I’ve listened to The Pale King and Consider The Lobster, and his 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech “This Is Water” is one of my favorite talks of all time. His fame is well deserved.
Infinite Jest in particular is an unusually interesting work of his, and not only because of its inventive use of endnotes or its ungodly length (60 hours on Audible where the usual length of a novel is ~12 hours), but because the story is essentially plotless.
The audiobook ends with the listener being driven off a cliff. [Pseudo-spoilers ahead] We get no clarity or closure on any of the various sub-plots that weave in an out of the narrative, and in the brief moments where the sub-plots do intersect, it is only in the barest or most inconsequential ways. These moments only tantalize the listener, and I can tell you that I felt giddy with anticipation when these moments would arise. I would think “Ok, it’s been 40 hours, and finally two characters are interacting! Is this where he’s been going all along? Is this what he’s been building towards?” And then, the characters would part, and nothing would come of their interaction at all.
I understand the meta-narrative of what DFW was creating. He certainly could’ve chosen to give more structure and plot to Infinite Jest that he deliberately chose not to include. The listener is left with loose ends untied and a vague feeling of being lost at sea with respect to the characters and the fates that might befall them.
We can navel-gaze or be high school English teachers for a moment and wax poetic about how this aimlessness may signify that we are all adrift and unmoored and how there is no rhyme or reason to the lives we lead and that the universe is chaotic and random, but I’d rather spend my time asking why, if there is no plot or satisfying feeling of closure at the end of the novel, is listening to Infinite Jest so pleasurable?
Listening to Infinite Jest is an exercise in Zen.
There is no point or purpose or plot to advance, and so we are left with a “Be Here Now” ethos that permeates throughout the novel. The only other book I can recall making me feel this way is Beatrice and Virgil, by Yann Martel, which made me want to scream with frustration when I finished it.
DFW isn’t frustrating, though. He’s enlightening.
He was gifted by the gods of good writing with a knack for describing human behavior in a way that rivals Nabokov or Tolstoy. Listening to his work is illuminating and heartrending and hilarious because other human beings are illuminating and heartrending and hilarious, and he captures that elegantly in his writing.
Ultimately, Infinite Jest represents an approach to novel-writing that puts DFW firmly in the minority of novel writers — namely, he doesn’t write stories for the sake of narrative. Instead, he writes in a way that captures feelings, and then he sinks his fingers into those feelings and holds them up to the light for our examination, with no salient purpose in mind.
By being untethered from a plot that grips us and forces our investment into the fictional world of the novelist’s characters, DFW makes us sit with feelings and sensations that aren’t anchored in any concrete way. There is no movement, no direction, no purpose. We’re left to float by ourselves on a sea of ambiguity, knowing that we’ll never reach the shore.
It’s an existential experience to read an epic novel with no plot. We’re thrown into a story with no beginning and we’re ripped from the story with no end, much like our lives. What are we to make of the experience? Well, we may as well enjoy the ride and derive as much pleasure as we can while we’re able to listen.
Finally, there’s the envy.
Reading Infinite Jest gave me an appreciation for just how moving a piece of good writing can be. Each sub-story within the overall plotless narrative is so poignant and evocative and absurd, it leaves me with a deep feeling of jealousy.
I wish I could write like David Foster Wallace. I would drain my bank account to be gifted with even a tenth of his talent.
He writes in a way that is so powerful and expressive. I see why he’s engendered such a cult following.
And yet, DFW killed himself.
How can I sit here and write this and valorize him and glorify his work and say that I would give anything to be like him while knowing that he took his own life?
It’s extraordinarily threatening to acknowledge that what we think we desire won’t necessarily bring us joy or fulfillment.
Reading Infinite Jest, it becomes painfully obvious that DFW was intimately familiar with struggles of addiction, abuse, suicidal depression, and trauma. He captures the horror of alcohol dependency and the raptures of shooting up narcotics with such vividness that it’s a wonder he ever escaped the clutches of addiction to find the time to write at all.
Of course, I would never wish to be addicted or depressed or completely misanthropic as DFW seems to be, and yet this same man was, as I wrote above and truly believe, gifted by the gods.
I’m left with a feeling of status anxiety mixed with gratitude: I want the greatness of being able to write so well, while being immensely thankful to have not inherited the curses that have seemingly come hand in hand with DFW’s prowess.
Of course, the two are extricable, and the myth of the tortured artist is exactly that: a myth. There are plenty of great artists who live happy, fulfilled, non-tortured lives, and we shouldn’t glorify the addiction, depression, and trauma that DFW just happened to inherit along with his gifts.
And so, I can say that I’m jealous of DFW and I that I aspire to write like him, but if being able to write Infinite Jest came with the curses that DFW had to endure, then I don’t think I’d like to write anything plotless anytime soon.
[Also posted on Medium]