Thanks to his recent suicide1, I’ve discovered David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest is really really fun to read, challenging as it is – I’ve barely made it through 300 pages on four boredom-rich Christmas days, but was richly rewarded for the effort. There is a positively Pynchonesque feel to the book – though Pynchon’s mathematics/engineering nerd-extravaganzas here are replaced by mind-bogglingly intricate descriptions2 of life at a junior tennis academy, experimental film, Québécois seperatism and various types of drug abuse. Getting lost in these descriptions is exactly my kind of entertainment, and the book always roller-coasters between deeply desperate and depressing situations and a kind of complicated hilarity that I just love – for example, I just made my way through a 20-page description of Eschaton, a kind of live-action DEFCON played with tennis balls symbolizing nuclear warheads, which devolves from strategy game to teenage free-for-all slapstick brawl when the players start ignoring the rules after a “the map is not the territory”-type dispute. I hope the rest of DFW’s work is as good so that it’ll fill the waiting time until the next Pynchon novel is done.
1 Sorry. But I swear the book inspires you to write this kind of sentence.
2 Have I mentioned the 388 (sometimes multi-page) endnotesa on topics as diverse as peculiarities of Boston AA group meeting practices, applications of the mean-value theorem or a fictional post-Windows Microsoft operating system named “Pink”?
