David Foster Wallace - The Broom of the System

David Foster Wallace began what would become The Broom of the System as his honors thesis in English, meaning that he wrote it at an age uncomfortably close to my own. That similarity aside, and despite its place at the very beginning of Wallace’s body of work, The Broom of the System is, I imagine, likely approached how I came to it, which is to say by those who have just read the brilliant Infinite Jest and are curious about what else Wallace has done.

From that vantage point, the most obvious characteristic about this work is its relative simplicity. Here we have less technicality, fewer pages and characters, less experimentation, and no footnotes at all. But viewing The Broom of the System as only a building block on the road to Infinite Jest is not a fair way to view an earlier work. Looked at it at least partially upon its own terms, The Broom of the System is a fun, silly, and bright novel that occupies, albeit to a lesser extent, the same intersection of insight and absurdity that Wallace’s masterwork is known for.

We begin with Lenore Beadsman, a telephone operator in her mid twenties at a publishing house, whose brilliant but eccentric great-grandmother vanishes from the nursing home where she has lived in a temperature-controlled room for decades. In theory, the book is about searching for her. As this is a Wallace book, however, we don’t so much proceed forward through the plot as we do outwards. Though time does pass over the course of the novel, no real progress is made on the search, and just about none of the other plot threads are really brought to a conclusion. Instead, Wallace uses the search for the great-grandmother to introduce us to and explore those around Lenore. We meet her brilliant but deranged brother in his college dorm room, see her horrendous and hygiene-anxity-obsessed psychologist, and get to know quite well the head of her publishing house, Rick Vigorous, who is also her obsessive, controlling, and neurotic lover.

The absence of much more than a cursory plot tells more here than it did in Infinite Jest. Wallace strews the novel with the promise of events – some personal, some world-changing – and they are uniformly either not followed up upon or are advanced in the most ambiguous fashion possible. The tactic works for several of the book’s main threads but left me wondering why we had bothered with some of the smaller ones. Details like Lenore’s psychologist really not being a psychologist at all but rather an impostor  put in place by unknown hands, are added but never expanded. The book ends in mid-sentence, something that balances between powerful and obnoxious, and might lean toward the latter.

Still, lambasting our failure to find Lenore begins to, after not too long, miss the point of it all. This is not a novel about searching. Rather, The Broom of the System is a story about stories. Lenore’s great-grandmother believed in Wittgensteinian fashion that the world is words (p. 74). Lenore, therefore, is terrified that the world is nothing but words, that All that really exists of my life is what can be said about it (p. 119), that hers is A life that’s told, not lived (p. 119). What, she cannot help but wonder, sets her apart from a character in a story, controlled entirely but what is said by and about her?

Fittingly enough for a book about stories and their telling, The Broom of the System is packed with voices. Wallace proves himself as a chameleon, able to shift into new kinds of speech with each addition to his cast, and the focus is often almost entirely upon the words being spoken. Some scenes are presented as transcripts, nothing but tags and dialogue, leaving the reader to read the emotion in between the lines. Others go so far as to remove the tags, simply presenting us with monologues or with two or more conversants that are only separated by their manners of speech. Our first introduction to Rick Vigorous and the grown Lenore is a conversation between them that shows us their voices before their names. All of this is a choice that could prove disastrous, but Wallace is a skilled enough writer that I never had a moment when I couldn’t tell who was talking.

Stories are in no shorter supply. Frequently, it seems that much of what Lenore does is stumble across stories, and colorful backstories are often the object in the spotlight. We are also treated to many of the submissions that Vigorous receives for his literary magazine, and they were a prime example of how Wallace can balance levels and extremes. The stories are awful, and Vigorous, as he relates them to Lenore, frequently comments upon the terrible sentimentality or ideas in a section – but, perhaps in part because of their license to be contrived that allows them to then deny that very charge, they are often moving as well. Besides which, they are the location of some of Wallace’s most madcap creativity and are always a joy to hear described.

One of the results of Lenore’s belief in the totality of words, and one of the key ambiguities that the novel ends on, is whether people can change along with their words. In the prologue, a teenaged Lenore is sexually menaced by a collegiate Lang, who is joking but still threatening. Years later, as the novel nears its end, the two end up together. Lang insists that his earlier actions were just because they were kids back then, and, when Lenore asks why he now talks differently around her, he says I guess maybe we all talk differently with different people (p. 411). The implications, if we really are just what we say, would be that we are genuinely different people in different circumstances. The novel ends before we get to see if Lang is genuinely different, but I think that my extreme discomfort whenever he was with Lenore give at least my answer to the question.

Wallace’s commitment and ability to have his own cake and eat it too, to mock the excess of the submissions but still communicate it, is present throughout the book. It can be seen in Wallace’s tentative but inevitable approach to metafiction. The Broom of the System is far too concerned with its own telling to really be anything but, but Wallace is aware of the dangers. As Lenore says of a story, she read, It wasn’t real at all. It was like a story about a story (p. 335). Wallace being Wallace, he is not so much scared off by those dangers as he is enticed to play. One of the most amusing bits is his brief stab at all the college kid writers out there that write too-dark, too-pretentious stories and should be out partying instead, something that applies to not only me and my own dark, pretentious stories but Wallace himself at the time of writing this whole thing.

Indeed, Wallace is a master at finding tensions in stories and psychologies, and many of his deepest insights – and even his most poignant moments – come from such regions. Early on, he discusses how one’s obsessions – in one’s appearance, say – are counterbalanced by an equally strong obsession to not appear obsessed with the first obsession. Soon after, we hear, in a Vigorous submission, of how Ironically enough, a man, in whom the instinct to love is as strong and natural and instinctive as can possibly be, is unable to find someone really to love (p. 180), for his need to love proves hopelessly unattractive and prevents him from fulfilling it. Vigorous himself exhibits a paradox not far from that. He is defined by his love for Lenore, is desperate to ensure that their relationship survives, and, because he is so desperate for that, threatens to drive her away with his jealousy.

Other great details and insights abound throughout the novel. Wallace is the kind of writer that can draw the truth out of almost any situation and restate it in a fresh way. One example of that is what Vigorous comes to refer to as The Reversal after Lenore describes it to him, the way that at first you maybe start to like some person on the basis of, you know, features of the person. The way they look, or the way they act, or if they’re smart, or some combination or something. […] But then if you get to where you, you know, love a person, everything sort of reverses. It’s not that you love the person because of certain things about the person anymore; it’s that you love the things about the person because you love the person. (p. 287). Then there is how Wallace draws connections between every facet of love and our fundamental need/desire to not be alone, such as how one character comes to realize that Weight Watchers sees itself as a warrior in the great war against loneliness (p. 90).

Besides all of that, Wallace is a damn funny writer. Continuing (or, I suppose, preceding) Infinite Jest’s tradition, some of the best lines involve facial hair, such as the college kid that has a little blond beardish thing sprouting from his chin, making it look a little like an armpit (p. 14). Another character works in neuroses like a whaler in scrimshaw (p. 58). Needless to say, the humor continues above the level of the sentence. One of the novel’s most amusing running jokes is Vigorous’s attempt to write. The reader is treated to scenes and stories of his as he spitefully reenacts the scenes of his life with better results through his fictional altar ego in the most childish way possible. Earlier on, the governor of Ohio decides that the state has gone soft and decides to give the people a blasted area to measure themselves against, leading to the Great Ohio Desert – or G.O.D.

The Broom of the System is a smaller work than Infinite Jest, one with less searing brilliance that could have used a bit more of an ending and a bit less game playing. Still, it’s interesting to see how David Foster Wallace got his start, and, more than that, this is an interesting and worthy novel in its own right, one at home on the tight-rope balancing act of comedy and insight, storytelling and commenting upon storytelling.

Yoko Ogawa - Revenge

Deciding exactly what Yoko Ogawa’s collection Revenge is in a top-down, definitional fashion does not work particularly well. The collection is subtitled “Eleven Dark Tales,” and that is certainly accurate. But dark is not the most precise of terms, even if it may end up being all that we are left with. Of course, any reader that has held the volume in their hands (but not yet turned its pages) is likely unsure what I am so confused about. True, the blurbs come from varied sources. Hilary Mantel and Junot Diaz, figures of Literature both, serve to somewhat complicate the picture. But the cover quote from Joe Hill and the large-font of Peter Straub’s endorsement seem, at least insofar as marketing is concerned, to seal the deal: this is horror.

Indeed, Revenge does achieve many of the same effects as Horror – but its meaning of achieving them are so different from those used in the Horror genre that, while Horror may be its destination, that leaves the journey unilluminated, and this is very much a work about the journey and the process. To be fair, there are some moments of genuine Horror-style horror. There are murders here and grisly disfigurements. Lurid descriptions of torture, too. For the most part, those moments did not work particularly well for me. They felt like some of the collection’s weakest. The heart of the collection was not those few violent motions but the general picture that it built, the quiet collection of observations and experiences. This is not a book about a grand event that is seen but rather about the process of observing.

 The eleven stories in Revenge are each told by a different first person narrator. Though this is not a mosaic novel – there is no single story that is being crafted throughout – the narrators do encounter one another, and those passing glimpses of another’s pain or catharsis give the reader a powerful reminder of how different those experiences look from outside that character’s head. The effect does not end there. Within the stories themselves, Ogawa is always playing with differences, with what we see of each other. Often, the answer is not much. Near the beginning of the collection’s opening piece, “Afternoon at the Bakery,” Ogawa writes that You could gaze at this perfect picture all day – an afternoon bathed in light and comfort – and perhaps never notice a single detail out of place, or missing (pp. 1-2). From there, the collection becomes a subtle teasing out of what is out of place – and how horrifically off it is – and a reminder of how all pain is hidden in plain sight.

Crowded together in this modern world that we inhabit, it’s easy to think that nothing is hidden anymore. The narrator of “Old Mrs. J.” certainly thinks that. Living in close proximity to innumerable neighbors, he believes that: Just as I could see everything that went on in her apartment, she missed nothing that happened in mine (p. 30). But such surface transparency really serves to hide so much. This can be seen when Mrs. J. is in his apartment. Such encounters are uncomfortable. But, more than that, they show how much we miss. Mrs. J. reads the titles off of the narrator’s bookcase and, even standing right there, “got them all wrong” (p. 28). No matter how clearly we see, the world is not exactly as we perceive it. And that lesson is rammed home at the story’s close, as no one in any of these seemingly transparent, seemingly visible apartment notices the murder in their midst.

Direct, onscreen action is a rarity in Ogawa’s stories. It would remove all the layers of ambiguity and perception that underlie so much of what she is doing here. Rather, the tragedies in these stories are glimpsed out of the corners of our eyes, are talked about or remembered or even just imagined. “Welcome to the Museum of Torture,” my favorite tale in the collection, is composed of the last of those and also serves to tie together and comment upon the collection as a whole. The narrator, questioned by the police about a murder that occurred in one of the other stories, finds the whole procedure exciting. Her boyfriend finds that disgusting. “Do you find it amusing that someone died?” (p. 84) he asks. That’s not an unfair question, really, to ask of readers of Ogawa in particular and of Horror in general, but Ogawa does not simply ask it and wander off.

Pained by her boyfriend’s leaving her for her answer, the narrator enters the nearby Museum of Torture to take her mind off of things. What happens next is not what you think. She is not tied down and brutally tortured. No, she is simply shown through the museum, and the kindly, attentive curator describes the exhibits to her. The interactions between the curator and her are some of the easiest, most connected conversation to be found in the whole collection, and the narrator knows it: “He certainly was interested in what I had to say, unlike my boyfriend” (p. 93). This moment of genuine human interaction occurs amidst pain. None of the torture devices are used onscreen, but each is described, and the narrator and reader imagine their implementation. It is horrific. To give just one example, in the curator’s words: “Next we have this leather strap and those pliers. The victim’s wrist was attached to a table with the strap, and the pliers were used to extract the fingernails. Note the unusually delicate tips of the pliers” (p. 90). Yeesh!

But why wander the halls of the museum of torture? Well, the aforementioned connection is part of it, but it’s not the only part. To start with, it must be admitted that, yes, there is something (horribly) amusing about death. As the curator says, “The desires of the human heart know no reason or rules” (p. 90). But even that is not the whole picture, for to say that we encounter death because we are interested in it is to wholly flip the equation. After all, as the narrator knows, “torture was everywhere” (p. 91). This is confirmed by how, throughout her tour of the museum, the narrator hears of devices that the reader has seen in previous stories, albeit in less extreme contexts. Those encounters, too, were torturous. And if pain is all around us, then our choice is not whether to seek it out because it is amusing or to healthily prevent it. Our choice is whether to acknowledge reality or to pretend.

Ogawa, needless to say, does not pretend. She approaches pain in all its guises, approaches loneliness and vulnerability and murder. Very occasionally, Ogawa does break the slowly woven web with a moment of abrupt violence, or at least the sudden revelation of one. This occurs in “Lab Coats,” where a conversation takes a sudden and drastic shift at its end with the disclosure that one of the participants killed her boyfriend. Though twists like that do shock the reader, they were my least favorite parts of Revenge, because the sudden upset left me less rather than more engaged with the narrator’s perceptions. Thankfully, such sharp turns are rare. Generally, the hurt at the center of each story is only slowly brought out as the narrator tries to go about their life. It comes on stage calmly, gently, until it is, by the end, all that the reader can see or think about.

Though not a speculative fiction author exactly, Ogawa does toy with impossibilities and fantastic metaphors. This can be best seen in “Sewing the Heart,” in which the narrator meets a women with a bizarre defect: her heart is outside of her chest. Just before seeing it for himself, the narrator realizes that he has “never seen a human heart before, and the thought filled me with fear and disgust” (p. 65). The moment of true and very literalized insight into another, though, does not actually leave him disgusted. Rather, he finds it impossibly alluring. He wants to caress her heart. By the end of the story, he wants to possess it. The story, before long, becomes one of the collection’s most troubling. We are too far from one another to ever truly see them, it seems to say, save in the most extraordinary circumstances. But, if we actually could, that might not help matters. It might be only our distance that prevents us from doing even more harm to one another.

No matter how far from each other we may ultimately be, though, writers as skilled as Yoko Ogawa can give us a glimpse behind the curtain of other minds. In the way that it builds and progresses, Revenge is a soft collection filled with pathos. It is also a cutting knife.

David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you. (p. 389)

When reviewing a novel of over a thousand pages, with literally hundreds of footnotes, it’s difficult to not start with a discussion of size. But Infinite Jest is not simply long. It is also complex. At times, David Foster Wallace struck me as a mad juggler, or at least a demented tosser of balls. Character after character is thrown into the air, dozens and dozens of threads and incidents, all rendered behind a dozen spins and obfuscations. But these are not random throws. No, Wallace may be as madcap as they come, but he is also brilliant, and each of the ten thousand pieces he sets in motion is precise and even, once we manage to follow its arc, beautiful. From early on, I was completely caught by Wallace’s wit and insight, and I soon found myself running along after his throws, frantically trying to understand each and every one. I didn’t succeed. This is not a book I can simply sum up. But my week and two days of determined reading, annotating, and theory-compiling still left me not only as stunned by a book as I have ever been but brimming with new ideas. Infinite Jest is a mammoth, hammer-wielding study of loneliness, meaning, choice, success, interpersonal connections, and addiction in America.

Before I can start trying to articulate what I think all those bells are spelling out or even how they were thrown, I had likely best give you some idea of what the more important arcs actually are. Hal Incandenza is the main character, if Infinite Jest can be considered focused enough to have a single main character. He is a student of the Enfield Tennis Academy, a prodigy on and off the court. On the academy’s grounds, however, we are not just interested in Hal. Wallace pans the camera all around, gradually assembling a picture of the school’s top athletes, its teachers, its courses, its administration, its grounds, and the way that tennis can function as a metaphor for just about anything (and everything, in turn, can function as a metaphor for tennis). Enfield is a shining academy on a hill, a place striving for perfection in every way.

Behind the Academy and even Hal stands the Incandenza family, a bizarre mass of geniuses, eccentrics, tragedies, and Oedpial dynamics. Of particular note is Hal’s father, Jim Incandenza, Himself, the Mad Stork, and even the Sad Stork (Throughout, David Foster Wallace endlessly concocts euphemisms, nicknames, and even neologisms). Up until his suicide by microwave oven, Himself was a genius like Hal who leapt from field to field as he mastered them, passing through and even revolutionizing tennis and military optics and more. Eventually, he landed in film. There, he became a controversial figure, at once lauded for and detested for his technical brilliance and his scorn for conventions and, debatably, even narrative. Himself created the Entertainment, the samizdat, the film Infinite Jest  – but we aren’t quite ready to talk about that yet.

Down the hill from the academy, we find the streets of Boston, and we find Ennet House, a halfway house where a good half or so of our cast and action may be found. As at the academy, our angle is broad. Each of the addicts has a story, and we follow many of them, seeing their falls and their struggles to recover. Our main focus, though, is Don Gately, a longtime Demerol addict and burglar now struggling to get clean, now making it, now even a staffer at the house as he tries to help others follow his footsteps while he, too, struggles on. Coming with these struggles is Boston AA. Within and without the casts’ heads, we attend meetings, wrestle with and interpret AA’s ideology and practice, and plumb the depths of addiction and pain.

Enfield and Ennet may be the two largest arcs, but they are not the only ones. Innumerable smaller stories and styles lie all about them. We are in the future, here, a future assembled as if the present were a film and this its parody. Relations between the US and Canada have grown beyond frosty, and Quebecois separatists form terror cells to injure the United States in whatever way they can. The most fearsome of these are the Wheelchair Assassins, and it is from this conflict that we get Marathe and Steeply, two intelligence operatives whose debates form another of the tapestry’s recurring strands. Elsewhere in the text, we have those struggling on the streets of Boston, articles on the etiquette and economics behind the rise and fall of videophones, the way that broadcast television and advertising were killed by the advent of something suspiciously like Netflix (fact check: did Wallace have access to a crystal ball?), Orin Incandenza’s rise to NFL fame, the and countless other strange and wonderful asides and tales.

Were I simply handed this book without any information at all about its author or the circumstances of its creation, and were I told to take the best guess I could from how all these threads are conceived and played out, I think I might have thought Infinite Jest the work of a partnership between Alexis de Tocqueville and Jerry Seinfeld after the two were bludgeoned and inspired by every walk of life, every kind of loneliness, and every kind of addiction. As for how that pairing (or should I throw in a third name, to match David Foster Wallace’s three?) gets its effect, I think the brew’s three main components can be identified, if not exactly summed up by, the following: detail, insight, and wit.

This is a novel bursting at its themes with details. There are veritable mountains of them within it. Imagine, for a moment, that the world was frozen in time around you, you were given a pad, and you were told to write down everything you saw and heard and felt. Done? Now imagine that you are living a full life and that you treat every second in just that way. That is something like Infinite Jest. One chapter has Hal and his fellow culprits caught after a rule-breaking debacle and left to wait in the anteroom of the academy’s headmaster. They do nothing but wait, and Wallace turns our eye to and fro over every object in that waiting room, drawing connection after connection between them, delving into their pasts, exploring every inch of ground in every direction but simple, forward narrative momentum. That level of it is unique to that scene, but the tendency can be seen throughout. Taken alone, this would make for an unreadably tedious book. But, coupled with Wallace’s other strengths, it makes for a hypervivid one.

David Foster Wallace was a genius. Not only that, but he can impart his wisdom. Though often hard to imbibe, Infinite Jest is a book that, once digested, genuinely expands the way you think. Wallace gets fully within his characters and drags you in after him. Their revelations are yours. The insights of the characters’ lifetimes dawn on the reader as they progress, rammed home by our witnessing their formation, and Wallace’s wide angle allows him to crowd a great deal more than one epiphany in there. Every once in a while, Wallace pauses it all and goes so far as to simply talk to us. In one section, we are told about “exotic new facts” (p. 200) that we can learn in a halfway house, should we ever step foot within one. As we likely have not yet done so, Wallace then tells them to us. This technique should simply not work. For the novelist to break out of character and simply lecture should be unbearable. But the hypothetical novelist the rules were written for was not David Foster Wallace, and it works. Brilliantly. (As for the wisdom that is conveyed, well, I will do my best to lay some of it out soon enough…)

The reader gets through the details and learns the lessons, and enjoys the hell out of it all too, because David Foster Wallace was one funny bastard. His wit can be seen in one-liners and snide remarks. Early on, Hal asks a (potential) professional conversationalist: “Would it be rude to tell you your mustache is askew?” (p. 30). Elsewhere, the book boasts elaborate comedic set pieces, like the depicted game of Eschaton (in which tennis players pose as world leaders and lob balls/tactical nuclear weapons, into each others territory) and how it goes so horribly awry. Often, Wallace’s humor operates in the darkest of places, and Wallace respects no boundaries. In fact, laughter is often how the novel imparts its deepest pathos. At AA meetings, Wallace tells story after story of pain and degradation. The human suffering in these, the Bottom that the members reach, is exaggerated until it is absurd, even parodic. We laugh, and then we realize what we were laughing at, and we feel the blow that they felt.

And now, I think, the time has come to look at the struggle at the heart of it all. Infinite Jest is about the need for meaning, a need that is attempted through successes and entertainments and drugs, but which can ultimately only be fulfilled through genuine connection with another human being. As David Foster Wallace tells us, The great transcendent horror is loneliness (p. 694).

In his quest to illustrate meaning, connection, and the quest for them, David Foster Wallace begins with their opposite: depression. By this point in time, I think it’s fair to say that most of us have heard Wallace’s own story of depression and suicide, and I’ll avoid interpreting his masterpiece through the lens of events of over a decade later. Besides, such biographical readings are not needed to give the text power. Kate Gompert, a resident of Ennet House, is clinically depressed, and Wallace’s evocation of her condition is one of the most painful things I have ever read. In the absence of meaning, life becomes an unendurable slog, a state of utter hell and nausea. “I can’t stand feeling like this another second,” Kate tells her doctor, “and the seconds keep coming on and on.” (p. 74) At the root of this hell is loneliness, for depression is lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. […] a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. […] A clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution (p. 696).

The best, the highest route to purpose seems to be finding something greater than yourself to dedicate yourself to, finding some ideal of perfection to work towards. This is the route that those at Enfield Tennis Academy take. As the instructor Schtitt makes clear to them, tennis is not truly a game between you and the opponent. It is a game between you and your own limits: You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win.  […] All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again (p. 84).

For a time, such drive can suffice, but the pursuit of success is doomed. Should the athlete – or human – in question attain their dreams, they will be destroyed. As we are told of one such triumphal striver: Achievement didn’t confer meaning or joy on his existence (p. 693). The true struggle at Enfield, then, is not to make oneself better, for that struggle is more prerequisite than purpose of this level of play. The true struggle is to not be destroyed when you achieve the source of your meaning and find it hollow.

Striving for perfection does not occur in a vacuum; it, like all of our other strivings and sources of meaning, is a way to connect with others, and the connection at Enfield is that sports are one of the many sources of entertainment that we in America try to connect with one another through. After all, professional athletes are [… also] entertainers, albeit of a deep and special sort (p. 188). And the draw of both sports and entertainment in general is connection, as Orin shows when describing the wonder of football for him: a lot of It seemed emotional and/or even, if there was such a thing anymore, spiritual: a denial of silence: here were upwards of 30,000 voices, souls, voicing approval as One Soul (p. 295).

Such moments of genuine connection, however, are rare. Even when there is genuine emotion in art, it is almost always one way. Mario listens to the radio show of Madame Psychosis, and it moves him deeply, but he is sure Madame Psychosis cannot herself sense the compelling beauty and light she projects over the air, somehow (p. 190). Conversely, one of Himself’s films has a lecturer speaking to students. The lecturer is so moved that he weeps. The students watch, bored and doodling.

The fastest – and, ultimately, the most disastrous – escape route from that loneliness is drink, drugs, addiction. Throughout the story, highs are associated not only with pleasure and a warped sense of time but with a sense of connection, one borne from chemicals but one that nonetheless comes to provide purpose and comes to end that loneliness, such as in this description of Joelle’s high from cocaine: The ‘base frees and condenses, compresses the whole experience to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the graph, an afflated orgasm of the heart that makers her feel, truly, attractive, sheltered by limits, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an instant by God (p. 235).

The connection found in a syringe or bottle, though, will ultimately destroy you, leading to the Bottom, a plummeting return to the meaninglessness of depression while the alcoholic stares about their shattered life. This is what so many in Ennet House struggle with, the horrible truth that Once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you (p. 201).

The only way out is to not simply slaughter that need but to transfer it. As Infinite Jest progresses, it becomes clear that addictions do not end with substances. AA itself is approached in the same way, as are relationships, arts, and religions. We are all addictions, all slaves; we have all shoved our passions entirely into something, desperate for it to give us joy and purpose and connection. As Hal says: We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately – the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into (p. 900).

But what if there was an entertainment that actually formed a genuine connection, that truly touched us? That question brings us to the Entertainment, the final creation of Himself, the film so entertaining that anyone who watches it will never want to do anything else, will gladly chop off their own fingers for another viewing, will sit and starve in front of their television while it loops endlessly. Canadian terrorists are now disseminating that film throughout America, believing that the foolish Americans will prove their weakness by being unable to refuse the choice for death of the head by pleasure (p. 319). The connection is made between it and drugs, and it is clear how absurd and futile it is for a government to try and protect us from our own choices.

But the Entertainment is more than cocaine. For one thing, it is explicitly and obviously a high borne from communication. Himself says that his goal in making it was to contrive a medium via which he and [Hal] could simply converse. […] His last resort: entertainment (pp. 838-9). Furthermore, though the Entertainment obviously brings with it great consequences, it does not bring the Bottom that the bottle does. There is no indication within the text that its high is not a true one. Remember that the horror of alcoholism comes at the end, comes when the drink has destroyed everything else in your life, is your only meaning, and then itself turns to poison: . You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction (p. 347). The Entertainment brings the outward consequences of such a state and more, but we never see the viewers have any desire to stop at all, we never get a hint that the transcendent pleasure of viewing is less on the thousandth viewing than on the first.

That contrast between inner and outer state, then, may serve a different purpose: it shows the true importance of, as Himself had it, conversing. If we can truly connect with another human, the wonder of it will outmatch everything else, for every other activity in our life is a simple striving for that connection. That is why, when presented with it, we will gladly allow the rest to burn.

The Entertainment, unlike lesser entertainments, manages to go both ways, to touch the entertained and the entertainer, even if its impact on the matter is more oblique. A glimpse of this can be seen in Himself’s film Medusa v. Odalisk, in which the two legendary creatures fight on stage while an on-film audience turns to stone at the sight. With each petrification, the briefest flash of grief can be seen on the combatants’ faces as they realize the destructive (and transcendent?) cost of connection on the audience.

Admittedly, the actress in Infinite Jest claims to have thought it boring, says she can’t understand how anyone could have found it entertaining, let alone lethally so. But that actress, Joelle, wears a veil because of her beauty. I’ll allow her to say why in her own words: I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they’ve seen me they can’t think of anything else and don’t want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right. Everything. Like I’m the solution to their deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with perfection (p. 538). The effects of her beauty (itself a form of interpersonal connection), then, have an effect like that of Infinite Jest, and that effect has deeply impacted her. Furthermore, one should remember that Joelle never views the scene herself, just creates it. And as for Himself, it is always hard to say what he is and is not affected by, but one must remember that he not only joked about the film’s lethally entertaining value but also killed himself three months after its creation.

There is another element to this quest for meaning and connection, however, for, though we spend our lives striving for it, we also fear it. We despise it, even. As Hal theorizes: What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being human, since to be really human (at least as [Hal] conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic way forever infantile (p. 695). The final word of that, infantile, is important.

Throughout the novel, there are hints that connecting with each other, while what we really need, is also something we view as pathetic, something we are kept from doing by our very age. One of the novel’s last scenes is the story of the Enfield employee Loach, who tries to prove the goodness of man by living on the streets and begging not for money but for a single touch. Not one passerby will grant him that simple human contact – not until Mario comes along, Mario who had no one worldly or adult with him there to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn’t automatically be honored or granted (p. 971).

The connection we need is something that we also keep from ourselves, then. But the Entertainment bypasses that. And do you want to know one of its tricks? Himself, always the technical whizz, filmed it with a special lens: The lens was supposed to reproduce an infantile visual field. That’s what you could feel was driving the scene (p. 940).

The above is certainly not the only possible interpretation of Infinite Jest. It leaves many facets of the book unexamined. Really, this is the kind of novel that – both due to its length and to its author’s perspicacity – feels, well, infinite. One gets the sense that the only limits to the meanings that can be found within are how deep you are willing to delve. As can no doubt be guessed from all the above, Infinite Jest wowed me. In fact, it blew me away like nothing else I’ve ever read. If I was to pick a single favorite novel, this would be it.