I love this book, but I’d like to start by noting the wrong reasons to want to read it before I talk about the right ones.

It’s tricky to champion David Foster Wallace. He gets a lot of hype – often from unlikable, snobby folks liable to sneer at whatever it is a mere prole like you happens to read. In the popular imagination he’s primarily known for prose that’s lengthy to the point of unmanageability, the indulgent use of obscure vocabulary, and of course copious foot and endnotes.[i] Your average educated adult may not have read much Wallace, but she can nod knowingly in acknowledgment at the mention of David Foster Wallace and footnotes in the same way madeleines and cockroaches stand in for the Proust and Kafka you’ve never read.

I personally get the sense that for some that the driving motivation to summit Mount Infinite Jest is like George Mallory’s rationale for attempting Everest: because it’s there. Enduring 1079 pages as a crucible of intellectual fitness, dodging hazards of hard verbiage all the way up, with a dog-eared OED as your Sherpa. Reading as conquest – a way to visibly display literary virility. It’s not for nothing that someone I met recently feared I might be a “MFA lit bro” when I told her I loved Wallace. There are all kinds of vain, self-absorbed, and dumb reasons to evangelize for Wallace and for Infinite Jest.

JOKE: Q – How do you know if someone’s read Infinite Jest? A – Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.

The irony here is that if all you get from finishing the book is a heightened sense of your own intellectual power, you didn’t really understand it at all. At its core Infinite Jest exalts humility, recognizes everyone’s shared humanity, and expresses profound hope in human connection’s redemptive power to overcome sadness. These are the qualities that make me want to make you want to read it.

I’ve recommended Infinite Jest to more than a few of my friends, and many of them have been kind enough to heed to my recommendation and begin reading it. Most abandon it after the first 75-150 pages. And I hear ya – the first 200 or so pages are jarring and seemingly disjointed, at least until you get beyond 200. The book begins with the chronologically final events of the story, and from there it jumps around from one character’s introductory vignette to another’s introductory vignette, each told in disparate voices (and grammars) without returning to pick up the thread of each character for a long time.

Trust me when I say I can identify with the urge to abandon ship. My own reading history found me purchasing the book as a 20 year old because I heard lots of smart, hip people liked the book. When I picked it back up eight years later and read up to where my bookmark had faithfully served for almost a decade, I did not recall a damn thing of the 60 pages I was (ostensibly) reading for the second time. All of which is to say the beginning of the book did not make much of an impression on me the first time around. But twists and turns in my life brought me back to it in 2013.

Above all else Infinite Jest is about sadness. When asked what he intended to write when he began the book, Wallace said “I wanted to do something sad.” The forms of pain he broached are wide-ranging and almost beyond cataloging. He depicts characters staggering toward coping with loss – losses of family members, lovers, life ambitions, psychic peace, physical well-being, and many other losses, some mundane and some cartoonishly, savagely painful. Insomuch as Infinite Jest has a plot, it centers upon the release of a movie so compelling and pleasurable to watch that the audience loses their minds; viewers are rendered incapable of doing anything other than watching it over and over again until (presumably) they expire.

It sounds outlandish but there’s a basis in reality. While it’s pretty straightforward to draw a parallel between (real life) substance addiction and a (fictional) movie so pleasurable you choose to watch it on repeat until you die, drug and alcohol-induced descent is subtle and insidious, at least compared to the self-annihilation in the pursuit of pleasure first observed in the experiments of Olds and Milner back in 1954. While attempting to research the potentially therapeutic effects of electrical shocks in the brain to alleviate epilepsy, they instead stumbled upon what they called pleasure centers – now more commonly referred to as reward centers.

They found that if hooked up to an electrode which delivers a mild electric shock to a particular region of the brain, and if given access to a lever that activates that shock, rats would choose to push that lever repeatedly, ignoring food and water to the point of starvation and death. Even when presented with the chance to mate, the rats chose to just push the lever instead. Here’s a video with an example of one such rat.

The experimental results could be replicated in higher order mammals, as well. In 1958 a scientist named Lilly wired electrodes in monkeys’ brains. One monkey in his study activated the electrode in its brain 200,000 times in a 20 hour period before succumbing to exhaustion. Back before experimentation of this type was uniformly considered unethical, human subjects displayed a similar willingness to completely lose themselves in the pleasure of senselessly activating an electrode.

In one of the subplots in Infinite Jest the characters allude to the Olds and Milner study. The book’s central problem is grappling with articulating a distinction between pleasure and happiness, as well as attempting to get a grasp on the when the pleasures we choose actually make us happy, versus merely not sad.

One of the most moving passages in the book (which you have to stick it out until page 200 to arrive at) tackles the latter question through a discussion of the lessons one learns while living in a drug and alcohol recovery halfway house, side by side with residents whose addictive substances have been taken away:

If, by virtue of charity or the circumstances of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts . . .

That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: 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. Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required A.M. and P.M. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.

That in metro Boston the idiom of choice for the male sex-organ is: Unit, which is why Ennet House residents are wryly amused by E.M.P.H. Hospital’s designations of its campus’s buildings.

That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on.

That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.

That AA and NA and CA’s ‘God’ does not apparently require that you believe in Him/Her/It before He/She/It will help you. That, pace macho bullshit, public male weeping is not only plenty masculine but can actually feel good (reportedly). That sharing means talking, and taking somebody’s inventory means criticizing that person, plus many additional pieces of Recoveryspeak. That an important part of halfway-house Human Immuno-Virus prevention is not leaving your razor or toothbrush in communal bathrooms. That apparently a seasoned prostitute can (reportedly) apply a condom to a customer’s Unit so deftly he doesn’t even know it’s on until he’s history, so to speak.

That a double-layered steel portable strongbox w/ tri-tumblered lock for your razor and toothbrush can be had for under $35.00 U.S./$38.50 O.N.A.N. via Home-Net Hardware, and that Pat M. or the House Manager will let you use the back office’s old TP to order one if you put up a sustained enough squawk.

That over 50% of persons with a Substance addiction suffer from some other recognized form of psychiatric disorder, too. That some male prostitutes become so accustomed to enemas that they cannot have valid bowel movements without them. That a majority of Ennet House residents have at least one tattoo. That the significance of this datum is unanalyzable. That the metro Boston street term for not having any money is: sporting lint. That what elsewhere’s known as Informing or Squealing or Narcing or Ratting or Ratting Out is on the streets of metro Boston known as ‘Eating Cheese,’ presumably spun off from the associative nexus of rat.

That nose-, tongue-, lip-, and eyelid-rings rarely require actual penetrative piercing. This is because of the wide variety of clip-on rings available. That nipple-rings do require piercing, and that clitoris- and glans-rings are not things anyone thinks you really want to know the facts about. That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused. That female chicanos are not called chicanas. That it costs $225 U.S. to get a MA driver’s license with your picture but not your name. That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer, and sitting so close to Ennet House’s old D.E.C. TP cartridge-viewer that the screen fills your whole vision and the screen’s static charge tickles your nose like a linty mitten.⁷⁰

70. Not to mention, according to some hard-line schools of 12-step thought, yoga, reading, politics, gum-chewing, crossword puzzles, solitaire, romantic intrigue, charity work, political activism, N.R.A. membership, music, art, cleaning, plastic surgery, cartridge-viewing even at normal distances, the loyalty of a fine dog, religious zeal, relentless helpfulness, relentless other-folks’-moral-inventory-taking, the development of hard-line schools of 12-Step thought, ad darn near infinitum, including 12-Step fellowships themselves, such that quiet tales sometimes go around the Boston AA community of certain incredibly advanced and hard-line recovering persons who have pared away potential escape after potential escape until finally, as the stories go, they end up sitting in a bare chair, nude, in an unfurnished room, not moving but also not sleeping or meditating or abstracting, too advanced to stomach the thought of the potential emotional escape of doing anything whatsoever, and just end up sitting there completely motion- and escape-less until a long time later all that’s found in the empty chair is a very fine dusting of off-white ashy stuff that you can wipe away completely with like one damp paper towel.

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That it is possible to get so angry you really do see everything red. What a ‘Texas Catheter’ is. That some people really do steal — will steal things that are yours. That a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hypertext phonics thing with HELP functions for every word. That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don’t, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away — at least for a while. That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people. That the metro Boston street term for panhandling is: stemming, and that it is regarded by some as a craft or art; and that professional stem-artists actually have like little professional colloquia sometimes, little conventions, in parks or public-transport hubs, at night, where they get together and network and exchange feedback on trends and techniques and public relations, etc. That it is possible to abuse OTC cold-and allergy remedies in an addictive manner. That Nyquil is over 50 proof. That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack.

That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.

That addiction is either a disease or a mental illness or a spiritual condition (as in ‘poor of spirit’) or an O.C.D.-like disorder or an affective or character disorder, and that over 75% of the veteran Boston AAs who want to convince you that it is a disease will make you sit down and watch them write DISEASE on a piece of paper and then divide and hyphenate the word so that it becomes DIS-EASE, then will stare at you as if expecting you to undergo some kind of blinding epiphanic realization, when really (as G. Day points tirelessly out to his counselors) changing DISEASE to DIS-EASE reduces a definition and explanation down to a simple description of a feeling, and rather a whiny insipid one at that.

That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis. That cats will in fact get violent diarrhea if you feed them milk, contrary to the popular image of cats and milk. That it is simply more pleasant to be happy than to be pissed off. That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one’s mind. In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself. That it is possible to make rather tasty poached eggs in a microwave oven. That the metro-street term for really quite wonderful is: pisser. That everybody’s sneeze sounds different. That some people’s moms never taught them to cover up or turn away when they sneeze. That no one who has been to prison is ever the same again. That you do not have to have sex with a person to get crabs from them. That a clean room feels better to be in than a dirty room. That the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak. That you don’t have to hit somebody even if you really really want to. That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

Endnote 70 in the above passage alludes to an even more vexing challenge within a challenge – that when it comes down to it, it is radically more difficult to articulate an affirmative vision of what constitutes meaningful living than it is to identify the coping mechanisms one relies upon to deal with the inherent hardships of life. As if it weren’t already hard enough to simply to step back and observe whether our chosen pursuits are indeed “abusable escapes.”

Much of the core of the book centers upon substance abuse and 12-step recovery, but its message isn’t just relevant to those addicted to chemical substances. Many of us in our day to day lives develop dependence upon all kinds of compulsive behaviors and pleasures, fantastical dreams, and flights of ego that might well be less about finding joy than fleeing from what’s dark and sad. And achieving recovery from what makes us sad can’t be accomplished merely by adopting the pose of the ascetic and withdrawing ourselves, however completely, from the pursuit of pleasure:

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you’re new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it’ll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There’s serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time. Then now that you’re clean and don’t even much want Substances and feeling like you want to both cry and stomp somebody into goo with pain, these Boston AAs start in on telling you you’re right where you’re supposed to be and telling you to remember the pointless pain of active addiction and telling you that at least this sober pain now has a purpose. At least this pain means you’re going somewhere, they say, instead of the repetitive gerbil-wheel of addictive pain.

They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you’ve been Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you’ll begin to start to ‘Get In Touch’ with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You’ll start to feel why it was you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic. ‘Getting In Touch With Your Feelings’ is another quilted-sampler-type cliché that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out. It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.

Wallace’s own biography casts a long shadow over any discussion of whether he can offer an affirmative vision of where to proceed from here. I can understand why someone with knowledge of how his life’s story concluded might doubt that he has a great deal of wisdom to contribute to our understanding of how to process and transcend pain. I know some out there will reasonably disagree with me when I say that I tend to think that the course his life took burnishes his credibility on the subject, if anything. Putting that argument aside, though, Infinite Jest’s message is deeply life affirming. It’s a clarion call against that act which he later committed: that no given individual moment, no matter how painful, is something one cannot endure.

Near the book’s end, one character recovering from cocaine addiction talks to another character who is hospitalized with a gunshot wound:

She said ‘This was why I couldn’t get off and stay off. Just as the cliche warns. I literally wasn’t keeping it in the day. I was adding the clean days up in my head.’ She cocked her head at him. ‘Did you ever hear of this fellow Evel Knievel? This motorcycle-jumper?’ . . .

At St. Collie only the Crocodiles’d heard of him. My own Daddy’d followed him, cut out pictures, as a boy.’ Gately can tell she’s smiling under there. ‘But what I used to do, I’d throw away the pipe and shake my fist at the sky and say As God is my fucking witness NEVER AGAIN, as of this minute right here I QUIT FOR ALL TIME.’ She also has this habit of absently patting the top of her head when she talks, where little barrettes and spongy clamps hold the veil in place. ‘And I’d bunker up all whiteknuckled and stay straight. And count the days. I was proud of each day I stayed off. Each day seemed evidence of something, and I counted them. I’d add them up. Line them up end to end. You know?’ Gately knows very well but doesn’t nod, lets her do this on just her own steam. She says ‘And soon it would get. .. improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear. One car, two cars. By the time I’d get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it would begin to seem like this staggering number. Jumping over 14 cars. And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them.’ She left her head alone and cocked it. ‘Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?’

Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes. Broke in Malden. Bent with pleurisy in Salem. MCI/Billerica during a four-day lockdown that caught him short. He remembered Kicking the Bird for weeks on the floor of a Revere Holding cell, courtesy of the good old Revere A.D.A. Locked down tight, a bucket for a toilet, the Holding cell hot but a terrible icy draft down near the floor. Cold Turkey. Abrupt Withdrawal. The Bird. Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A Revere Holding cage for 92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he’d be feeling this second for 60 more of these seconds — he couldn’t deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second — less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he’d never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. What the White Flaggers talk about: living completely In The Moment. A whole day at a crack seemed like tit, when he Came In. For he had Abided With The Bird.

But this inter-beat Present, this sense of endless Now — it had vanished in Revere Holding along with the heaves and chills. He’d returned to himself, moved to sit on the bunk’s edge, and ceased to Abide because he no longer had to.

His right side is past standing, but the hurt is nothing like the Bird’s hurt was. He wonders, sometimes, if that’s what Ferocious Francis and the rest want him to walk toward: Abiding again between heartbeats; tries to imagine what kind of impossible leap it would take to live that way all the time, by choice, straight: in the second, the Now, walled and contained between slow heartbeats. Ferocious Francis’s own sponsor, the nearly dead guy they wheel to White Flag and call Sarge, says it all the time: It’s a gift, the Now: it’s AA’s real gift: it’s no accident they call it The Present.

‘And yet it wasn’t til that poor new pipe-fellow from home pointed at me and hauled me up there and I said it that I realized,’ Joelle said. ‘I don’t have to do it that way. I get to choose how to do it, and they’ll help me stick to the choice. I don’t think I’d realized before that I could — I can really do this. I can do this for one endless day. I can. Don.’

The look he was giving her was meant to like validate her breakthrough and say yes yes she could, she could as long as she continued to choose to. She was looking right at him, Gately could tell. But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. What’s real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed. If Gately got out of this, he decided, he was going to take the Knievel picture off his wall and mount it and give it to Joelle, and they’d laugh, and she’d call him Don or The Bimster, etc.

It’s a simple, unadorned message by the time it comes to the reader on page 859. One so earnest it risks being dismissed by a self-perceived sophisticated reader as corny. Sentimental hokum.

It’s also the most powerful spiritual advice on how to survive woe that I’ve come across anywhere, and while it’s simple to grasp, it requires enormous discipline to truly live by. To abide in any circumstance, to live without fear of any future loss, to let go of losses already suffered, and to recognize (internalize, embrace?) the reality that each moment passes and the next will bring change. And if the change in the next moment doesn’t bring relief, the next moment after that may. And so on.

That these might strike one as banal clichés perhaps goes a long way toward explaining why Wallace may have felt it necessary to construct a 1079 page edifice around some basic truths about how to live through pain. He personally knew how hard it could be for one who imagines himself to be more intelligent than those around him to be receptive to seemingly simple messages. In a testimonial on behalf of the real life halfway house in which he (the author) lived, he wrote:

Six months in Granada House helped me immeasurably. I still wince at some of the hyperbole and melodrama that are used in recovery-speak, but the fact of the matter is that my experience at Granada House helped me, starting with the fact that the staff admitted me despite the obnoxious condescension with which I spoke of them, the House, and the 12-Step programs of recovery they tried to enable. They were patient, but they were not pushovers. They enforced a structure and discipline about recovery that I was not capable of on my own: mandatory counseling, mandatory AA or NA meetings, mandatory employment, curfew, chores, etc. Not to mention required reading of AA/NA literature whether I found it literarily distinguished or not. Granada House also provided my first experience of an actual recovering community: there were over twenty newly recovering residents, and the paid staff–almost all of whom were in recovery–and the unpaid volunteers, and the dozens of House alumni who seemed always to be around in the kitchen and living room and offices. I made friends, and enemies, and enemies who then became friends. I was, for six months, literally immersed in recovery. At the time, it seemed crowded and claustrophobic and loud, and I resented the lack of “privacy,” just as I resented the radical simplicity of 12-Step programs’ advice to newcomers: go to a 12-Step meeting every day, make one such meeting your home group, get a sponsor and tell him the truth, get active with some kind of job in your home group, pray for help whether you believe in God or not, etc. The whole thing seemed uncomfortable and undignified and dumb. Now, from the perspective of almost fourteen years sober, it looks like precisely what I needed. In Granada House, I was surrounded by recovering human beings in all their variety and sameness and neurosis and compassion, and I was kept busy, and I was made bluntly and continually aware of the fact that I had a potentially fatal disease that could be arrested only by doing some very simple, strange-looking things. I was denied the chance to sit chain-smoking in private and drive myself crazy with abstract questions about stuff that didn’t matter nearly as much as simply not putting chemicals into my body.

This is not to say that the staff and volunteers at Granada House didn’t listen. The House was structured and disciplined, but it was not authoritarian. One of the kindest and most helpful things the House staff did for me was to sit down and listen–to complaints, cravings, questions, confessions, rants, resentments, terrors, and insights both real and imagined–because a lot of my early recovery consisted of learning to say aloud the stuff about drugs and alcohol and recovery I was thinking, instead of keeping it twisting and writhing around inside my head. People at Granada House listened to me for hours, and did so with neither the clinical disinterest of doctors nor the hand-wringing credulity of relatives. They listened because, in the last analysis, they really understood me: they had been on the fence of both wanting to get sober and not, of loving the very thing that was killing you, of being able to imagine life neither with drugs and alcohol nor without them. They also recognized bullshit, and manipulation, and meaningless intellectualization as a way of evading terrible truths–and on many days the most helpful thing they did was to laugh at me and make fun of my dodges (which were, I realize now, pathetically easy for a fellow addict to spot), and to advise me just not to use chemicals today because tomorrow might very well look different. Advice like this sounds too simplistic to be helpful, but it was crucial: I had gotten through a great many days sober before I realized that one day is all I really had to get through.

After Wallace’s death, Maria Bustillos visited his archives to peruse the books that had comprised his personal library. She was surprised at:

. . . the number of popular self-help books in the collection, and the care and attention with which he read and reread them. I mean stuff of the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness and la-la reputation was to be found in Wallace’s library. Along with all the Wittgenstein, Husserl and Borges, he read John Bradshaw, Willard Beecher, Neil Fiore, Andrew Weil, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Carefully.

I propose, therefore, there was a method in his OED-bingeing, elaborately literary, aggressively non-linear madness. That the relative difficulty of Infinite Jest may not have merely been self-aggrandizing for the author, or a way to ensure he appealed to pretentious readers, but instead (at least partially) a calculated means to persuade people who fancy themselves very smart to buy in to some moral lessons which, at first glance, might not appear refined enough to catch the attention of the intellectual elite.

Despite its reputation as a snobby book, Infinite Jest takes pains to affirm the humanity of characters who occupy many of the most humble perches in society. It does so in a way that’s compulsively readable, darkly comic, yet in my estimation still sincerely empathetic:

It’s not like Boston AA recoils from the idea of responsibility, though. Cause: no; responsibility: yes. It seems like it all depends on which way the arrow of presumed responsibility points. The hard-faced adopted stripper had presented herself as the object of an outside Cause. Now the arrow comes back around as tonight’s meeting’s last and maybe best Advanced Basics speaker, another newcomer, a round pink girl with no eyelashes at all and a ‘base-head’s ruined teeth, gets up there and speaks in an r-less South Boston brogue about being pregnant at twenty and smoking Eightballs of freebase cocaine like a fiend all through her pregnancy even though she knew it was bad for the baby and wanted desperately to quit. She tells about having her water break and contractions start late one night in her welfare-hotel room when she was right in the middle of an Eightball she’d had to spend the evening turning unbelievably sordid and degrading tricks to pay for; she did what she had to do to get high, she says, even while pregnant, she says; and she says even when the pain of the contractions got to be too bad to bear she’d been unable to tear herself away from the ‘base-pipe to go to the free clinic to deliver, and how she’d sat on the floor of the welfare-hotel room and freebased her way all through labor (that new Joelle girl’s veil’s billowing in and out with her breath, Gately sees, just like it also was during the last speaker’s description of the statue’s orgasm in the catatonic’s dysfunctional Catholic mother’s devotional photo); and how she’d finally delivered of a stillborn infant right there alone on her side like a cow on the rug of her room, all the time throughout still compulsively loading up the glass pipe and smoking; and how the infant emerged all dry and hard like a constipated turdlet, with no protective moisture and no afterbirth-material following it out, and how the emerged infant was tiny and dry and all withered and the color of strong tea, and dead, and also had no face, had in utero developed no eyes or nostrils and just a little lipless hyphen of a mouth, and its limbs were malformed and arachnodactylic, and there had been some sort of translucent reptilian like webbing between its mucronate digits; the speaker’s mouth is a quivering arch of woe; her baby had been poisoned before it could grow a face or make any personal choices, it would have soon died of Substance-Withdrawal in the free clinic’s Pyrex incubator if it had emerged alive anyway, she could tell, she’d been on such a bad ‘base-binge all that pregnant year; and but so eventually the Eightball was consumed and then the screen and steel-wool ball in the pipe itself smoked and the cloth prep-filter smoked to ash and then of course likely-looking pieces of lint had been gleaned off the rug and also smoked, and the girl finally passed out, still umbilically linked to the dead infant; and how when she came to again in unsparing noonlight the next day and saw what still clung by a withered cord to her empty insides she got introduced to the real business-end of the arrow of responsibility, and as she gazed in daylight at the withered faceless stillborn baby she was so overcome with grief and self-loathing that she erected a fortification of complete and black Denial, like total Denial. She held and swaddled the dead thing just as if it were alive instead of dead, and she began to carry it around with her wherever she went, just as she imagined devoted mothers carry their babies with them everywhere they go, the faceless infant’s corpse completely veiled and hidden in a little pink blanket the addicted expectant mother’d let herself buy at Woolworth’s at seven months, and she also kept the cord’s connection in-tact until her end of the cord finally fell out of her and dangled, and smelled, and she carried the dead infant everywhere, even when turning sordid tricks, because single motherhood or not she still needed to get high and still had to do what she had to do to get high, so she carried the blanket-wrapped infant in her arms as she walked the streets in her velvet fuchsia minipants and haltertop and green spike heels, turning tricks, until there began to be strong evidence, as she circled her block — it was August — let’s just say compelling evidence that the infant in the stained cocoon of blanket in her arms was not a biologically viable infant, and passersby on the South Boston streets began to reel away white-faced as the girl passed by, stretch-marked and brown-toothed and lashless (lashes lost in a Substance-accident; fire hazard and dental dysplasia go with the freebase terrain) and also just hauntedly calm-looking, oblivious to the olfactory havoc she was wreaking in the sweltering streets, and but her August’s trick-business soon fell off sharply, understandably, and eventually word that there was a serious infant-and-Denial problem here got around the streets, and her fellow Southie ‘base-heads and street-friends came to her with not ungentle r-less remonstrances and scented hankies and gently prying hands and tried to reason her out of her Denial, but she ignored them all, she guarded her infant from all harm and kept it clutched to her — it was by now sort of stuck to her and would have been hard to separate from her by hand anyway — and she’d walk the streets shunned and trickless and broke and in early-stage Substance-Withdrawal, with the remains of the dead infant’s tummy’s cord dangling out from an unclosable fold in the now ominously ballooned and crusty Woolworth’s blanket: talk about Denial, this girl was in some major-league Denial; and but finally a pale and reeling beat-cop phoned a hysterical olfactory alert in to the Commonwealth’s infamous Department of Social Services — Gately sees alcoholic moms all over the hall cross themselves and shudder at the mere mention of D.S.S., every addicted parent’s worst nightmare, D.S.S., they of the several different abstruse legal definitions of Neglect and the tungsten-tipped battering ram for triple-locked apartment doors; in a dark window Gately sees one reflected mom sitting over with the Brighton AAs that has her two little girls with her in the meeting and now at the D.S.S. reference clutches them reflexively to her bosom, one head per bosom, as one of the girls struggles and dips her knees in the little curtsies of impending potty — but so now D.S.S. was on the case, and a platoon of blandly efficient Wellesley-alum D.S.S. field personnel with clipboards and scary black Chanel women’s businesswear were now on the prowl in the South Boston streets for the addicted speaker and her late faceless infant; and but finally around this time, during last year’s awful late-August heat wave, evidence that the infant had a serious bio-viability problem started presenting itself so forcefully that even the Denial-ridden addict in the mother could not ignore or dismiss it — evidence which the speaker’s reticence about describing (save to say that it involved an insect-attraction problem) makes things all the worse for the empathetic White Flaggers, since it engages the dark imaginations all Substance-abusers share in surplus — and so but the mother says how she finally broke down, emotionally and olfactorily, from the overwhelming evidence, on the cement playground outside her own late mother’s abandoned Project building off the L Street Beach in Southie, and a D.S.S. field team closed in for the pinch, and she and her infant got pinched, and special D.S.S. spray-solvents had to be sent for and utilized in order to detach the Wool worth baby-blanket from her maternal bosom, and the blanket’s contents were more or less reassembled and were interred in a D.S.S. coffin the speaker recalls as being the size of a Mary Kay makeup case, and the speaker was medically informed by somebody with a clipboard from D.S.S. that the infant had been involuntarily toxified to death somewhere along in its development toward becoming a boy; and the mother, after a painful D&C for the impacted placenta she’d carried inside, then spent the next four months on the locked ward of Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham MA, psychotic with Denial-deferred guilt and cocaine-withdrawal and searing self-hatred; and how when she finally got discharged from Met State with her first S.S.I, mental-disability check she found she had no taste for chunks or powders, she wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof, and she drank and drank and believed in her heart she would never stop or swallow the truth, but finally she got to where she had to, she says, swallow it, the responsible truth; how she quickly drank her way to the old two-option welfare-hotel window-ledge and made a blubbering 0200h. phone call, and then so here she is, apologizing for going on so long, trying to tell a truth she hopes someday to swallow, inside. So she can just try and live. When she concludes by asking them to pray for her it almost doesn’t sound corny. Gately tries not to think. Here is no Cause or Excuse. It is simply what happened. This final speaker is truly new, ready: all defenses have been burned away. Smooth-skinned and steadily pinker, at the podium, her eyes squeezed tight, she looks like she’s the one that’s the infant. The host White Flaggers pay this burnt public husk of a newcomer the ultimate Boston AA compliment: they have to consciously try to remember even to blink as they watch her, listening. I.D.ing without effort. There’s no judgment. It’s clear she’s been punished enough. And it was basically the same all over, after all, Out There. And the fact that it was so good to hear her, so good that even Tiny Ewell and Kate Gompert and the rest of the worst of them all sat still and listened without blinking, looking not just at the speaker’s face but into it, helps force Gately to remember all over again what a tragic adventure this is, that none of them signed up for.

This standalone vignette is one long, breathless paragraph, but I don’t think that it can be said that it’s unreadable or that it’s not compelling.

There are aspects of the book that I’m uncomfortable with and/or do not endorse.[ii] But this isn’t a book review. There are lots of characters, themes, and plot strands I’ve not touched upon at all here. I do hope that I’ve perhaps convinced a few folks to give reading Infinite Jest a try – or at the very least maybe you’ll find my love of it a little less insufferable than before.

A unifying thread throughout the novel deals with the destructive power of alienation and the promise of small, real moments of connection between people. Because the story unfolds in a nonlinear fashion, the chronologically final event in the book takes place on page 17. A protagonist is suffering a nervous breakdown, and in the midst of it he perceives acutely that sometimes expertise or prestige are no substitute for common human warmth and genuine empathy:

It will start in the E.R., at the intake desk if C.T.’s late in following the ambulance, or in the green-tiled room after the room with the invasive-digital machines; or, given this special M.D.-supplied ambulance, maybe on the ride itself: some blue-jawed M.D. scrubbed to an antiseptic glow with his name sewn in cursive on his white coat’s breast pocket and a quality desk-set pen, wanting gurneyside Q&A, etiology and diagnosis by Socratic method, ordered and point-by-point. There are, by the O.E.D. VI’s count, nineteen nonarchaic synonyms for unresponsive, of which nine are Latinate and four Saxonic. I will play either Stice or Polep in Sunday’s final. Maybe in front of Venus Williams. It will be someone blue-collar and unlicensed, though, inevitably — a nurse’s aide with quick-bit nails, a hospital security guy, a tired Cuban orderly who addresses me as jou — who will, looking down in the middle of some kind of bustled task, catch what he sees as my eye and ask So yo then man what’s your story?

[i] I refuse to ape this element of his literary style. Don’t believe me? Look! No endnote #2!

[ii] Alright, I lied. Here’s endnote #2. I am uncomfortable with, among other things, the use of (ostensible) African American Vernacular English in Clenette Henderson’s introductory vignette on pages 37-38 (though I lack the linguistic background/competency to condemn it outright), as well as the way Poor Tony’s gender presentation seem to be played up for laughs. Ok – that’s it for the endnotes.