Infinite Jest is a great novel, but you should know what you're getting into.

If you've read anything else by David Foster Wallace, you know that he's a brilliant humorist who revels in bringing out the absurd in everyday life. His essays, collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, are fast and lively reads. If you've seen Wallace's name around, read some of his essays, or even read one of his earlier novels, you may be totally unprepared for this book.

Infinite Jest's marketing offers some superficial hints that this will be the usual high-speed fun that Wallace does so well. In the photograph on the first edition Wallace looks to be about 18 -- it's an OLD photo! -- and this may assure some readers that this novel just can't be all that weighty despite it's obvious length. The literal-minded may see the title as a promise of comedy, forgetting that it comes from Hamlet's meditation on the skull of an old friend, spoken next to the fresh-dug grave of the woman he drove to madness:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio,
A fellow of infinite jest ...

And indeed, if you just randomly open the book, you will light upon passages of such hilarity that you can laugh yourself into choking. Whole subplots seem, on the surface, to be there only for laughs. For example, in this near-future world, the US and Canada are both trying to relinquish control of a poisoned wilderness that is all that remains of northern New England after some technological mishap; in the course of this plot we learn cheerful new words like "experialism" -- the opposite of "imperialism" -- which denotes the aggressive giving-away of territory. Many features of the the book seem to be sheer, self-indulgent weirdness: the endless footnotes, some irrelevant, some crucial; the rash of terrorist acts by wheelchair-bound Quebecois-separatists; the absurd pharmacological detail about the many illicit substances that the brilliant young minds of Enfield Tennis Academy can concoct or acquire.

Corporate sponsorship has taken over the calendar, so that dates are recorded as "The Year of Glad" or "The Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland." This is an easy joke, and it gets old, but that should be a clue. Many of our most profound miseries can be seen as jokes that got old. Wallace can spin off bright and funny lines faster than anyone, and there are, on average, several laughs per page. But only on average, and many of the laughs contain cries.

At its heart, this book is dead-serious and speaks, as the best humorists do, from searing pain. The book tells the parallel stories of Hal Incandenza, a promising young star at the Enfield Tennis Academy, and of the denizens of a rehab facility just down the hill. Both of these main plotlines are ultimately stories of addiction.

Wallace knows this experience inside and out. This book's vast galaxy of plots revolves around a series of Alcoholics Anonymous scenes that simply blow the mind. In long, blabbering paragraphs, Wallace recounts the testimony of addicts about the most gruesome kinds of childhood abuse. His style, half inside and half outside the damaged self he's describing, offers a shortcut to that profoundest of laughs -- the laughter that comes only when you can't scream anymore.

Of course, you shouldn't need to know this when you pick up the book. You should be able to judge whether you want to read a novel by its first page. But if you are expecting Wallace's usual breeziness, the opening of this book will mislead. Yes, the scene of Hal Incandenza's disastrous interview at an Arizona university is hilarious, but it's also the portrait of an overstressed, brilliant, addictive mind that is no longer connected to either the body or the heart, and that has yet to hit absolute bottom. The sheer impassiveness with which Hal witnesses his own catastrophe gives this opening scene its relentless funniness, but it is a scene of catastrophe nevertheless.

Hal's halting narrative in the opening scene takes the form of many short paragraphs, often single sentences, whose jarring rhythm is telling you to slow down. Yes, this novel is a long, SLOW read. Wallace's facile brilliance can trick readers into skimming for the jokes, but if you do this, you'll miss the novel completely.

Infinite Jest speaks in a remarkable array of voices -- from the high erudition of Enfield to the struggling expressions of the illiterate -- but all these voices are screaming. Absurdly shelved under "Science Fiction" in the bizarre taxonomy of Epinions, it might just as well go under "Horror", except that none of this horror is gratuitous. This is the horror of addiction, seen from the inside.





Recommended: Yes