Infinite Jest

After working at it on-and-off all summer long, I’m finally done with Infinite Jest and I feel . . . well, I don’t quite know how I feel. I was determined not to let reading this difficult book become a “difficult” process and just resolved to read a page then turn the page then read the next page (modified, as necessary, for footnotes and such) and not spend too much time worrying about whether or not I was understanding everything that’s going on. Consequently, I enjoyed myself reading the book—it’s funny, clever, etc., has some great set pieces, blah blah. Also some weak points. But by the end this has added up to . . . what, exactly? I don’t really know. A sprawling meditation on addiction and the over-entertained American, I guess.

But in a fundamental sense it struck me as very unsatisfying. Not just in terms of the weird ending, but in terms of definitely not feeling like I got more out of reading it than I could have gotten out of reading three books that were one third the length. That in turn is really making me glad that I was made to read Anna Karenina and Moby Dick in high school. I really loved both those giant honking books, but does it really make sense for a busy person in the modern world who maybe doesn’t care to dedicate all that much time to classic novels to read them? Seems like it might make more sense to read some short Tolstoy like “Family Happiness” and “Hadji Murat” and then move on to other things.

Adding new possible ways to entertain ourselves naturally starts to squeeze out the viability of some old ways. And maybe the long novel is among the squeezed. Which seems in some ways regrettable (which I take it is part of the point of Infinite Jest) but at the same time to really be a feature of the world.