The Big American Novel would appear to be making a comeback bid. But what is
perhaps most surprising is that a novel such as Infinite Jest should have
been so long coming. Since the middle of the 1980s, much American mainstream
fiction has fought shy of the grand and compendious - a focus which has led
some unfairly to accuse it, therefore, of trading in the ephemeral and
minuscule. But even then, those novels which have dared to be enormous
(notably Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Harold Brodkey's The Runaway
Soul) were guaranteed the attendant hype and vitriol that only come with
"media events". Of course, this may have much to do with the very nature of
the business, the fiction industry vying only with competitive
vegetable-growing in the importance it attaches to sheer size and weight.
There is, however, more to it than that; America was the nation that turned
the conspiracy theory into an art-form, and since Thomas Pynchon, it has
been hard to ignore the ways in which plots and plotting are contingent upon
each other.
Along with John Barth and Don DeLillo, it is Pynchon who lurks in the shadows
of Infinite Jest. V and Gravity's Rainbow display most famously the
particular features of this kind of chunky philosophical satire: secret
societies, undercover agencies and mavericks, all following tortuous chains
of leads and clues, as the novels pose various questions about chance and
design, about which shapes are perceived and which imposed. Twenty-five
years ago, Tony Tanner observed of V that: The preoccupation with signs,
codes, signals, patterns, plots, etc, permeates the book so thoroughly that
it - the preoccupation, not just the signals and patterns themselves - could
be said to be the subject of the book.
And the fact that American popular culture is becoming explicitly concerned
once more with information, misinformation and control - hence the
catch-phrase "The truth is out there" - goes some way towards explaining why
David Foster Wallace has found this form congenial to what seems to be a set
of noticeably mid-1990s concerns: the comedy and despair that ensue when the
border between leisure and addiction begins to break down, and when private
lives can become corporate products. In nearly 1,000 pages of closely
printed text, followed by another hundred of bizarre endnotes, which range
from the hilarious to the deliberately in-furiating, Infinite Jest packs a
considerable range of bawdy, satirical excursions. Whether Wallace can be
said to have succeeded depends on how much validity one accords to plots
where endurance is itself part of the experience, and how his form sits with
what it aims to explore.
Set in a future that is not too distant, the very time-scale of the novel is
now subsidized, years being no longer dated but named after their commercial
sponsors. Two institutions, side by side in Boston, find their destinies
intertwining: an academy dedicated to the science of tennis, and a facility
for recovering addicts. Among their many points of contact is that young
tennis ace Hal Incandenza has a few habits of his own: "he likes to get high
in secret, but a bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he
is to getting high." As the two sets of inmates play out, and discourse on
their needs, the reader is introduced to the central McGuffin of the story.
Hal's late father, the founder of the tennis academy, became a legendary
underground film-maker, and is reputed to have made the film which shares
its title with the novel, a film which works directly and irrevocably on the
brain's pleasure centres. It is a striking central conceit - a film in which
art does not imitate life but actually becomes it for viewers, as they die
of pleasure. And naturally enough, both the American Government and a band
of Quebecois separatist guerrillas are only too keen to get their hands on
the elusive master copy.
Infinite Jest is perhaps best approached as a piece of allegorical science
fiction, recasting and stylizing contemporary anxieties as that genre has
always done. The very nearness of its future setting allows a reader to
trace currents from today that have gone all too plausibly awry. For
example, the story of the short-lived video telephone - reminiscent of an
American Douglas Adams - is a sharp send-up of the cults of beautification
and "cyberspace": Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable.
Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly
overintense listener's expression they had to compose for in-person
exchanges. Those callers who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike
doodling or pants-crease adjustment now came off looking rude, absentminded,
or childishly self-absorbed ,and the James Incandenza filmography in the
endnotes ("Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED") hits the right note of
self-defeating pedantry. This is due, in part, to Wallace's evident fluency
with the broad range of vernaculars that go to make up his novel's voices:
from urban jive to official double-talk. The prose often has a verve that
the prim British "novel of ideas" would not nowadays risk, as can be seen in
Wallace's disclaimer: "Any apparent similarity to real persons is not
intended by the author and is either a coincidence or a product of your own
troubled imagination."
A disarming sassiness, though, however welcome, does not guarantee anything
beyond itself, and parts of the novel suffer from crossing from being
Pynchonesque to simple Pynchonese. While it is undeniably funny to find that
what was once the USA is now called ONAN, not all of Infinite Jest's
acronyms serve so constructive - or destructive - a comic purpose.
Similarly, for a novel so concerned with various forms of acceleration
(tennis hot-houses, recreational drugs, the microwave oven with which
Incandenza Senior kills himself), the central quest takes a long time
getting going, and even then it never seems quite as structurally necessary
as it should be, although this vagueness could be argued to be central to
the form of the shaggy-dog story. Gravity's Rainbow may not just be about
the search for the V-2, as Moby-Dick is famously not just about looking for
a whale, but the very frustration of those searches casts important light
and shade on the novels' other quests. The actual business of tracking down
the film Infinite Jest - and novels which share titles with works of art
within them are getting distinctly old hat - doesn't occupy that much of the
narrative, not least because so much of it occurs as analepsis. Still, given
time, the skewed idiom and pace of the novel begin to establish themselves,
and Wallace's central concerns are powerfully and disturbingly given form.
Where Infinite Jest truly succeeds, and begins to justify some of the American
critics' superlatives, is not so much in its formal experiments as in its
portrayals of the blurry hinterland where recreation meets slavery: here, in
both senses, is where the novel's heart lies. Aside from the obvious
chemical and alcoholic fixes, Wallace has assembled any number of strange
and malign "virtual realities". Even the American agent Steeply has seen his
family clouded by his father's inability to tell M*A*S*H from real life:
"But my old man, the progression of the program from fun to obsession -
crucial distinctions had collapsed, I think, now."
It is the collapse of such "crucial distinctions" that Wallace renders so
well, conveying the sadness and confusion of an America where "prosthetic
man" has gone mad, and people clamour for the simulations of experience over
experience itself, all these images meeting in the elusive movie. The
novel's extreme length serves his purpose here, in that a reader can trace,
over great textual spaces, the progress of characters' pains, and their
failure to communicate them: it's the face In The Floor, the grinning
root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in
the mirror, now, it's you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become
you, and the puke, drool, and Substance crusted T-shirt you've both worn for
weeks now gets torn off and you stand there looking. . . .
But for all this, Infinite Jest never seems more than the sum of its weighty
parts. For a start, Wallace's style is so identifiably akin to 1970s
experimentalism that it can come over as the stylistic equivalent of period
costume, as the novel plays all the requisite moves around plots and
realities. Reflexive game-playing is a legitimate manoeuvre for a novelist;
nevertheless, without an active justification, it risks becoming as
self-defeating or ossified as those narrative styles which it purports to
overturn or call into question (as happens, for example, in Nabokov's weaker
books). The stylistic idiosyncrasies of the novel, while producing many
striking effects, do not always convince us that they could only have been
written as they were, or that the choice at any one point is especially
pertinent: the old circularity about "doing justice to confusion" only holds
up to a point. It remains to be seen if Infinite Jest heralds a return to
popular experimental novels in the United States; but, as Michael Chabon's
droll Wonder Boys showed, the Big American Novel has itself become a cliche,
and a book which so wilfully takes no prisoners stands in danger of not
attracting the attention merited by the quality of some of Wallace's
writing. Whatever truths there are "out there", the forms in which American
fiction presents them may yet be other than any of us, experimentalists
included, anticipated.
David Foster Wallace
INFINITE JEST
1,079pp. Little, Brown. £17.99.
0 316 92004 5
