Infinitely Jested

I recently finished reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which you can often find on “Longest Novels in English” lists. I read it on and off for almost six months. It's a hard novel to explain, although it happens mostly in only two locations, and mostly involves just a handful of characters (although there are literally hundreds of ancillary characters you can attempt to keep track of, too, if you’re so inclined.) I have to say, it's an entertaining read, one that I'm sure will be influential in the coming years when I think about the possibilities of the novel, the forms it can take, and what a novel can ultimately be about. It's long-winded at times exhaustively descriptive, especially if you’re not into the jargon of both training for and playing tennis, but you can tell through it all that the writer is finding this jungle of words he's hacking his way through highly amusing.

One piece of wisdom stands out to me, though, and when enough years have gone by and I've forgotten all the details and maybe even the broad themes of the novel -- although I'm pretty sure that, unlike many other books, just rereading passages from it will rather easily recreate the neural pathways this gargantuan thing has tunneled into my mind – it will stick with me. I'll try to explain it in the less than three closely typeset pages that it took DFW. It all boils down to this: there is no reciprocal emotion for idol worship.

Let me clarify... there are people in all our lives who we idolize, the people (maybe movie stars, maybe rock gods, maybe authors, maybe political/religious figures, maybe star athletes) who we look up to and are in awe of. We buy their tickets, or their CDs, magazines with their covers on them, or whatever extensions of these people exist in our personal world, just to feel like we're closer to them, to experience what it is they have to say or what they have to show us. They kindle something in us that makes us long for them, to be near them, to maybe even be them. This is the centerpiece of American celebrity, this belief that being famous will make us stronger, will make us more *us*.

But here is the kicker, one that should make us reevaluate who we are in relation to our idols. The celebrities that we love are, for the most part, totally excluded from this collective longing we have for them. Being loved by millions of fans doesn't make you feel any more worthy, or secure, or whole as a person. If anything, it makes you even more isolated, more numb to actually experiencing life and love as it's meant to be experienced. As confident and self-assured as they may seem, that feeling (if they have it at all) isn't provided by the adoration of millions of fans. If anything, it exists in spite of it.

American culture seems based on this fallacy, that being famous will make you happier. We keep striving for it, even as we are told over and over that it’s not what we think it is. Fiona Apple can stand up in front of an audience and say, flat out, “This world is bullshit” (meaning, the world of Celebrity) and we won’t believe her. We believe the illusion because we want – and some of us *need* -- to believe it, that our talent and our good works will get us noticed, will make us worthy of being loved.

This, I think, is the heart of what Infinite Jest is about, and if it is I'm amazed that DFW was able to convey it to me as I read it, and not make it clear only in retrospect. Many of the characters are young students at an elite tennis academy, and they're preparing for a possible life of stardom knowing full well that most of them won't get there, and if they do they'll only survive it if they ignore it. Other characters are recovering drug addicts of one kind or another, living at a halfway house near (and sometimes working menial jobs at) the tennis academy. Each of them is learning to turn their psyches inside out, going from the self-absorbed, self-gratifying stasis of addiction into a life where each moment, each day you have to validate your own existence to yourself. All the characters are either moving from anonymity to stardom, or stardom (at least in their own heads) to sober anonymity.

I think that DFW's novel is a powerful, sly meditation on how we choose to assign meaning to things in our lives. Should it be ourselves? Should it be the love of others? And there are other questions, too: What does a person amount to, really? Are we simply a swirling mass of the various entertainments we ingest, movies or sports or drugs or whatever? How is it possible that we can even be able to deal with the pain and uncertainty of living?

I find myself thinking that these are things that DFW must have thought about all the time. A person just doesn't write a 480,000+-word novel in the span of three years without being passionate about the subject. He actually ended up committing suicide, perhaps because of the very fame he seemed to be working his way toward acceptance through writing Infinite Jest. I'll definitely be reading more of his works, to see if this was the theme that forms the through-line of his life.

But for now, I feel easier about putting aside the hunt for fame that fuels so many people’s ambition. There’s a truer path, and that’s understanding, accepting, and honing one’s own true talents. If we focused more on that as a culture, just think of what we could achieve.