Infinite Jest

The test is subtractive, and no book on this desk is more exposed to it. The case for the length is real: a novel about a culture that will tolerate nothing but pleasure must make its reader work, and its thousand pages and hundred pages of notes are the opposite of the film at its centre. The core is required. The Eschaton must stay, the map mistaken for the territory on four tennis courts; the Marathe and Steeply dialogue must stay, since it states the book’s question about what a person chooses to serve; Gately’s hospital chapters must stay. But much could go without the knowledge changing: several of the residents’ case histories, the long run of Orin’s seductions, the Wardine section, a good part of the tennis drills and the set pieces of the satirical future. A tenth or more of the main text is permitted rather than compelled, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a culture organised around pleasure has made addiction its normal condition, and the escape from the self, by drug, screen, sport or irony, is what it sells. The Entertainment is the limit case, a film whose viewers die watching. Against it the book sets the one institution it shows working, Alcoholics Anonymous, whose slogans the clever characters despise and which keep Gately alive. The harder disclosure is that irony, the defensive cool of the clever, is itself a drug, and that a culture of knowing detachment has no way to say what it means. The action carries both: Gately, shot, refuses narcotics in hospital across many pages of pain; Hal, the gifted son, is found unable to make himself understood. Held off the top because much of the meaning is spoken outright, by Marathe and in the recovery rooms, rather than found.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Elevation comes often, through comedy and dread, in a book whose usual register is not elevated. The Eschaton degenerating into violence is the comic sublime, a world war on four tennis courts. Gately’s fight with the Canadians outside Ennet House is a set piece of physical terror. Kate Gompert’s account of clinical depression is dreadful in the old sense. The wraith at Gately’s bedside, speaking words into his head, is the strangest height. Hal in the opening section, saying to himself “I am in here” while the deans hear only noise, is the book’s coldest moment, and the last pages, Gately’s memory of a binge and its punishment, end on a beach where “the tide was way out”. Held below the higher reaches because long stretches are deliberately flat, procedural or comic, and the heights are spaced across a thousand pages.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The built myth is Hamlet. The title is Yorick’s, “a fellow of infinite jest”; the son is Hal; the father has died by his own hand before the action begins; the mother, Avril, keeps close a man of the family, Charles Tavis, who now runs the father’s academy; and the father returns as a ghost, though to Gately, not to his son. These are load-bearing: the family plot runs on them. The second myth is the fatal pleasure, the lotus and the siren, built into the plot as the Entertainment and its veiled actress. The two built myths carry the axis over the bar. What holds it near the bar is that the Hamlet frame is left open: the son never hears the father’s secret from the ghost, no revenge is taken, and the usurper is a comic figure. The satirical future, the Great Concavity and its feral creatures, is myth evoked as atmosphere more than built.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The inheritance is the encyclopedic American novel of Pynchon and Gaddis, DeLillo’s systems and Barth’s metafiction, with Joyce behind them all. Much of the apparatus is inherited: the acronyms, the alternative geopolitics, the paranoid plot around a lethal object, as in Gravity’s Rainbow. The turn is in what the apparatus is used for. Wallace had argued in “E Unibus Pluram” (1993) that postmodern irony had been absorbed by television and could no longer resist anything, and the novel turns the encyclopedic form against irony: its moral centre is a recovery house and a set of slogans, and its sympathy goes to the people the systems novel would have treated as specimens. The endnotes make the reader’s attention part of the form. The stake was real: a thousand-page book from a writer whose first novel had been received as clever and young. Held below the top because the instrument is largely Pynchon’s, and the swerve lies in purpose more than in means.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The endnotes interrupt the reading every few pages and send it to the back of the book and back, so that reading becomes a recursion, the motion of a habit. The chronology is broken and the climax withheld: the book begins in the Year of Glad, with Hal already beyond speech, and ends earlier, leaving the events that connect them, the digging up of the father’s head among them, for the reader to reconstruct. A novel about a pleasure that asks nothing is built so that it cannot be consumed without work. The braiding of the academy on the hill and the recovery house below it makes the parallel between discipline and addiction structural. Held off the top because many episodes inside the frame are containers rather than instruments, and the satirical future could be stripped out with less loss than the form’s defenders claim.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, and thirty years supply it. The book has drawn a literature of its own: Stephen J. Burn’s reader’s guide (2003), Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity (2007), the essays gathered as The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012). Readers reread it together in the Infinite Summer of 2009. The questions it plants are still argued: what happened to Hal between November and the Year of Glad; whether the Entertainment, the mould he ate as a child or a drug is the cause; what Gately and Hal did at the father’s grave; whether the book’s sympathy for recovery is its faith or its irony. Held below the top because thirty years is a short test, and part of the scholarship is reconstruction of the plot, which is difficulty before it is depth.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The field is American fiction of the late twentieth century. The force is a reorganisation of what the encyclopedic novel was for: the systems novel, which had held its characters at a satirical distance, was made to carry sincerity, compassion and a moral seriousness the generation before had treated as naive, while keeping all its learning and comedy. What holds it below the top is that the reorganisation finished what Pynchon began rather than starting it, and that much of the reach runs through the manner more than the vision. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book became the emblematic novel of its generation; it fixed the footnoted, maximal, discursive manner on a generation of American writers and on literary journalism; the turn away from irony that it argued became a common position in American fiction after it; and it stands on Time’s list of 2005 of the hundred best English-language novels since 1923.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over thirty years, and the evidence is positive. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout. Presence is wide and continuous: public rereadings, a film about its author, The End of the Tour (2015), and a readership that has grown since Wallace’s death in 2008. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment: the cartridges and the videophone belong to the 1990s imagining the future, though the satire of a culture of streamed entertainment reads more pertinently now than then. Charged against it: the book’s standing has been contested in the last decade, both for the readership it gathered and for what became known of its author’s conduct, and its presence is narrower outside the United States. The contest has not removed it from print, from teaching or from readers; it bears on presence, not on form or fabric. Three decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on Wallace’s English, with no translation between. The command is of register, and the range is the widest of any American novel of its decade. The opening, “I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.”, is precise, formal and cold; the Ennet House chapters take on Gately’s speech and the speech of the recovery rooms without condescension; the Marathe and Steeply dialogue is written as a translation, its idioms faintly wrong; the filmography of James Incandenza, an endnote, is a parody of an academic catalogue that becomes the portrait of a man. The long sentence, subordinate on subordinate, carries obsessive attention. Three charges hold it below the top: the tics recur and harden, the stacked qualifications, the coined abbreviations, the conjunctions in series; some sections are logorrhoeic, length without pressure; and the Wardine section, written in an imagined Black Boston dialect, is the book’s least controlled passage and has been justly charged with caricature.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the Marathe and Steeply dialogue, a political conversation about freedom on a mountainside outside Tucson, and Gately in his hospital bed refusing Demerol. They obey one law: a person is what he chooses to give himself to, and the free choice to serve one’s own pleasure ends in slavery to it. The academy, where boys give themselves to tennis, and the recovery house, where adults give themselves to a programme in place of a drug, are one law seen from two sides; the separatists who want the Entertainment as a weapon understand the American appetite exactly. The range is very wide, from slapstick to theology. Charged: the satirical future, its catapulted waste and outsized infants, runs on a looser physics of comic exaggeration than the naturalism of Ennet House, and the refusal to bring the strands together leaves some of their laws asserted rather than tested in collision.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Many orders, and one question holds them: what a person will serve. Consciousness, in Hal and in the depressives. The family, the Incandenzas, three sons and two parents bound by evasion. Institutions, in the academy and the recovery house, with their disciplines and their sayings. Sport, as labour and as vocation. Work, in Gately’s duties at the house and the residents’ jobs. Class, in the distance between the hill and the house below it. The state and its geopolitics, in the Organization of North American Nations, the separatists and the American agency. The media and the entertainment economy. The natural order, poisoned, in the Great Concavity. The sacred, in the Higher Power to which Gately prays without believing. They are integrated, not listed: every order is a form of service and of addiction. Held below the top because history is thin, the past reaching the book only as family history, and because women are held less fully than men.

Score: 9.1 / 10