I am writing this just after finishing the book: with a bittersweet feeling, after DFW led every story to a convergent point, you just are left there hanging. In an interview DFW was asked if IJ had an ending or if he just didn’t want to finish the book, and he said “that an end can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame… if no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you”.
After reading his interview I can project and predict what happened at the end, but there are so many questions, maybe that is why people say you should re-read the book immediately after finishing it. And I would love to, because going back to the first chapters, there are some chapters that made no sense and that I am sure will make sense after a second read. However, I am writing this after my first time finishing the book, I hope there will be another one in the future.
DFW created a masterpiece in which every character is important and plays a role in the climax (which we don’t get to experience). Not only this is a novel about tennis, drugs, alcoholism and recovery, but it is a sociopolitical novel, and I think the main force driving the novel is the political conflict happening between the US and Canada. It is also full of sarcastic humor, and part of this is the conflict itself. There’s a president-elect: Johnny Gentle, who has a cleanliness-OCD: he wears a mask all the time and is constantly washing his hands. In his cleanliness obsession he wants to clean the United States, so he decides to transform a geographical area into a trash landfill. Curiously, the areas he turns into landfills are the areas where his political opponents reigned, the areas north of Ticonderoga and encompassing some of the New England states. This area was known as the Great Concavity (or as the Great Convexity by the Canadians, because nobody wanted to take that territory into their nation), and President Gentle spent a lot of money creating the EWD (empire waste displacement) and ATHSCME fans that threw and sent all of the toxic waste flying into the Great Concavity (by the way, this was such an expensive operation that the government had to sell the naming rights of the years, creating B.S. years – that is before syndications, and years after syndications: Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, etc). As an added phenomenon, children born and exposed to the waste in said area were born with defects such as a boneless skull.
President Gently founded the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN) as a way to gift this area to Canada.
Now, since this area is exactly south to Quebec, the quebecoise are the main affected by this incorporation of the Great Convexity, so a lot of insurgent terrorist separatist groups emerged, such as the FLQ (front de liberation quebecoise) or the AFR (the assassins of the fauteils rollent), which are the most relevant to the novel. This organization believed that if they somehow made the United States really angry with a terrorist act, the United States would retaliate; thus Canada, fearing reataliation from the US, would claim no association with Quebec, and would secede from Quebec, giving Quebec its long-wanted independence. Now, the AFR (whose members are all in wheelchairs because they used to play a game in which the last to jump in front of a train won) thought the best act of terrorism would be to release a mysterious movie called Infinite Jest. The myth said that every person that watched Infinite Jest entered a trance in which they only wanted to keep watching IJ and would die not wanting to eat or sleep, they just could watch IJ, with their souls lost.
Now, regarding the author of IJ (the movie, not the book), it was created by genius James Incandenza. He was a kid prodigy for playing tennis, but suffered an injury, that made him start studying optics, creating some innovations for military optics. After dominating the optics field, and with a couple patents he decided to create a tennis academy, the Enfield Tennis Academy, the school his children attended. After creating the ETA he started creating movies; highly theoretical and artistic movies focused on being ironic and bothering the viewers and the critics. Incandenza’s filmography deserves a book by itself. He innovated the movie world by pioneering the apres-garde movie movement, creating a genre of movies called Found Drama, in which he opened the phone book and chose a random person. That person was the protagonist of the movie, and the movie was his actual life during that night, with no cameras recording him. Critics regarded this movie as genius. James eventually met Joelle van Dyne (Orin’s girlfriend), and cast her in his movies, making her the star of his last movie, Infinite Jest — this is the movie so addictive one cannot stop watching it. James was an alcoholic, and after stopping drinking (by Joelle’s petition) he committed suicide putting his head in a microwave oven.
Now, the AFR was trying to locate the master copy of Infinite Jest entertainment cartridge, which supposedly had been buried in James’ tomb. However, they were trying to get information on the master to be able to locate it and reproduce the cartridge. They were also doing their own tests with one of the copies of the cartridge they found, by kidnapping people, playing the movie for them, and then asking them to cut their fingers if they wanted to rewatch it. Since James was already dead, they tried locating James’ son, Orin, the Cardinals kicker based in Arizona, and Joelle, the actress, currently recovering from her cocaine addiction and suicide attempt in the Ennet House for Recovering Addicts. Simultaneously, Hugh Stepply, an agent from the Office of Unespecified Services (formerly the FBI), via intelligence he got from an AFR member (Remy Marathe who is exchanging the intel for medical care for his deformed wife) is also interviewing Orin, and protecting Joelle from the threats the AFR poses.
Mental health, addiction and suicide are big topics, with a lot of characters experiencing depression. Being written by someone fighting with depression, and who eventually took his own life, or demapped himself, the descriptions read very sincere and powerful. One of the analogies of suicide I liked the most is being in a building that is on fire, so you have to choose between the horror of being burnt alive and the horror of jumping through the window. People will see you jumping through the window not seeing the fire and won’t understand, same thing happens with the suicidal. Another key topic is the bottom of the addiction: the moment the person is at his lowest and decides he has to do something or else he will kill himself or die because of drugs. We read some interestingly terrible stories, such as the girl that had the stillborn baby attached to her placenta and denied it was dead, or the girl whose adoptive sister was abused by his father daily and ran away from her house. In Don Gately’s case, we learn at the end of the book that his bottom was his Dilaudid bing with Fakelman’s stach he got from the stolen bet money, when Bobby C came into the apartment to kill Fakleman. Don is an important character, I would say he is the other main character besides Hal, who had a dark past committing frauds in apartments and eventually spending time in prison for breaking into a certain DuPleiss house (and allegedly stealing the master copy of IJ). During one of this moments he caused something to affect Totty (the ADA’s wife or daughter) so bad that it triggered her phobias. As a side note, the ADA being in a 12-step program for OCD and phobics anonymous, wanted to tell Gately he forgave him. Anyways, so Gately recovers from his addiction to narcotics and starts working in the Enet House (same place where he recovered), and he eventually became a hero by taking a shotgun by protecting the residents of the house from some Canadians Randy Lenz had bothered (by killing their dogs while on coke). Again, as a side note, Randy Lenz ended up being kidnapped by the AFR, who tested the entertainment on him.
There is a lot of action too at ETA, where we learn Hal Incandenza is a big marihuana (“Bob Hope”) addict, but not as bad as his friends, mainly Michael Pemulis, who deals the substances and also the clean urine for the tests, and who is a big ‘drines addict. The environment at ETA is both friendly and competitive, where Hal is second only after John Wayne (not the actor — as a side note, there’s a movie by James Incandenza about John Waynes – not the actor), who casually also had a sexual relationship with Avril Incandenza (which Pemulis saw once and thought it would be leverage for him to use in case they wanted to expel him – which was his major fear, since he would have to go back home, where his father sexually abused of his brother, who became a gay hooker). With strict training and studying routines the students at ETA had little time to do other activities, their recreational drugs included, so they were planning beforehand for a day to try the newly hauled DMZ. However, this would not happen, allegedly, because there was a conflict between the “small buddies” while playing Eschaton, and Pemulis, Hal and co were taken to the headmaster and they were given 30 days to take a drug test. Hal had to “lose all hope” and experienced heavy withdrawal and depression associated with it in the days leading to the end of the book.
The climatic event of the book is the ETA gala, where yearly the ETA students play tennis against international guests in front of their sponsors, as a fundraiser. This year (YDAU) the guest school was a quebecoise tennis school. The AFR in their attempts to get to the master copy decided to take the bus where the quebecoise tennis players would arrive, and the last thing we read is adults in wheelchairs are getting into the ETA. We can only imagine the rest.
by LiterallySagan