How To Finish "Infinite Jest." Guaranteed Or Your Money Back.

Warning: My system will not be for everyone, but neither was David Foster Wallace.

Catching up in person after years with an old friend a few weeks ago in the sports-betting wing of a casino in Springfield MA, who happens to be the smartest person I’ve ever known and once was the head of Princeton’s Classics Department, I mentioned that I’d read David Foster Wallace’s epic novel (1,079 pages in my edition, including every footnote, which are in an even smaller typeface). It’s inarguably modern writing’s most unplumbable epic, a barbed text, the toughest of wades, Half Ulysses, half The Three Stooges — just a huge thing to take on in totality.

My friend’s reaction was of un-hide-able bafflement. The data just didn’t add up for him. “The whole thing?” he said. Then, “You read the whole thing?”

No surprise there. After we left college, when he’d gone on to get his degrees, for the next three years I covered a minor-league hockey team whose home arena, the New Haven Coliseum, was later imploded because no one went to the games and everyone in the city thought it was an eyesore, although I always thought that the circular parking ramp and garage floors were pretty cool, Brutalist-ly.

*

But so anyway (i), having a reunion in the sports-betting wing of Springfield’scasino, my friend and I were sitting in front of a too-large screen showing four live events. Our seats, as in a small theater, were in a dozen rows of those kind of lecture-hall chairs that have those flip-up half-desks hanging down to the right, attached to the armrest, so you can flip them up to take exams or notes or poems. The cup holder is over on the left.

No one sitting in any of the chairs that day in front of the giant screen was taking notes like at a lecture, or writing a memoir or anything, just drinking, as they watched a team they’d bet on losing a game or match on the screen, but worse, because the guy missing the crucial putt is three times larger than life, a few yards away.

“It was a New Year’s Resolution,” I explained to my friend. “How I read the whole thing.”

By now, I could tell that my friend was not completely listening, because even though he hadn’t bet on any of the games on the screen, it was so large that there was no way to ignore them, but I kept talking anyway.

*

DFW’s voice had hooked me with the first piece of writing that broke him free from the rest of us: an account for Harper’s of the Illinois State Fair, where he took pieces of every long-form journalism formula ever used by long-form journalists and assembled them for a trip to an entirely other dimension of the form/craft. Then he did the same thing for Harper’s for cruise ships.

I was stunned at both. This was what I did for a living, writing that kind of story. In fact, just a few years earlier, my account of my four-day embedment at a Phish festival was fucking brilliant!..man, did I ever capture the vibe, right?…but it wasn’t even in the same league. I was awed, if you can literally be awed.

Then, soon after that one evening I was walking in Manhattan and turned a corner to see a few dozen people on a sidewalk in the lower East Thirties watching through basement windows onto a packed basement auditorium. I leaned in to see DFW reading at a desk. I knew it was him because of the bandana.

I figured it was a sign. Time to pay attention. So I pulled Infinite Jest off a bookstore shelf. I made it through 11 or 12 pages. The brain behind the thoughts was brilliant, the clutter of words impregnable — and I had actually read the whole of Moby Dick, yes, to get a good grade, but I ended up loving it — but then, Melville’s use of language and syntax, while dense, were the accepted version of what word-instruments a writer used, and in what fashion, to tell a sell-able story in those days. Henry told the cool tale: Guy, whale. Funny. His words were thick, but played by word-sentence-paragraph rules.

Infinite Jest’s syntax, language, and rules of thinking about how they should be used obviously weren’t the accepted versions. You had to find a way to solve them first, then try and immerse yourself in that flow, and then, if you make it, just ride the current until it’s over, asking for more.

There’s a downside to Infinite Jest: Like Moby Dick, it’s not really meant for women. But while there are no women in Moby Dick, that’s probably not intentionally on Melville’s part. They didn’t figure. Whereas women in Infinite Jest might as well be invisible.

I’m not going to defend DFW the man when it comes to women. His former editor at Esquire wrote a lot about him in her book (ii.) I knew Adrienne from when she was the assistant to my editor at GQ, so I know that whatever she wrote is what happened. A is authentic. She makes it clear that DFW was demonic regarding the woman thing.

*

But the second time I tried Infinite Jest, about 20 years ago, a decade after the first time, maybe because I’d learned the craft of writing better, I was able to unclump the words, see the pace of their flow, his thoughts pumping at multi-speed, possessed of the writer’s lens’s ability-curse to see everything at once. I began to realize that our brains were/are not dissimilar in having to blurt out everything we take in and write it down and tending to see everything more acutely than other people, and more quickly, which is most ways is useless.

Where we were dissimilar was in to what degree of success we achieved when we put these biologically similarly crafted brains into translating everything into written words. When I wrote, if I could play checkers well, DFW was playing chess. If I were ever presuming to play literary chess, he was playing three-dimensional chess. If I were playing three-dimensional chess, he was playing String Theory Chess, which posits, as I understand it (String Theory does), eight or nine dimensions.

But that second time, I also began to actually understand how he’d constructed and arranged his words. But I also understood that no matter how hard you try, even over your third quattro-shot latte at Starbucks, you can’t possibly read more than ten pages of Infinite Jest at a time. Maybe you’re in a prison cell 23 hours a day, or on the drug African hunters take to shut their bodies down for 24 hours to lure prey into not being able to sense any living thing in their domain, then maybe you could read all 1,000 pages in a few sittings.

But in real life no mind can take on IJ in anything but digestible bites. So I came up with an idea. If I read ten pages on a hundred different days I could finish it totally realistically in one year. The trouble was, sitting even in your favorite reading spot, ten pages take forever because they’re just too intense to do in a relaxing place.

Then I thought: There’ll be 100 days minimum this year when I can take a walk and read at the same time. I was right. There were. After staring in January, I finished it in October after, more or less, 100 walks. (And in much better shape, since the last stretch was always uphill.)

So this is why it probably won’t work for you: People who see you will find the sight highly eccentric, and if you don’t want to be thought of that way, don’t read fat books while you’re also walking in a town. After my first dozen or so DFW strolls I realized that there were people in town who were seeing my behavior as a reader-walker reading this crazy-thick tome with a highlighter or pen in his right hand as unusual, which I totally am when it comes to the written word, but I hadn’t seen it that way when I started. One day as I walked in front of the firehouse, reading, a guy said to another guy, “Here he is!” Another time a friend came down off her porch on the phone to describe to who ever she was talking to about how her friend Peter was reading David Foster Wallace as he walked on the sidewalk, sort of like telling her friend she’d spotting a lost moose.

Even friends in cars would slow to express their wonder at what I was doing. No one ever said, “What are you reading?” They always asked if I was nuts, reading and walking, as if I might not see a tractor-trailer heading down the street as I was immersed in thick, swampy prose, or I’d trip and fall and hit my head and die. So I gave up trying to explain that I wasn’t exactly walking down the middle of the street as I read, just on sidewalks, although if there were a dog barking a few feet away from me even if it was in a house, yes, I’d drift to the street to read to re-gain concentration.

But usually, when someone slowed down to express curious delight at seeing such a thing (I certainly would have), it was just easier to laugh along with them at my own innocent inanity.

In the end it turned out that the best thing about reading Infinite Jest brick by brick, in hundredths, was that when I was done, I got it. It had been assembled, maybe like a pyramid, and now I got the whole. The meta-mega-narrative buried beneath his crazy-always-buzzing brain had come through, to where I knew who each character was in all of the concurrent/contiguous plots. I had favorites. I had villains.

Coolest of all, Infinite Jest had turned out to be, against the all-est of odds, a really good novel, as well as everything literarily else it is, which, if he were here, he could explain.

*

My friend and I decided to both put $10 down on whether the Giants would win six or more games this upcoming season. If we turn out to be right, we’ll each get a $7.36 profit. We’d always had football in common. One Sunday our last year, as he got the PhD and I graduated 1492d out of 1506 (who would ever forget that number if that’s where they finished in their senior class?), for the food as we watched the Redskins playing the Cowboys in the second game, he baked Banquet Fried Chicken adding small cubes of pepperoni. I’d brought Lou Reed’s Rock ‘n Roll Animal. The Redskins won.

After we bet for the Giants, my friend went back home up in Northampton to work on the final section of his interpretations of Aristotle’s Poetics, and I went home to work on something else or the other. We agreed to meet midseason to make another round of bets.

*

But so anyway, after a late start, I’m doing another resolution again this year, but “The Pale King,” the thing DFW was writing when he killed himself, is only 700 pages, so I’ll make the deadline at my current rate: 10 a day, seventy days in all. Today I made it to 178. I know, I’m biased, but the dude could type.

(i) DFW’s favorite way to open a sentence

(ii) Miller, A: In the Land of Men: A Memoir; Ecco/HarperCollins, 2020. New York.