When you’re toting around a book that’s 1100 pages long, aside from the looks that suggest you’re nuts, people often ask “So, what’s it about?” I can sometimes have a hard time answering this with even the shortest book, because I’m afraid of leaving out what might, for the person asking, be the best part; or, conversely, that I’ll include something that will turn the person off from the book when there are others things they might love.
The question is even harder to answer with a really long book. I mean, the book would have been a lot shorter if a question like “what’s it about” were easy to answer, right? Still, I think it’s a good exercise to try to answer this question, so here goes. No spoilers, but if you want to read the book without knowing anything going in, the way I did, you shouldn’t be reading this.
Infinite Jest takes place in a near, alternate future, mostly in the Boston area. The narrative follows many characters, but mostly we’re interested in Hal Incandenza, age 17, and Don Gately, in his late 20s. Hal is a very lexically-gifted tennis prodigy; Don Gately is working at a rehab facility. Over the course of the book, we meet everyone in Hal’s family: his father James (a research scientist, filmmaker, and former tennis prodigy who founded Enfield Tennis Academy, which Hal attends), his mother Avril (the current head of ETA, militant grammarian, Canadian ex-pat), his oldest brother Orin (a kicker in the NFL), and his older brother Mario (a filmmaker who has been physically deformed since birth, and lives at ETA). We also meet most of the residents at Enfield House, the rehab facility where Don Gately works and is himself in recovery.
The United States is part of the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN), which includes Canada and Mexico. It’s ostensibly a cooperative, but there are tensions, especially surrounding The Concavity, a huge area of land in the northeast US that has been reverse annexed to Canada (forcibly given away), and which is used as a massive landfill for waste, much of it highly toxic. This is the politic backdrop of the book’s world.
The one spoiler, of sorts, that I’ll give up is this: when you get to the filmography endnote, the biggest one in the book (or pretty close, it’s around 10 pages), at least skim it. It’s amusing, and is your first chance to see the book’s title as far as I could tell. Skip it, and you’ll spend a little longer wondering where the book’s title comes from (something that always bugs me until I figure it out).
Chronologically, the books starts basically at the end of its timeline, then skips around in points in the near (mostly) and sometimes more distant past. We see right away that something isn’t quite right, but we don’t know how or why it happened, and we’re not exactly sure what it is. It’s probably best, for the first 150-200 pages, to just kind of take it all in as you go.
In terms of the plot, I really wasn’t sure where it was going even up through the first 900 pages. It wasn’t predictable enough that I felt like I could really guess. It’s not a ruthless page-turner, but neither is it apparently aimless; I just didn’t really know where it was going. I liked this; it probably gives other people the howling fantods. I also had to go back and re-read, or at least skim, the first 150 pages or so to remember what all happened at the beginning. Doing that made things a bit clearer overall, although of course it feels somewhat insulting having gotten through almost 1100 pages to have to read some of them again right away.
The book touches on a huge range of topics, as you might expect: addiction, depression, tennis, the nature and pursuit of happiness, interpersonal and intercountry relations, consumerism and commercialiation, and more. There are sections that feel very fanciful, and others that feel absolutely true (concretely, or philosophically). There are sections that are deadly serious, and some that are laugh-out-loud hilarious, and even more that are a mixture of both. It’s not an easy read by any means, but it was, for me, totally worthwhile.
If you can devote some time and a lot of attention to reading, I think it’s definitely worth giving Infinite Jest a try. Even if you end up struggling to explain why you’re reading such a monster that’s hard to explain.