Infinite Jest

So I finished Infinite Jest yesterday. Finally, 980 pages plus over 350 footnotes, some of which spanned multiple pages and offered key plot points not found within the main text. It was both very satisfying and extremely frustrating. It's as though the whole book is setting the stage, bringing you into the characters, building connections, and setting up a singularly explosive situation, only to END just as a hand is striking a match to ignite the powder keg. It is all setup, and it pulls a Lucy football by just ENDING.

Now I must say that I did love a lot of it. The characters, the writing, the dialogue were all just amazing. There were some scenes in the book that will never leave my mind, which is a good thing. But I was left ultimately unsatisfied... And I know that was exactly what he wanted to do, to leave us on the edge, not knowing what would happen next.

As I wrote before, a lot of the book is about addiction, and what it brings people to. There's not a single fully functioning person in the book, and everyone is wounded in some way, and acting badly. It's a big love letter to AA, which counsels you to take it one day at a time and just be in the moment and not look ahead because. So ending abruptly is perhaps just right.

so I respect it. I respect what he did there.

but I still want to know - did Hal take the dmz that left him wrecked at the beginning of the book willingly, or did Pemulis dose him as he did others? Will the quebec separatists ever get ahold of the entertainment and unleash it on the unsuspecting north Americans? Will Maranthe actually seek out Joelle Van Dyne and try to work out the nature of the entertainment? Will Gatley recover? the presence of the crown at the end indicates he was more hurt than we realized, and maybe he won't be able to stay off of pain killers after all? Will Orin escape the glass cage with the roaches and tell the quebecois wheelchair terrorists where his father was buried?

Now that I write this, I guess these are pretty silly questions if you haven't read the book... But that's what I'm left with.