As mentioned before, occasionally I write reviews for the website www.goodreads.com. I’m in the middle of reading a few books at the moment, so I don’t have anything piping hot and fresh, but I would like to share some of my favorite reviews I’ve written. This one is of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
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A preface: If you haven’t yet read Infinite Jest, this review won’t serve to persuade you to make the commitment. Other reviews will tell you how long and complex this book is, or how some of the vocabulary comes straight out of the Oxford English Dictionary’s left field, or tell you how brilliant or pretentious or overwritten or other Red Flag words the book and author are tagged with. Et cetera, et cetera.
A review: In his book Howard’s End, E.M. Forster wrote, “Only connect!”
That short little diddy has long been one of my favorite literary quotes; and although I have no tangible evidence to prove either way, I think a variation of this ran through David Foster Wallace’s mind constantly.
I had the misfortune of having started this just a few weeks before DFW committed suicide, so naturally, my perspective on the book changed mid-read. For those of you have read Infinite Jest, recall how Hal starts perceiving the world horizontally instead of vertically. Yeah, it’s kinda like that. Adding to the emotional baggage of this read was an uncle of mine who also committed suicide a year prior, not to mention a few good friends who have been to rehab and recovery houses. Then, on top of that, is the capitalized Personal Identification I discovered having with DFW too, which quite possibly transcends ways in which I am able to coherently express.
Suffice to say, circling back to the quotation above, you know how some have said words and language are the only real way we connect as human beings, right? Well, to me, Infinite Jest is Wallace’s personal own Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), his way of sending out a transmission signal that said, “I’m here. We’re here. We’re alive and suffering, trying to be happy, living the only way we can. Please respond. Please Identify. Please commit.”
Last night after I closed Infinite Jest for the final time, I had an image in my mind of DFW presiding over a dying plant and slitting his own wrists to water it with blood. I think it will stick with me for some time.
Concluding thoughts: this review is probably too somber and narrow, and I find it difficult to say what really matters without going on and on and on and on, so it’s time to cinch up the tourniquet and spare the limb. It’s worth noting how compulsively laugh-out-loud hilarious this book can be, and how the philosophical digressions will get you nodding affirmative, the observations of persons, places, and things so spot-on and vivid some won’t want to leave your head, a literary entertainment so gentle and brash and enlightening and real, and yes, entertaining too, that I will truly miss reading it.
What more can you say about a book than that?
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