Infinite Jest

The book turns out to be depressingly finite. At 1000 pages, it took me about six months to hack my way through, and still I feel like there isn’t enough — I am cruelly left hanging (as was David Foster Wallace…) — as it ends without any resolution. The story is bizarre and compelling from the first few pages and weaves its way through so many interconnected lives of greatness and depravity, but feels after the last page turn as if we have just reached an intermission… I have previously read D.F.W.’s “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men”, which is a collection of short stories, some of which do have a resolution and some that do not, but no matter the length or narrative conclusion, his writing stands as the best use of the English language that I have ever read. His descriptive abilities are frighteningly and hilariously good, with every word purposed so perfectly and sentences that defy the limitations of printed ink to elicit an imagined visual purer than video. Life is more complicated than a neat finishing tie-up and every word, every sentence, every paragraph that we write in our own lives is infinitely more important than how it ends. His writing betrays a mind that is simultaneously gifted and cursed, picking out every minute detail and analyzing it endlessly, typically with a kaliedescope of colors that blends into a  dull-gray, which must have made his life ultimately unlivable. While we can lament the elimination of his own map, we can be grateful that he was able to focus his thoughts into art for at least some time, producing a body of work that is invaluable to our culture.