David Foster Wallace ’s Infinite Jest was the good science fiction novel I register in the 1990s , and remains one of the best novels I ’ve ever read in the genre . The story of a succeeding dystopia where entertainment has eventually become so addictive as to be deadly , Infinite Jest was glorious and morbid , with a flakey suicide at its core . So perhaps it ’s not that surprising that David Foster Wallace took his own life this weekend . I ’ve been expect a XII years for Foster Wallace ’s next novel , and now it looks like we ’re all out of fortune . Infinite Jest coddler ahead . Infinite Jest is a frustrating novel to read in some ways — a caboodle of the most interesting parts are bury in the mountain of endnotes that link up through to bits of the text . It ends suddenly and you never quite ascertain how Hal Incandenza becomes the damaged creature you see in the flash - forward at the novel ’s beginning . It ’s a novel you really have to immerse yourself into , instead of rake or zipping through . It ’s very self - consciously postmodern in its fancy use of words and many weirdly juxtaposed character and storyline . It ’s a spy chronicle mix with a tennis fib mixed with a story of addiction . And yet it ’s totally enthralling and nous - blowing .
I ’ve frankly never been able to get into a circumstances of other pomo authors — even Don Delillo lead me inhuman — but Infinite Jest actually fulfills the promise of the postmodern novel . It ’s a groovy novel and it has all these superfluous layers of uncanny cultural significance . In a nutshell , IJ takes blank space in a futurity where the U.S. , Canada and Mexico have merged into a exclusive superstate called O.N.A.N. , and a large chunk of the Eastern seaboard has been turned into a toxic waste dump address the Great Concavity or the Great Convexity , depending on whether you ’re in the U.S. or Canada . Instead of being numbers , the year are named after corporations or merchandise , and the naming right are auctioned off . Most of the novel ’s action look at place in the Year Of The Depends Adult Undergarment , but there ’s a flash - forward to the Year of Glad . Infinite Jest has a bunch of shift subplots , including spies and malefactor and Quebec separatist . But it really has a pretty clear-cut theme run through the book : that of addiction . The main grapheme , Hal , has a psychological addiction to weed , and he ’s always smoking out every chance he gets , possibly ruining his bright future at the Enfield Tennis Academy . ( And it ’s never clear if it ’s drugs , or something else , that turn Hal into a quasi - vegetable at the end of the tarradiddle . ) Meanwhile , a heap of the rest of the action takes office at a nearby addiction treatment facility . Not to mention a batch of pills , Mount Dilaudid , that turn up at the goal of the Word . And then it turns out that Hal ’s founding father , Himself , has create a video that ’s so entertaining that you ca n’t cease learn it until you die . ( The lethally addictive TV is squall Infinite Jest , or just The Entertainment . ) Hal ’s father has killed himself by putting his head in a microwave oven and rigging it to work with the door unresolved . According to Wikipedia , fans speculate that the Year Of The Depends Adult Undergarment is 2008 or 2009 , which imply we ’re now living in the future that DFW warned us about . Okay , so North America has n’t unite into a superstate . But the medium saturation and corporate mastery that impregnate the background of Infinite Jest are definitely more obtrusive than they were in 1996 , when the novel came out . Most of all , Infinite Jest fend as a magnificent face at how technology can amplify our ever - present tendencies towards obsessiveness and self - destructiveness . As David Foster Wallace ’s last novel , it ’s a pretty powerful assertion and a chef-d’oeuvre that should long outlive the literary fads that breed it . And its source will be miss .
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