Infinite Jest

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Soapy's picture
Soapy
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Joined: 30-05-10
Mar 8 2011 03:02
Infinite Jest

Has anybody else read this book? I find it to be first of all a work of genius, and second of all a great critique of capitalism. Without spoiling anything for those who haven't read it I'd like to explain my reasoning.

1st off the book makes life at every level of the class ladder look absolutely miserable. The Enfield Tennis Academy trains players to be the best tennis players in the world. However, life for students there is miserable just like everywhere else. No matter how good a player gets, he is always in danger of being worse than another player. If he achieves top status, he either kills himself out of fear of losing his high status, or he simply lives with the constant fear of being outranked by another player. There is no hope of this system getting any better, since just as it is in real world, there can only be a certain number of people who will be successful in life, and so the majority of attendees at Enfield will always be doomed to miserable failure in the field that they spend their entire youth working in.

I could go on and on, but I'm sure nobody would read anything more than what I have written. I am curious if anybody else had the same analysis I did?

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tastybrain
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Joined: 11-11-07
Mar 9 2011 03:45

Reading it right now. Yeah, it's great. I hadn't really considered it as a critique of capitalism but I yeah I can see the logic of that assessment. The idea of lethal entertainment is interesting. Please don't give away the ending, I'm not finished with it yet!

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Wayne
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Mar 9 2011 10:40

I totally agree, Soapy. I think he was the great writer of his generation and Infinite Jest is my favourite novel. It's the great novel of ideas but it's also funny and frightening and sad and human and, with a little help from Eggers' Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius, it's almost single-handedly dragged Anglo-phonic writing beyond postmodernism; which is to say, it's able to talk about love and solidarity and morality without reverting back to a more innocent age of literature. Also, sentence by sentence he is an exceptional stylist: to construct prose that exact over a book of that length is incredible. And he's a ventriloquist, too, able to impersonate any voice. It's great that his work is now attracting a wider readership because a few years ago, in Britain at least, nobody read his stuff.

It's very intersting that you see in Infinite Jest a critique of capitalism because I think that side of the book is often ignored. Politically, Foster Wallace was a fairly standard left liberal (committed to being a good citizen, participating in the democratic process, etc.), but there's this heart-felt (though never naive or sentimental) humanity in his work that becomes - to me at least - a sort of revolutionary energy against the dehumanised capitalist society he satirises. I also agree with your analysis of the tennis hierarchies - though I've read the book more than once, I'd never thought of that, so thank you.

I could haver on and on at tedious length but basically, aye, it's the best thing ever. Just don't hope for an ending, tastybrain; remember it was originally subtitled 'a failed entertainment'...