Welcome to my book review, which I’m writing because my four sons (now teen- and pre-teen-aged) are getting squishy about having their adventures published.
In December I read “Infinite Jest,” by David Foster Wallace.
To the lovely people who email me typo and grammar critiques, please know that the AP rule is to encapsulate book titles in quotation marks, not tilt them into italics. Don’t stop emailing me though. Don’t ever change. You’re perfect.
Published in 1996, “Infinite Jest” tracks a web of mostly-drug-addicted characters hunting for peace in a posh tennis school, a halfway house, and on the streets of Boston, Massachusetts. Set in a future in which the United States and Canada have combined into a rocky federation fraught with civil war, the novel also follows secret agents on both sides of the conflict.
A warning here: if sordid scenes derail you from a book’s arching message, this one isn’t for you. It’s probably not for your kids either. It might not even be for your grandma. Imagine yourself as a hardened intel agent while you digest this book’s valuable concepts and let its sordid scenes fizzle into your less-accessible memory banks.
Again, it’s futuristic. It envisions a future in which Americans in particular and Canadians too, are so pleasure-dependent that nearly everyone is addicted to a screen or a drug or alcohol.
That’s what I love about this work. Wallace, who wrote it while he was going through marijuana and alcohol withdrawals and while spending his entire adult life on SSRIs, doesn’t spare anyone.
Screen addicts, junkies, compulsive romantics: Wallace puts them all on the same side of the tracks, spiritually speaking.
They’re all falling short of their full potential. They’re all failing to savor the wonders around them, the “Higher Power,” and their duty and ability to care for others.
Someone – I won’t tell you which character – creates a film so fascinating and compelling that it inflames the pleasure receptors in the viewers’ brains, and those viewers want only to watch it until they starve to death in their own fecal matter, glued to the screen.
Wallace describes an America “unable to say non to fatal pleasures.”
He predicts our foreign enemies finally giving up on making open war against us, instead using our addictive tendencies to corrupt, distract and cripple us.
Hm.
A word here to some segments of the current cannabis-is-only-medicine movement, which may be shocked at me relating that Wallace had marijuana withdrawals. We hardly hear of such a thing today.
But Wallace anchors huge portions of this remarkable novel around the concept.
I don’t know what marijuana withdrawals are like or how severe they are. I resemble the Babylon Bee joke about Mike Pence: “I've never injected so much as a single joint of marijuana in my life!”
For now I’m going to take Wallace’s word for it.
Onward…
The book spirals around Don Gately, a halfway house worker and recovering addict who was once a burglar, once a gambling boss’s thug; once a high school dropout who left his love of football for opioids.
Unlike Wallace, Gately is a man of simple thoughts and simple speech. In him we find clues for how to leave the frenzying, wearying life of addiction.
He kneels his massive frame every morning to seek his “Higher Power,” and every night to thank that power for another day of sobriety. And he never stops seeking, though he doubts more than he believes.
He’s humble - working menial, even degrading jobs as he climbs out of debt and a tough probationary term.
He adopts a protective role toward his fellow man.
And he’s curious.
Only the curious are open to moments of awe. Only the curious can stop asserting their narrow perceptions of self onto the world and instead stand ready to absorb the world as a gift: a bizarre mosaic of different souls and a huge and stunning display too mighty to be classed with its inferior, “entertainment.”
Reading all this, I got the feeling Wallace was chiseling his most effective addiction-fighting techniques into a book for himself and for us all. How raw he was: I can tell he really tried.
Wallace lost those battles more than a decade after the book's release, killing himself in 2008.
But how I want to thank him for being brave enough to illustrate his struggles for us.
Brave enough warn us. To expose our depression, and his, as self-absorption. To challenge us toward moments of awe and moments of selflessness.
And to give us this impressive book, which, I reiterate, you should probably not let your kids read.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
