Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

It's pretty meaningless to try to identify a favorite book. What do you mean exactly by "favorite?" There are so many criteria that it quickly becomes a futile endeavor. You've got to start categorizing things and being quantitative and so on. Ick.

So let's just leave it at this: Infinite Jest is one of my all-time favorites. This book knocked me out the way that only a handful of books have ever knocked me out. Endlessly puzzling, terrifying, hilarious, complex, innovative, and on and on. For me to try to give a description of it would not do it justice.

I guess it began sometime this last spring when I first saw it at the library. "What is that incredibly thick book about?" I would ask myself. I read the dust jacket (of Maplewood's hardcover copy) and must confess it didn't grab my attention, but that's just a testament to how horribly insufficient a dust jacket description can be when trying to suggest at the contents of a mammoth novel like this. If it had been merely three or even five hundred pages, I might have read it a few months earlier. But a thousand? You've got to be wickedly motivated to read something that long, or be given a shining review of it by someone you trust, whose literary tastes are similar to yours.

My motivation came when I re-read the dust jacket in May or June sometime and this time read about the author, David Foster Wallace. It said he lives in Bloomington, Illinois. That did it for me. I was going to read this book. It took me another month or two to wrap up the reading material I already had on my itinerary, but when I did, I went for Infinite Jest. It turned out that it had absolutely nothing to do with Bloomington, Illinois, but that was of little concern to me once I actually got into it.

Have you been to central and southern Illinois? It's as flat as the ocean. Flatter, I suppose, since at least the ocean has waves and tides. I don't know why the geographical features (or lack thereof) of rural Illinois made such an impression on me the last two Februarys and Marches that I've driven through it, but they did. Something sad and content and stately and insidious all at the same time. Abraham Lincoln practiced law or delivered some important speech or something in Bloomington didn't he? There's something very Abraham Lincoln about central and southern Illinois to me.

Also the fact that relatively glamorous Chicago is right there in the same state with all that plainness. Almost nine million people live in the greater Chicago area (2.8 million in the city itself), and only twelve million in the entire state of Illinois. Granted, the "greater Chicago area" (according to my almanac) includes Kenosha, Wisconsin and Gary, Indiana, but the numbers are still pretty lopsided. For some reason that severly skewed population distribution just makes me admire the sparcely populated parts of the state. Bloomington-Normal, Urbana-Champaign, Decatur, Peoria, Springfield. Places like that. Same with Minnesota, 60% of which lives in or around the Twin Cities. Gives me more respect for places like Duluth and Rochester in that state. I grew up in a town like that, middle of nowhere-ish. Several dozen thousand population, but nevertheless notoriously unremarkable compared to the metropolis a few hours away.

None of this, of course has anything to do with Infinite Jest. I'm just explaining how DFW's hailing from so-called "outstate" Illinois (Urbana, I think) gave me a lot more interest in his writing at the outset than I would have had if he had been from, say, Chicago, or anywhere in California, or the east coast. It's all a matter of perspective.

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