David Foster Wallace’s monstrous Infinite Jest is one of the few books I’ve read where it’s not possible to be certain what actually happened. As I noted in my post on his novel, Wallace is determined to interrupt and frustrate, making use of a fractured timeline, different points of view, many narrators and an array of acronyms and endnotes. A reader’s guide is pretty much essential.
Burn provides a fairly useless chapter on Wallace’s life (but not his recent death) and then moves onto the meat of the novel itself. As I did, he sees parallels with Greek myths, although not specifically the Odyssey, and he rather convincingly links the Narcotics Anonymous 12 step programme that Don Gately follows with the labours of Hercules.
He’s insightful about a lot of things that I had missed – in particular the significance of a missing year of the plot – The Year of Glad (which is the “very last year of subsidized time”), a year that is especially important in Hal’s story. We know that he attends the emergency room and he and Gately dig up the head of James O. Incandenza, Hal’s father, which may or may not contain the master copy of the entertainment (i.e. the film Infinite Jest), but Burn here fleshes out more of what may or may not have happened from references strewn throughout the thousand pages of the novel.
I’d also missed the significance of 8th November as a date in the novel, and that that was also the date that X-Rays were discovered (in 1895); Burn speculates that this is significant because Wallace is trying to provide us with a look inside his characters’ souls, and he provides some fairly compelling evidence that this is not just a coincidence.
He also provides a very useful timeline that rearranges the events of the novel in chronological order, which has the side-effect of showing how much more subtle the effect is when arranged in Wallace’s order, but also helps to lift the veil from some of the more obscure elements of the plot.
This is a useful and intelligent look at a modern masterpiece, but if you’re going to read Infinite Jest, I suggest you only read Burn’s study guide after having done so.
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