Poor Yorick

Nearly a decade after publication, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest remains a literary ink-blot test. At a length of 1,079 pages (including nearly 400 footnotes), and with its fondness for gags, pharmacology, cultural theory, popular culture, scientific minutiae, and Latinate vocabulary, the novel still divides readers on matters of literary technique and the question of Wallace's literary talent.

I tend to believe that David Foster Wallace's stylistic pyrotechnics are not bright enough to hide the comparatively dull substance of his writing. Infinite Jest is not the Next Big Thing (except for the size of the tome itself), but nor is it the fodder for the Moronic Inferno that Dale Peck and the rest would have it.

The novel's tragic flaw is its lack of emotion depth. Wallace seems more interested in inventing acronyms and an "après" filmography than in developing characters. The author's utilization of the language of pop psychology and millennial technological frenzy to portray teenage tennis phenoms does truly capture their milieu and their fixations. Wallace hits false notes, however, using that same language to draw the mostly lower-class residents of a halfway house, as if they were operating from the same frame of reference as the rich kids at the tennis academy.

Focusing on such young, shallow characters violates the Big Rule of compelling fiction: There has to be something at stake in a work. You may not forget Hal Incandenza, the teenage tennis and linguistic prodigy who is as close to a protagonist as this novel offers; but it is this implausible combination of natural gifts (and Wallace's pretentious character names), not Wallace's rendering of boy or his story, that make Hal memorable. Hal's lower-class counterpart, Don Gately, a thirtyish petty thug recovering from drug addict at the nearby halfway house, is more intriguing for the difficulty of his situation and his more advanced age. But Wallace presents Gately as lacking self-awareness to a degree that kills whatever sympathy readers might otherwise be willing to invest in him.

Wallace's experimental style does not disguise the essential weakness of his writing here either. Few of the narratives coalesce, and it is often difficult to imagine why editors did not simply send certain passages off to the exosphere. The apparently arbitrary chronology works against any sort of pace Wallace might have established. And, though the novel wisely ends on an ambiguous note, this note is frustratingly oblique. It's difficult to imagine why a writer blessed with such intellectual gifts would offer up a shaggy dog story as his magnum opus. Infinite Jest feels like it should have ended at least 500 pages before it actually does -- and yet it hasn't earned an ending.

Wallace should be commended for his attempt to add intellectual depth to modern American fiction without sacrificing the traditional literary devices of characterization and narrative, and to dramatize the effects on the consciousness, and the conscience, of our hydra-headed consumerism. But there's disparity between a laundry list of contemporary social maladies and a novel that compellingly addresses these. And that disparity is, well, just about limitless.