Infinite Jest: Difference between revisions

[[David Foster Wallace]]'s relentless [[Doorstopper]] of a novel, first published in 1996. Infinite Jest takes place in [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future|the not-too-distant future]], around the Enfield Tennis Academy and the neighboring Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (redundancy ''sic'') in suburban [[Useful Notes/Boston|Boston]]. Before he died, James Incandenza, founder of the ETA and film auteur, created a movie so mesmerizingly entertaining that the master copy is being sought as a weapon by Canadian terrorists and the US government. Dealing with issues like the nature of the self, family, emptiness and absence, addiction and recovery, and the minutia of tennis, there's just no way to adequately summarize this massively complex novel here. With nearly 100 pages of end notes, this may be one of the only novels for which you will need to use two bookmarks simultaneously.

 

* [[Accidental Athlete]]: The older brother in the family starts out playing tennis, and is really good at it, but in college, he tries out for the football team, only to find that he isn't big enough. As he is leaving the try-out, he punts a football, and the coach realizes he is a really good kicker

* [[Addiction Displacement]]: All of the characters to some extent, but none so horrifying as {{spoiler|Randy Lenz's}} evening constitutionals.

* [[And I Must Scream]]: The fate of Hal Incandenza. That's not a spoiler, it's the first chapter.

* [[Author Appeal]]: David Foster Wallace was a pretty good tennis player in his youth, reaching the top levels of junior tennis in high school. It makes some sense that he'd set some of the novel around a tennis academy.

* [[Author Vocabulary Calendar]]: A novel this size, one could be forgiven for assuming this out of hand, [[Averted Trope|but nope]]. Aside from some [[Future Slang]] and tennis terminology (which is always explained), conversational English reigns throughout.

** Admittedly, there are a fair number of oddball ten-dollar words tossed in...but only where it would suit the voice of the viewpoint character, in which case it's seamlessly blended into ordinary conversational English.

* [[Best Served Cold]]: Pemulis' philosophy when it comes to revenge.

* [[The Big Guy]]: Don Gately

* [[Brick Joke]]: Gately's toothbrush prank on the ADA in the hat comes back hilariously only about 800 pages later.

** Hilariously might not be the right word, considering [[Driven to Madness|the effect of said prank]] on the ADA's wife.

* [[Calvin Ball]]: One of the courts at the ETA is intricately painted with a map of the Earth and all its nations. Its only use is for a training game of nuclear geopolitics, which has become something of an Academy tradition. True to the trope, all that is made explicitly clear is that nuclear strikes are represented by serving tennis balls onto the map; the rest of the rules are stated to be so complex that they can only be understood through total memorization.

** This part of the book has actually been adapted as a music video, for "The Calamity Song" by [[The Decemberists]].

* [[College Radio]]

* [[Crapsack World]]

** Not to mention pharmaceuticals, in the end notes.

* [[Show Within a Show]]: Mario's puppet show, several excerpts from James O. Incandenza's filmography.

* [[Stepford Smiler]]: One aspect of Avril Incandenza. Someone tells a story about how when Orin accidentally killed her dog, she went on calmly acting as though nothing had happened in order not to upset him.

* [[The Metric System Is Here to Stay]]: Wallace had a definite preference for metric units, and in his universe, they've become standard in the U.S. (probably as a result of ONANite integration).