I have been away on the tiny Dodecanese Island of Halki in Greece. It was hot - up to 35 degrees - and I wrote minimally, maybe 1000 words total.
Something happened; I read a book that paralysed me: Infinite Jest by Andrew Foster Wallace.
This same feeling hit me after I went to see Rodrigo y Gabriella, the Mexican guitarists, play intricate and accomplished flamenco versions of Metallica tunes: I didn’t pick up a guitar for months.
I have never read a book with such scope and density of reality, yet also containing such humour and satire. The book invents a world so complex and full that it dripped into my subconscious so much that I dreamt about it some nights, sheltered from the snow under the lung or hanging with the Crocodiles at the White Flag Group.. The near future world the book takes place in has a history, language sets, politics, that make it recognizable to a modern reader but also other worldly, alien - it is a strange and wonderful feeling to immerse yourself fully into Wallace’ world. You think of De Lillo, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, Proust, great epic works of madness, and anybody who takes themselves to The Edge for their art.
In the book the U.S., Canada and Mexico have been merged into the unpopular O.N.A.N. - the Organisation of North American Nations, although Mexico and Canada are really part of an anshluss as America forced the other nations, then turned a vast swathe of south-eastern Canada into a massive toxic waste site. The book takes place in a tennis academy and a drug rehab facility. There are many other characters, such as Quebecois anti O.N.A.N.ite terrorists, street drug addicts, wheelchair assassins and Secret Service agents.
They are all looking for The Entertainment, a short film said to kill the viewer with pleasure. That is the briefest, emptiest description I can give; It is an atom of the story.
Infinite Jest is long, 1,000 pages, has 300 footnotes, it is ‘difficult’, sometimes dwelling too long on the intricacies of a tennis training match or the minutiae of twelve step therapy, but it is also often hilariously funny, often so inventive you shake your head at the infuriating abilities of Foster Wallace - I really believe that Infinite Jest is a modern work of manic genius, true creative-at-the-coalface-of-talent genius. It amazes me on every page; sometimes I am marveling at the scope, and other times reading out loud a you-gotta-hear-this-its-so-funny moment.
It is worth the effort to find these epic works of human endeavor as they show us, even though they can shock us momentarily into artistic paralysis, how far the human mind can be stretched and act as inspirations and validations for our own trials and errors: why aim for only the clouds when the sky is a gaping blue and wide open beyond them.
