ThomasLitchford

I’ve finished reading Infinite Jest but Infinite Jest has not finished with me.

David Foster Wallace’s book has stuck in my head the way few other books have (The Sound and the Fury, V., Gravity’s Rainbow, and London Fields are the others). To paraphrase Wallace (on Infinite Jest, not the others, but to me personally the sentiment applies to all of them), Infinite Jest succeeds at being difficult and entertaining at the same time. The reader wants to do the work required of him by the text. (Not all readers can be seduced into a difficult text in this way, but that’s because the difficulty must become part of the entertainment, and not all readers find difficulty entertaining.)

Infinite Jest is difficult in an extreme way that tempts a second reading while also sending the reader to the library or, in our modern day, the Internet. Since returning home from my holiday visit to Detroit, I’ve been spending a lot of time online searching for interviews with Wallace that might illuminate the text. (Check out The Howling Fantods for some good links and news.)

The effect of this ’secondary reading,’ has been to create an image of David Foster Wallace in my mind, an image composed of snippets of interviews and journalistic observations pasted together to form some kind of ‘meta-DFW.’ Though I know this mediated version of Wallace represents only the most brilliant aspects of his character, when taken in tandem with the novel he’s written, the combined image is almost unbearable to look at. He’s too smart, too quick, too good.

Or maybe that’s just the impression I get as a fiction writer. The word that comes to mind when I think about Wallace is genius, but perhaps that’s only because I read somewhere that one of his college professors told Wallace he might be one (a genius).

The next stop on this logical fallacy thought train is to think, ‘I couldn’t write anything that good.’ As a writer, I guess what should worry me more is the possibility that a day will come when I think, ‘I can write something that good.’ Because, odd though it may seem, while self doubt is a feeling that can cripple a writer, it is also what drives him to work harder.