So I finished David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest yesterday and it feels like a very small epoch of my life just ended. Wallace's 1,000+ page tour-de-force first piqued my interest interest last May when I was in the final stage of CFA Exam prep. Sick of reading about bonds and balance sheets, I planned to read some solid piece of fiction after I got the test out of the way. I will admit that I have a penchant for lengthy works (my bookshelf proudly declares I've read The Naked And The Dead, Atlas Shrugged, East of Eden, The Fountainhead, and most of Anna Karenina). However, what really led me to this book, as it happens so often in life, I noticed one of my most creative and humorous friends was reading it. I figured if my crazy/brilliant ex-roommate, the lead guitarist for Nightheart found it worthwhile to slog through a book measured in pounds rather than pages, then this book must certainly meet my far looser literary standards.
While I certainly cannot say I was disappointed in Wallace's work; for all its girth, the book left something missing for me. Probably, as a less sophisticated reader, I needed more of the plot lines neatly tied down at the conclusion. As I caught a second wind during the last 200 pages, I felt a growing dread that given Wallace's meandering pace, the story could not be finished in the pages that remained. Although in the end I was right, the plot is left unresolved, I am starting to accept and even admire this way of concluding things right at the most intense, dramatic place in the story. Our chaotic, insane world is forever cartwheeling from crisis to crisis. Peace never returns to the kingdom, another struggle always ensues. The maelstrom of conflicting and often irrational human desires forbids any sort of tidy ending. (Cue the Sopranos Final Episode reference here) I enjoyed Infinite Jest despite never really knowing where it was taking me. The hundreds of incredibly descriptive but entirely tangential little vignettes are just so entertaining to read and its dozens of minor characters are depicted as unique but so utterly human that it is ultimately refreshing to explore their curious but very much, real lives. If you have the two to three months of patience that Infinite Jest demands, I definitely recommend you read it.