Great Books While High: Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest is the most difficult and absolutely most rewarding book I’ve ever read. A 1200+ page (including endnotes, a select few along the way of which have their own, sub-end notes) magnum opus, David Foster Wallace put his name on the list of all-time great novelists when he completed this mammoth work of fiction in 1996.

Infinite Jest is a work that contains some of the most breathtaking prose I’ve ever seen, with a brilliant tone that can snap between gut-bustingly funny and heartbreaking serious within the same sentence. It covers a wide range of topics in great detail, but it is a particular interesting read as a weedist because of the prevalence to our favorite topic of choice and the effect is has on its characters.

It’s hard to truly discuss just how big this work of art really is, which is something of an accomplishment just in itself. It’s also equally impossible to talk about this book without putting it into a personal context; it’s just that kind of thing. A good friend of mine read it first, and wanted to lend it to me. However, this book is a heavy, heavy volume given its size. I decided to purchase it on my iPad, mostly because I didn’t want to lug the book around with me. This turned out to be the best move in more ways than one.

The thing about David Foster Wallace’s writing style is that he uses endnotes: sometimes these are the final punch line on a joke, and sometimes the endnotes are pages long and are essential scenes or lists. Anyone who reads the physical version is going to need to keep a bookmark in the back, because the endnotes require flipping back and forth. On an iPad, however, you need only tap ‘back to text’ to be placed back to where you were just reading.

A scene-by-scene breakdown on this website will start to give you an idea of the kind of large-scale epic we’re talking about here. Reading Infinite Jest is a bit like glancing into the inner workings of the mind of a crazy person, and it’s just as exhilarating and interesting as that actually might be. (Those who want either a great primer or companion piece, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is a series of “essays and arguments” from Wallace and offer his personal background, opinions, and experiences with many of the topics covered in Infinite Jest) ***

As far as its relevance to cannabis enthusiasts, Infinite Jest covers the topic of addiction through one of the funniest and most insightful lenses I have ever seen. One of the main characters, Hal Incandeza, begins the novel by freaking out in an epic way during a college interview. Chronologically, this is the last event of the book; before you reach the novel’s actual last scene, it’s obvious that this freak out has to do with Hal not medicating. For many in the novel, using marijuana is absolutely about self-medicating and getting to a place where they are able to deal with the actual problems around them.

Early on, we see characters like Steve Erdedy, someone who is so hopelessly addicted to not only marijuana itself but to going on self-destructive days long binges of being high that it seriously starts to affect his real life. We meet Kate Gompert, another supposed marijuana (or as she calls it “Bob Hope”) addict dealing with it (along with depression) at the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, which is down a hill from the Enfield Tennis Academy, which was started by Hal’s father (referred to by the rest of the Incandeza family by many names, including the gut-wrenchingly dysfunctional “Himself”).

David Foster Wallace, one of the greatest literary voices of the 20th century

Again, it’s hard to stress just how ‘tip of the iceberg’ these details are when placed in the overall experience of what reading this book is like.

Infinite Jest took me roughly 6 months to read, during which I had to repeatedly stop and digest what I had just experienced. This serves as a disclaimer to all who maybe don’t read very much in general: work your way up to this one, it’s as close to a literary marathon as anything else. However, those who are brave enough to dive into the world that David Foster Wallace creates will absolutely not regret and will come out of the other side a much more enlightened human being for it.

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***as an homage, I’ll use this endnote to mention that these topics include but are not at all limited to: tennis and tennis history, film theory including the films of David Lynch and most other modern cinema, organized religion, state fairs, vacations in general, and literary criticism.**

** I had to skip that essay, the shortest in the collection, because I honestly know nothing about it and was lost within the first page. There were times during Infinite Jest where the sheer level of detail was truly staggering, because you realize that in order to write like that, he was so smart that he just casually was an expert in so many different fields.