If I go searching for “White Whale” books online I mostly find lists of books about whales, which is disappointing. For me, this is one of the White Whales of White Whales for a lot of people. For one, it’s popular to talk about reading this book, and it’s equally popular to talk about avowedly NOT reading this book. I learned about this book for the first time in college when I was discovering such books. At the same time I also became seriously interested in reading a lot of Thomas Pynchon books after just picking up one of his books in the college bookstore and sort of attempting to take it in. It was a book that I felt clearly had “presence,” and like the twerpy, white, male college English major I was, I was right to think it did. This book had that same kind of feel to it. I don’t know where I heard of it the first time, but I remember spending a weekend at Duke University while a friend was doing a summer program. We went to a pool and there was a guy (who looked like the kind of guy who would read this) reading this book at the pool. It was either the first time I’d ever come across it as a concept, or merely the first time I ever saw it “in the wild” or “in the flesh”. So I asked for it for Christmas, got it from my mom (santa), and then promptly never read it. This would have been 2002 or 2003, so the book would have been less than ten years old. I’ve cycled through 5 or 6 copies of it over the years, sometimes reading the first Hal section, one time making it to about page 200, and never finishing it. It’s funny because the book is exhausting, sometimes a slog, and sometimes wonderful, but any individual moment of reading it is never all that difficult (if only tasking at times), so who knows. Maybe I was scared. The point is, like the Thomas Pynchon novels I came across (and still haven’t read most of), this is a book that feels immediately “statusy,” especially if you’ve given over to the idea that reading a certain book helps attains one a status. I certainly did at the time and certainly still do to some diminishing sense. I think maybe the summer after I learned about both writers I took a class where we read To the Lighthouse and there’s a character, a man, who talks about seeing the world of literature and knowledge as a journey though the alphabet from A to Z and at 36 he thinks he’s at Q and finds this quite satisfying–an obviously ridiculous man. And UH OH! So anyway, like I said, this is a White Whale novel for me. It’s one of those one’s I’ve chased for years, thought I had it right, didn’t, tried again, abandoned and so forth. But I got it now, and like the dog who caught the car, well, I am happy to let it go.
But what is the novel? Well, when it’s clicking, really clicking, it’s actually quite amazing. There’s descriptions of tennis matches that sing. There’s scenes of AA and NA meetings that really show a clear and deep sense of empathy and understanding of the world. There’s a scene where he’s basically inventing Netflix and another where he’s basically inventing Instagram and Snapchat filters. Like science fiction writers (and this book is not not science fiction), he’s able to understand where technology and where it seems to be leading us. And like a lot of science fiction, this book gives us the funny phenomenon of the wrong language being used to describe something intimately familiar to us. In describing what is essentially Netflix as we understand it today, he envisions a world in which physical cartridges are sold and packaged where various desired media (literally anything you want) can be beamed (through fiber optic networks) to your house, cheaply and efficiently, only for you then to record them on physical media. Very close! In another moment, he imagines advanced technological masks that are used to hide our true, ugly selves are we talk on video phones. So close to filters on Instagram and Snapchat. And the effect of the impreciseness of the language, and the reliance on physical objects to create the desired effect remind me of Ray Bradbury describing what we would understand as earbuds as “tiny seashells” in the ears of the characters of Fahrenheit 451.
So the plot, as there is one, involves a future version of the world where the calendar has been subsidized so that companies and products sponsor the years themselves — a concept that seems in line with a character’s frustration that college football bowl games have corporate sponsorship. We spend most of our times in four arenas (to varying numbers of pages): at a tennis academy in Massachusetts founded and run by the Incandenzas, a family of prodigies where we mostly spend time with Hal the youngest son and most talented tennis player in the family who also happens to be a genius, a nearby addiction treatment facility with Don Gately a thief and alcoholic in recovery, in the cell of a Quebecois terrorist group, and in the family history of the various Incandenzas. The structure of the novel is supposedly fractal and I will have to trust that argument, but it’s nonlinear to say the least. In terms of reading the book, it’s a lot like William Vollmann’s Europe Central or even John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy, and I think some connections to other collective novels like these, where there’s various stories, almost novellas, first person narrative, close third-person narratives, wide third-person narratives, essentially play(lets), descriptions of media and newspaper, etc. The narrative jumps around frequently and while there are indicators of when and where you are at give moment, the story washes over you in various ways.
The title refers to a movie made by Hal’s father, a filmmaker, called Infinite Jest and is a reference to the Hamlet line about Yorick. The movie is so engrossing that when one watches it, one loses all desire to do or watch anything else. It’s very similar in this respect to the Monty Pythin sketch about the world’s funniest joke, and even The Tick episode with the world’s most comfortable chair. It’s also, like the lotus eaters in The Odyssey, a stand in for whatever literal or figurative narcotic, addicting substance, self-medication, self-delusion, self-denial, etc etc etc we want it to be for our given situation. The constant jumping back to the AA/NA meetings and the language of giving over to the program reinforces this idea throughout the novel.
So to read this novel feels like being trapped in it. It took about 5 days of really putting myself into to make it through. I don’t think I enjoyed the whole experience, and there’s some sections of the novel that I find to be not very good — I am not the biggest fan of the terrorist cell scenes — and when a character is showing us just how intelligent they are, I actually find these moments limiting their intelligence, rather than showing it’s expansiveness. It’s the way I almost always feel about “geniuses” in literature and art. But the novel does explain a lot about how I’ve felt about myself at times, and how much I feel like I’ve been saved into my 30s from myself. It’s also funny how clearly it informed some people I’ve been close to at times who clearly absorbed a lot of what’s in here and spouted it back at me, who didn’t know their referents and just went with it. It also has the feeling like I am putting this away for good. I guess I need to move onto my next “White Whale” (WHO KNOWS WHAT?? {Thomas Pynchon obviously}).
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6759.Infinite_Jest)
