Infinite Jest

I just "finished" Infinite Jest on the plane back from San Diego last night. Then I started from the beginning again because it seems like that's the only way to make sense of it.  Infinite indeed.

Some thoughts, appropriately disjointed, for myself and others who have already read it:

1. I haven't seen any IJ analysis that touches on the mathematics in the book, but I see some major clues to what happened in the year between the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment and the Year of Glad. I started cataloging science- and math-related errors in the book in order to determine if DFW was making the errors or the characters.  I ended up finding about 25 significant errors; most of them were of a nature that they had to be intentional. If I knew pharmacology and chemistry like I know physics, optics and math maybe the list would be much longer.

Quite a lot of the errors are math "mistakes" that Pemulis communicates to Hal.  In one or two cases, The Peemster nails the math when he isn't communicating with Hal, but he's always wildly off when he's tutoring Hal. And ALL of Hal's math--which he presumably got from Pemulis at some point--is terrible.  Hal tells Mario that his most-feared monster is somebody who can lie without him (Hal) realizing it--and he mentions that Pemulis had just lied successfully in a way he'd never seen and he didn't know that the Peem could lie like that--and on pg. 852 Hal says that Pemulis has been "almost suspiciously generous" about tutoring Hal. The "point" of all this seems to be that Pemulis is in reality not Hal's best friend, but an incredibly subtle arch-enemy. I think the math points to the hypothesis that Pemulis deliberately sabatoges Hal through introduction of the DMZ. In a tale about Hal's alienation, it is a major key that his only real friend is actually one of literature's most cunning antagonists.

Some of the mistakes seem to be DFW error and some others are non-plot-related pseudo-narrator error akin to the pseudo-narrator grammar errors. Some appear to be deliberate physical surrealism. If I have a few hours I may list the errors here because nobody else seems to have done it, though my list will surely be incomplete.

2. The book is certainly meant to be read cyclically--there is no way to make sense of the book without starting at the beginning directly after reading the last page. This mirrors a general theme throughout the book.

3. The narration is individual-based but not first-person except for the very end and very beginning of the book, which are contiguous chronologically [also a brief chapter by Himself that is completely out of the chronology]. Hal's personal narration indicated to me upon first read that the events of the book all eventually cross with Hal--and that idea was borne out in the first chapter when it is revealed that Hal, John NR Wayne [representing the wheelchair assassins/Quebecois connection] and Don Gately [representing the Ennet Housers] dig up Himself's head together.  The story is about Hal--even the parts that aren't explicitly so.

4. IJ is clearly a work of mad genius. Don Gately may be the most beautifully rendered sack in all of literature.

I think I'd need 2-3 rereadings before I can really put things together. But let me leave you with part of pg. 482, which sums up how I feel while reading IJ:

"He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see."