Books of The Times: A Country Dying of Laughter. In 1,079 Pages.

TL;DR

The daily New York Times's flagship review in publication month — part of the notice that helped make Infinite Jest a phenomenon. Michiko Kakutani's verdict is a precise split: Wallace is "one of the big talents of his generation," a virtuoso who "can seemingly do anything," and the book is "often compulsively entertaining"; but it is also a "loose baggy monster," "a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Mr. Wallace's mind", "written and edited (or not edited) on the principle that bigger is better". Her most-quoted image is the ending as "that word machine is simply turned off", and the whole as "one of those unfinished Michelangelo sculptures: you can see a godly creature trying to fight its way out of the marble, but it's stuck there, half excavated". The definitive contemporary statement of the brilliant-but-bloated, unfinished reading — the mainstream 1996 baseline that thirty years of reception (Bissell, Hoby) would argue with.

Key claims

• The title as inside joke; the film's lethal perfection. The title "refers, plotwise that is, to an object much sought after by terrorists: a movie reputed to be so entertaining, so lethally perfect, that it causes anyone who so much as looks at it to become comatose and, literally, to die of pleasure" — the work of an "apres-garde" film maker.
• High praise for the talent. The novel shows Wallace as "one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything," who can "write funny, write sad, write serious, write satiric," equally adept at "the Pynchonesque epic and the Nicolson Bakeresque minute," "a pushing-the-envelope postmodernist who's also able to create flesh-and-blood characters and genuinely moving scenes."
• But: baggy, encyclopedic, self-indulgent. "Perfect, however, "Infinite Jest" is not": it is "a "loose baggy monster," to use Henry James's words, a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Mr. Wallace's mind." "It's Thomas Wolfe without Maxwell Perkins", done "in the hallucinogenic style of Terry Gilliam and Ralph Steadman", "on the principle that bigger is better" — "uproarious and mind-boggling, but also arbitrary and self-indulgent."
• The debt to The Broom of the System. Though Wallace has "burned off the annoying Pynchonesque echoes" of his 1986 debut, IJ "does owe a decisive debt to that earlier book": both portray "a futuristic America obsessed with entertainment and self-gratification", use "stories within stories", and follow "a character's (well, many characters') search for identity and meaning."
• Setting summary (cite-as-written). A "postmillennial America" with President Johnny Gentle, "a former singer" who "heralds the advent of a "tighter, tidier nation.""; subsidized time (Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment); the Statue of Liberty as advertisement; "Herds of feral hamsters"; New England as a toxic dump to be ceded to Canada; Québécois separatists after the master print, to "watch the spectacle of Americans killing themselves with pleasure."
• Character summary (cite-as-written). "James O. Incandenza Jr.," ETA director and "father of three sons: Orin, a successful football player; Mario, a fire-hydrant-size dwarf, and Hal," who is "still reeling from his discovery of his father's bloody suicide, his head found splattered inside a microwave oven." Gately is "a former burglar and Demerol addict who lives at Ennet House".
• Structure as juxtaposition, not linkage. Rather than overtly connect the three stories, Wallace "juxtaposes them to build dramatic tension and create a musical echo chamber of shared motifs and themes", asking the reader to consider "the dialectic between freedom and authority".
• The plots as armature for showing off. The subplots "provide a flimsy armature on which Mr. Wallace can drape his ever-proliferating observations and musings"; "the whole novel often seems like an excuse for Mr. Wallace to simply show off his remarkable skills as a writer and empty the contents of his restless mind."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest's non-ending is a failure of control and editing — the word machine simply turned off, a splendid novel left half-excavated — not constitutive design

• Crux: designed-holes
• Stance: rejects
• Evidence:
  • [inference] "At the end, that word machine is simply turned off, leaving the reader … suspended in midair and reeling from the random muchness of detail and incident that is "Infinite Jest."" [¶ ending]
  • [inference] "Somewhere in the mess, the reader suspects, are the outlines of a splendid novel, but as it stands the book feels like one of those unfinished Michelangelo sculptures: you can see a godly creature trying to fight its way out of the marble, but it's stuck there, half excavated, unable to break completely free." [¶ close]
  • [inference] The book is "written and edited (or not edited) on the principle that bigger is better, more means more important", yielding something "arbitrary and self-indulgent." [¶3]
• Notes: The negative pole of designed-holes at reception altitude — Kakutani reads the non-resolution and profusion as a defect of editing (a "splendid novel" trapped inside), explicitly NOT as intentional architecture. The mirror image of the anti-closure/design readings (Bissell, Zauner, the Swartz camp). The in-review counterweight is her own high praise: the failure verdict coexists with "one of the big talents of his generation".

THEORY: The Entertainment is lethally perfect pleasure — a film that kills by sheer entertainment value

• Crux: entertainment-lethality
• Stance: mentions
• Evidence:
  • [text] The film is "so entertaining, so lethally perfect, that it causes anyone who so much as looks at it to become comatose and, literally, to die of pleasure." [¶2]
  • [inference] The separatists' plan is to duplicate it and "watch the spectacle of Americans killing themselves with pleasure." [¶ separatists]
• Notes: A cite-as-written restatement of the premise, not a mechanism argument — Kakutani names the death-by-pleasure logic descriptively. Continuous with the entertainment-as-fatal-self-gratification theme she foregrounds (the Broom-debt "obsessed with entertainment and self-gratification").

Themes

Entertainment and self-gratification (the lethal film; America "obsessed with entertainment and self-gratification"; pleasure as fatal); the encyclopedic / maximalist novel (the "loose baggy monster," "bigger is better", Pynchonesque epic); freedom and authority (State vs. AA, "the dialectic between freedom and authority"); addiction and suffering ("frighteningly vivid accounts of what it feels like to be a drug addict"); the grotesque (the "gallery of upsetting characters," "rendered palpable, funny and affecting"); non-closure and form ("that word machine is simply turned off", the unfinished-sculpture verdict).

Cross-references

• The archive's 1996-reception layer, paired with Dale Peck's LRB pan "Well, duh": where Kakutani calls IJ a flawed work of a major talent, Peck calls it "terrible" outright — the mixed-flagship and the hostile-dissent poles of the contemporaneous reception.
• The negative pole of the non-closure debate the 20th/30th-anniversary appreciations answer: Tom Bissell's four theories and Michelle Zauner's foreword extract reframe the same withholding as design; Hermione Hoby's New Yorker piece treats the length as ethic, not bloat.
• The Broom-of-the-System debt Kakutani traces connects to the archive's Broom note.
• Its status as the launch-week "splash" is the object of Medvetz's sociology of IJ's reception.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the review (Kakutani's own prose unless marked; the raw uses straight quotes throughout — reproduced as-is).

• On the film: "a movie reputed to be so entertaining, so lethally perfect, that it causes anyone who so much as looks at it to become comatose and, literally, to die of pleasure."
• The praise: Wallace as "one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything".
• The critique: "this 1,079-page novel is a "loose baggy monster," to use Henry James's words, a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Mr. Wallace's mind."
• On the editing: "written and edited (or not edited) on the principle that bigger is better, more means more important".
• The ending image: "At the end, that word machine is simply turned off, leaving the reader … suspended in midair and reeling from the random muchness of detail and incident that is "Infinite Jest.""
• The closing verdict: "one of those unfinished Michelangelo sculptures: you can see a godly creature trying to fight its way out of the marble, but it's stuck there, half excavated, unable to break completely free."
• (IJ Hal, via Kakutani, cite-as-written:) "It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me" … "We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately -- the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly."