There’s a thing you have to do on page one of a 1,079 page novel. It’s the same thing you have to do on page 58, page 247, page 496, and even on page 1,078. According to the tennis coach in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, it’s the same thing you have to do on a tennis court: “Move. Travel lightly. Occur. Be here. Not in bed or shower or over baconshteam, in the mind. Be here in total. Is nothing else (461).” According to one of the novel’s two protagonists, it’s the same thing you have to do to get through a drug withdrawal: “Taking it a second at a time. Drawing time in around him real tight; build a wall around each second just to take it (860).” The only way to get through a 1,079 page novel, especially this one, where even at the beginning there’s an understanding that nothing is ever going to wrap up nice and tight like a more formal narrative, for these kinds of novels, there’s only one way to get through it: one word at a time.

There is no climax to Infinite Jest. There are hints of a climax, the first occurring on page 16 and the second on page 934, but there aren’t enough details to create anything concrete, nothing substantial. Instead, the reader is given a large cast of unique characters: wheelchair-bound Quebec-separatist terrorists, alcoholic film auteurs, sex-crazed grammatically-absolutist activists, gigantic kind-hearted bookie-strongmen burglars, transvestite spies, obsessive-compulsive politicians, veiled beauties, radically physically-deformed childlike adults, both recovering and raging alcoholics, tennis obsessed teenagers, and a protagonist who has an eccentric relationship with the unabridged version of the Oxford English Dictionary; on page 966–less than 20 pages before the end of the novel proper–Wallace even interrupts the flow of his narrative to recall the background story of a less-than-central character. The point (not of the background story, but of the novel) is there is no central narrative, no moment upon which the characters’ lives depend, and no “central truth” around which the novel revolves; rather, there is only the truth of the characters, the ones whose words and thoughts and actions, whose pains and desires, whose loves and losses are told on each and every page. The truth in this fiction passes from word to word and becomes a vast and operatic illustration of the truth that comes from a person breathing in and out.

Infinite Jest posits the truth–the truth of early-’90s U.S.A., anyway–as a great big absence of genuine experience, an absence less metaphysical in cause and more psychological. It is the truth of addiction, and not just to illegal substances, but also to things such as tennis, grammar and geographic politics. It is the truth of desire, of emptying oneself from the now in order to doggedly pursue some dreamt-of future. It is the truth of a protagonist whose ultimate experience of the now becomes so completely divorced from his physical reality that, though he believes himself to be speaking coolly and casually in a college interview, in reality he has to be bodily restrained because the Deans think he is in the midst of a violent seizure: “The sounds he made.” “Undescribable.” “Like an animal.” “Subanimalistic noises and sounds. Like some sort of animal with something in its mouth.” “The boy is damaged.” “Like a stick of butter being hit with a mallet.” “A writhing animal with a knife in its eye.” “His face. As if he was strangling. Burning. I believe I’ve seen a vision of hell.” (14).”

The hell of Wallace’s world is the truth of it. Though it contains postmodern elements–388 endnotes! in a fictional novel!–there is in Infinite Jest an abhorrence of disingenuous play. It is not hidden. The reader can feel Wallace’s earnest attempt to communicate his world truthfully, and his disdain for those who would do otherwise:

…[U]nsophisticated naiveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America…Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human…(695).

Wallace describes the ugliness of drug addiction, of familial estrangement, of vice-induced violence, and of psychic oppression, but he describes with an empathy. This voice that moves from word to word, from page one to page 1,079, from endnote one to endnote 388, this voice is the human voice.

Though there is no complete narrative, no final single meaning to Infinite Jest, we read because this human voice speaks to us, is present in every word, tells us of the now of millennial America, and tells us truthfully.