Infinite Sadness

Despite its title, and dozens and dozens of instances of utter hilarity, Infinite Jest is actually a very, very morose book. As mentioned before, the book is basically about addiction and recovery. DFW weaves the infinitely, infinitely sad personal stories of numerous characters in various stages of depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and, thankfully, treatment throughout the novel. A long section I read this week (446 pages in, 41.3% of the novel) was a description of a Boston AA meeting - and included the story of an adopted girl whose foster father had repeatedly sexually molested her handicapped foster sister while the adopted girl was in the room. This led her to become a stripper, prostitute and alcoholic at age 16. There's also a vignette about a cocaine-addicted pregnant woman who gives birth to a stillborn baby in a hotel room while she was freebasing. Then, she's in such denial, that she caries the baby's corpse around with her as if it were alive. DFW's prose in these sections is just incredibly heart-wrenching - I literally had to put the book down and stare at the ceiling for a few minutes to "reboot" my brain.

Suicide is also a recurring theme in Infinite Jest. There have been at least three instances of suicide or attempted suicide so far in the novel - including the father of main character Hal, who killed himself by putting his head in a microwave (he cut a hole in the door, filled the space around his neck with foil and pressed 'start.'). Another drug-addicted character named Kate Gompert attempts suicide before admitting herself into the Ennet House. The interesting thing about this episode is that Kate Gompert is a real person. She was also a tennis player, which is how DFW must've know her. I don't know whether she was actually an addict, but I read in another Infinite Jest blog that the real Kate Gompert sued DFW over the use of her name and untrue depiction in the novel. Can't find any confirmation of that on the Web, though.

One other note: When DFW died, many of the published tributes to him pointed to the sadness of and instances of suicide in Infinite Jest as ways of interpreting DFW's own suicide - retrospectively, of course. My initial reaction to this was skepticsm - I tend to believe you can always find a writer in his/her novel at some level, but most fiction isn't intentionally autobiographical and attempts to link a character or theme to the author's personal life is misguided. But, given the details that have emerged about DFW's life (especially in the fantastic Rolling Stone bio mentioned in the last post) about his own struggle with depression and alcoholism, I'm actually starting to think there may be something to the notion that Infinite Jest is a blueprint of reasons for DFW's own suicide. It's an idea that won't be fully formed for me until I finish the novel, but something I will certainly continue to think about....sadly.