It seems somehow fitting that a number of us are attempting to read Infinite Jest just as the regular baseball season ends. With the Twins done for the year, we all have oodles of spare time on our hands, right?
Okay, okay, I jest.* I have to confess I don't yet have the book in my hands, but writing this post prompted me to at least order it. I don't know how useful background information is going to be, but I thought I'd at least hit a few main points.
Wallace lived from 1962-2008.** He was born in Ithaca, New York, and spent much of his childhood in Urbana, Illinois. During this time, he became a regionally ranked tennis player. He attended Amherst college and majored in English and philosophy. He went on to get a MFA*** in creative writing from the University of Arizona. His first novel, The Broom of the System, was published in 1987, while he was still in graduate school. Starting in 2002, he taught at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Wallace began writing Infinite Jest in 1991. "I wanted to do something sad," he said in a 1996 interview**** given shortly after the book was published. "I'd done some funny stuff and some heavy, intellectual stuff, but I'd never done anything sad. And I wanted it not to have a single main character. The other banality would be: I wanted to do something real American, about what it's like to live in America around the millennium."*****
According to Ryan Compton's "Infinite Jest by the Numbers," Wallace used a vocabulary of 20,584 unique words to write the 577,608-word novel.
A quick search revealed that the Internet has no shortage of resources about either DFW or this book. I'm not sure how much I want to delve into these--part of me just wants to encounter the book on its own terms and see where that gets me. But if you're curious (or if I change my mind), here are a few that seem particularly informative.
The Howling Fantods: I have no idea what a fantod is, but this site boasts the following subheader "David Foster Wallace News and Resources Since March 97." The link I provided here will bring you specifically to the Infinite Jest section of the site.
Infinite Jest Wiki: This includes an index for the book along with explanations of key terms
And Like But So: A Character Guide to Infinite Jest: I have a terrible habit of reading only the first couple letters of a character's name and then skipping over the rest. In a novel with a lot of characters, this could pose a problem for me, so this site may be just what I need.
1997 Interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air
*Ouch. That's bad, even for me.
**I'm trying to figure out whether I should mention his death was due to suicide. I don't want it to overshadow everything else, so I guess I'll just acknowledge it here.
***an MFA(?)
****Did you have any idea Salon has been around that long? I'm pretty sure the first I heard of it was in 2000.
*****He apparently also had a thing for footnotes.
