“And so I purchased a copy of Infinite Jest at the start of the new year. I aimed to read 50 pages a day. Some days 50 pages felt breezy, cinematic, riveting; other days they felt like a slog. (…) When I emerged from those weeks of dedicated reading I had a feeling of intensified mental acuity, but more importantly, there was the sensation of grief. It was a type of mourning I had not experienced before, one contingent on the fact that this book had demanded so much of my attention for so long a time. I missed these characters. I had lived with Hal, Joelle, Orin, Stice, Pemulis, and meaty, square-head, heart-of-gold Don Gately, witness to their deformities and obsessions so meticulously detailed and made so alive on the page, and suddenly without them I felt hollow.”
That’s what I remember the reading experience to be, as well. (Except I didn’t buy the book, but got it as a gift.)
For one thing, reading is often interrupted by endnotes, of which there are 388 in tiny 8pt font. They range in complexity and salience from a one-word translation of the Québécois word for wheelchair to a nine-page inventory of a fictional film director’s collection of archival footage.
“The endnotes are very intentional and they’re in there for certain structural reasons … It’s almost like having a second voice in your head,” Wallace said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 1997.
The choice for end notes always baffled me. I love notes, but if the point is to interrupt the narrative, show them on the page. Don’t make me go find them in the back. (Because I won’t, and then the narrative isn’t interrupted.)