Pissed

(Written in August 2009)

Two months reading a book and I hated the ending. I have never devoted two months to a single book, and I thought I'd get some kind of reward at the end. I'm a capital-R Reader! Surely I deserved some kind of closure after reading 981 pages of story and another 100+ in end notes! Over a thousand pages of time-skipping, acronym-laden, deliberately ambiguous writing about tennis and addiction and depression and Quebec separatism and film theory.

Instead, I feel cheated by the outcome of Infinite Jest, which came to an abrupt end with no resolution to ANY of the dozen plot lines. I was resigned to ambiguity, but I got concerned when I was five pages from the end and David Foster Wallace still seemed mid-stream in the narrative. I read on, increasingly dumbfounded as I realized he wasn't even going to drop any more clues.

I read a comment later that an editor probably told DFW that the novel was just too long, so he's going to lop off the last third. The ending is so abrupt that I like that characterization, even though I don't believe the answer is that simple. I've read other commentary that the extensive jumping around in time means that much of the "beginning" of the book is actually after the ending and provides some clues. Someday I will go back and reread it and see if that's true.

But for now, I'll just pat myself on the back for having finished, and I'll pick up a Stephen King novel.