Needless to say, Canadians are not happy about this reconfiguration.
The North American continent has been ‘reconfigured’ as the Organization of North American Nations (whose acronym is tongue-in-cheekishly ONAN), where the US is governed by a former crooner, obsessed with cleanliness, and who has carved out northern New England to create a ‘concavity’ for the disposal of America’s ever-increasing toxic waste (hurled into space by gigantic catapults!), such concavity then forcefully ceded to Canada. But let’s start by saying that Infinite Jest is set in a parodic near future in North America, an era of so-called ‘subsidized time’, whereby years are successively named after different corporate sponsors.
So what is this hugely entertaining monster of a novel about? Attempting to come up with a quick summary of the plot is a futile exercise and I’m sure other readers will find different ways of doing so. It was fun exchanging notes with him through MSN or Skype or lengthy telephone discussions while reading it and afterwards. I’ll never be more grateful to have heeded my friend’s advice. So I spent six weeks reading little else (actually doing little else!) but this amazing novel. But a friend of mine had decided to give it a crack and he strongly encouraged me to read it along with him. I had for ever postponed reading it despite the hype surrounding it since it was published in 1996, or maybe also because of it, but mostly I was daunted by the novel’s sheer size (1079 pages of small print, roughly 100 of which in the form of 388 endnotes, in a even smaller print). Let me say it upfront: reading Infinite Jest has been one of the most mind-boggling experiences I’ve had as a reader of fiction in many years.
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