Word: incandenzas
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...possible, barely, to reduce the novel to a finite plot description. Hal Incandenza is a gifted, troubled student at a high-level Boston-area tennis academy founded by his late father. Down the road is a drug-rehab center inhabited by an assortment of seedy and desperate characters, notably one Don Gately, a cheerful Demerol addict "with a massive and almost perfectly square head he used to amuse his friends when drunk by letting them open and close elevator doors on." Then there's a film clip so entertaining you die if you watch it, and a cell of wheelchair...
...only a part of the story or, more accurately, stories. In a culture--ours--in which the national sport is channel surfing, Wallace dares out-of-shape readers to keep up with dozens of oddballs and intermingling plots. One is the tale of the upscale Incandenza clan, a family of high achievers. Mother Avril is a professor of language structure, and father James made a fortune inventing optical instruments, retiring to produce avant-garde films with cheeky titles such as The American Century as Seen Through a Brick, Dial C. for Concupiscence and Infinite Jest, a feature described as "lethally...
Counterpointing the Incandenza chronicle is the sorry saga of Don Gately, a former burglar and reformed drug addict who would rather suffer the agony of a gunshot wound than risk getting rehooked by pain killers. Ghosting through both densely detailed narratives is a group of legless Quebec separatists tasked with stealing Infinite Jest. They want to use its deadly amusing powers as a weapon. Filmmaker James Incandenza, was so entertained that he committed suicide by sticking his head in a hot-wired microwave oven...
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