Hardwood Paroxysm summer reading recommendations

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Recommended for Kevin Garnett

By Miles Wray (@mileswray)

Many a tree has been felled so that Infinite Jest may sit — perhaps with spine still uncracked, perhaps with only the first few hundreds of pages explored — on the shelves of athletes who are into decorating their houses with potential conversation pieces. It is a massive book, with tiny tiny letters. The sheer size itself is bound to amaze guests, prompting them to speculate wildly about the book’s owner’s level of sophistication.

At the very surface, Infinite Jest is about an underground movie that is so powerfully addicting that all of its viewers powerlessly turn into little zombie vegetables upon seeing just a few frames. They soil themselves in their loungers and neglect to feed themselves for the sake of watching the film on loop, uninterrupted. The film is unleashed into Boston by a radical Canadian sect who wishes to incapacitate the United States. Meantime, recovering addicts in a halfway house and also the students of an elite tennis academy stand, unwittingly, very close to the movie’s dissemination.

This is hardly enough plot to fill 1100 long pages — not to mention that a movie that kills its viewers is seriously implausible and ridiculous in a fictional world that is otherwise quite like our own. The point of Infinite Jest, however, is not the plot: the point is that we receive a massive and thorough vision of a world (our world?). The point is that we receive so many pages-long, brutally descriptive passages about the utter depravity of an addict wallowing in the dankest depths of their addiction — whether that addiction be drugs, alcohol, sex, television, themselves. The point is that, wowza, here is a linguist talented enough to totally recreate the stomach-knot churning of obsessive anxiety in ink on the page. The point is that there is solace in knowing that these thoughts don’t exist in only our heads, that here is a kindred spirit. That here these thoughts are, in a book, a real published book that so many other people have read and mentally harmonized with, the voices of our undying anxieties articulated for us by a man whose heart was big as it was tortured.

But, ah, sorry, still haven’t reached the bottom of the book yet: Infinite Jest is also a modern response to Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. The title of Infinite Jest is borrowed directly from Hamlet’s iconic graveyard scene. There are also the first words of Hamlet — “Who’s there?” — and the first words of Infinite Jest — “I am.” In Shakespeare and in Foster Wallace alike, the protagonist is a young male who must search inside a manic emotional interior to comprehend an identity that has just been thrown akilter by the loss of a father figure.

Kevin Garnett is no longer a young male, by basketball standards, and neither does he have, strictly, an NBA father figure. But oh are these trying, identity-dissolving times for The Big Ticket. Ray Allen left for Miami, which in some worlds was not a personal affront to Garnett’s very being but was of course exactly that in Garnett’s world. Kendrick Perkins, always a spiritual brother of Garnett’s, was ripped away from Garnett in the hollow name of business. Doc Rivers left for fresh superstars in Los Angeles. The number of deceased teammate Malik Sealy, 2, hangs heavy on Garnett’s back, like Hamlet’s ghost summoned onto the court, to dredge up old traumas. It would appear that the departure of Paul Pierce — who at once selflessly took a pay cut to remain in contention and also selfishly abandoned his brothership with and loyalty to Garnett — would cut KG deepest of all.

Yet isn’t the departure of Garnett’s talent the saddest of all farewells? His domination, his elevation, his spry leaps for rebounds and dunks, his ability to play more than 20 good minutes a night — these things, too, are all gone. They are not coming back. There remains only a mind, manically churning, surely distressed that the body cannot keep up with the mind’s wills. That this scene takes place in Barclays Center — one of the brightest but perhaps the emptiest of all the NBA’s locales — adds, I think, layers of sad on top.

Infinite Jest is not “fun” reading for anybody. But what does Garnett do that is fun? For him I think there would be catharsis in seeing spirits find themselves after being totally lost. And also Infinite Jest would be somewhere to point that mind during all the long nights on the road.

There will always be June 2008, when he sat on top of the NBA world with the Celtics and anything was possible. It was what Garnett had hunted, sleeplessly for years. It seemed enough, at the time. But there is no curtain and it does not drop even once a championship is won. Is that ring enough to salve the wounds, the wounds from all these pains?