A Sometimes Funny Book Supposedly about Infinity: A Review of Everything and More, vol. 51, number 6

Exalted, perhaps, in the wake of the World Trade Center attack, and suspecting, probably, that the American population would be satisfied with no response that fit within the limits of human comprehension, “someone, somewhere” in the Pentagon—the quotation is from Donald Rumsfeld— proposed “Infinite Justice” in late 2001 to designate the imminent campaign in Afghanistan. It was soon pointed out that many people, not least among those for whom the campaign was intended as an object lesson, considered infinity a divine prerogative, and the title was scrapped in favor of “Enduring Freedom”. Instead of a guarantee both mathematical and eschatological, the world would have to settle for a pretty good insurance policy. In the interim, more than one skeptic1 had time to note the initial designation’s inadvertent echo of Infinite Jest. It says something about our author’s standing in American letters, at least among the wired, that the reference was not to Shakespeare’s Poor Yorick, but rather to the title of David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel. On everybody’s Ten Best list, qualified as “world-historical” by Frederic Jameson,2 the 1,079page Infinite Jest (IJ) propelled Wallace (DFW) immediately— and deservedly—to the front rank of American writers. Alongside his fiction, DFW has developed an intensely original and provocative style as essayist and often profound observer of contemporary U.S. culture. His best essays of the 1990s are collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (ASFTINDA), the very first page of which reports Wallace’s adolescent “jones for mathematics”. In between two collections of short stories, DFW has taken the time to write Everything and More (E&M), ostensibly about the events leading up to and the circumstances surrounding Georg Cantor’s creation of his theory of infinite sets. Wallace, future classic, will have his literary biographers, who will probably have little patience with the professional mathematician who objects to E&M on the grounds that it not only lacks a clear sense of direction (try figuring out what happens in IJ without a guide) but is laced through and through with blunders of every magnitude. It does not help that the two most strongly negative reviews of E&M thus far3 were written by authors of what sympathetic biographers might construe as rival Michael Harris is professor of mathematics at Université Paris 7. His email address is [email protected].