Infinite Jest - Attempt No. 2.

So I'm about 160 pages in to this monstrosity. That's 30 pages past the point where I gave up last time. I'm going to tell you what this book is about (to me*).

There's a family who runs a tennis academy/boarding school in New England for elementary-through-high- school aged students. The family has three boys. One is a professional football kicker in Arizona, one is currently enrolled in the school and a pretty decent tennis player, and the other is mentally disabled somehow, but allowed to live on campus and seems to be a bit of a pal to everyone at the school.

The father has died and the mother and uncle took over the operation. He was apparently raised by an alcoholic, failed, pro-tennis player father who began teaching him, at age 10, a little bit about tennis while sipping whiskey. They lived between Arizona and California, depending.

There are a bunch of drug addicts that live in and around Harvard mugging people for their fixes. One's a transvestite. One dies during an overdose of something (drano?) while the rest watch. Then they put him in a dumpster.

There's another group of seemingly very uneducated, possibly drug-addicted other folk, but I thought they were Southern?

There is also a drug treatment center and the character who started it, in a run down neighborhood outside Boston.

One of the kids at the academy lived in this neighborhood. He is talented and does not come from money, like many of the other students. Almost all the kids participate in some form of drug use, and this kid deals in clean urine to keep them all eligible and enrolled.

Ok, now up in Canada, some Prince's Eastern European physician is comatose after watching a video that arrived in the mail. Everyone that goes to rescue him also finds themself fixated on the looping video in the playing device.

There's another dude that gets massive quantities of weed and locks himself up in his apartment to smoke it until it's gone. I forget the quantity. Maybe he smokes like two ounces in a weekend? Something insane like that. He keeps trying to quit but then goes back for one more bender. You might imagine he's a little paranoid.

Finally, there's a couple of guys sitting on a mountain outside of Phoenix. One's undercover dressed as a woman. The other is in a wheelchair. They are sitting and observing something. They might be in the military or some kind of police force. They sort of seem to work together but not.

Sometimes it seems like maybe the tennis academy is in the Southwest also, not in New England, but I'm pretty sure it's in New England. There is a big tournament discussed that IS in Phoenix.

This middle kid (youngest?) of the family, the one who can play pretty decent tennis and is an upper-classman at the academy seems to have had some kind of mental breakdown. He's a secret pot smoker. It's often unclear whether he (and his disabled brother) can actually talk – or if they are just imagining their conversations. He was of the sort of smart where he can memorize an entire dictionary and recite definitions, including the page number where they appear (depending on which dictionary you'd like him to reference). He's trying to gain entrance to a school in Arizona, when he cracks under pressure.

*I really have no clue if any of this interpretation is accurate. At this point I just keep reading when I can, as much as I can. Sometimes that's just a few paragraphs – before I get overwhelmed and have to close my eyes.