2 hours ago
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I’m not what you might consider Infinite Jest’s target demographic. The novel’s reputation precedes it as a book infamously few ever finish, and those who do tend to belong to a particular breed of college-age guys who talk over you, a sect of pedantic, misunderstood young men for whom, over the course of 30 years, Infinite Jest has become a rite of passage, much as Little Women or Pride and Prejudice might function for aspiring literary young women.
Most readers come to the novel in their formative years, but I was a late bloomer. It wasn’t until the winter of 2023 that, at the age of 34, smoking outside a party in Brooklyn, I found myself suddenly motivated to embark on the two-pound tome. A boy I knew from high school brought it up, and as I happened at the time to have developed a casual interest in those works one might attribute to the “lit-bro” canon (Bret Easton Ellis, Hemingway, etc), it seemed the appropriate time to take it on.
It’s difficult to pin down what exactly constitutes this canon beyond the readership that tends to gravitate toward it, and by extension the readership it repels, but its defining feature seems to be the centering of male loneliness. A male protagonist, isolated and misunderstood, stands at odds with social norms and expectations and either grapples internally to critique them or identifies the source of ideology and seeks violent revenge against it. The spaces these works operate in are largely male-dominated – war zones, finance offices, fight clubs. They are largely accessible on a stylistic level and deeply familiar on a psychological one and, as such, have proven popular mainstream fare – massive bestsellers, ripe for adaptation, often critically championed besides. In recent years, the backlash against such success, carried out online and in other public discourse, and the backlash against that backlash have done as much as any single intrinsic commonality to create the perception of similitude throughout the canon.
My guess is I became interested in this genre because I wanted to see for myself what exactly this community of young men was attracted to. And so I purchased a copy of Infinite Jest at the start of the new year. I aimed to read 50 pages a day. Some days 50 pages felt breezy, cinematic, riveting; other days they felt like a slog. Though neither the Enfield Tennis Academy nor the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House is an inherently male-dominated space, the majority of the characters are men, all of them, of course, completely levelled by loneliness, but in terms of pace and accessibility, the novel stands starkly apart from the genre with which I had come to associate it.
For one thing, reading is often interrupted by endnotes, of which there are 388 in tiny 8pt font. They range in complexity and salience from a one-word translation of the Québécois word for wheelchair to a nine-page inventory of a fictional film director’s collection of archival footage.
“The endnotes are very intentional and they’re in there for certain structural reasons … It’s almost like having a second voice in your head,” Wallace said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 1997. He hesitates to go into more detail lest he appear pretentious, until Rose wheedles him to “quit worrying about how you’re gonna look and just be”.
In interviews Wallace often comes across as a kind of Charlie Kaufman protagonist. Isolated by his own intelligence, longing for connection, neurotic but vulnerable, gently well-spoken, often apologising for roundabout answers that nonetheless exhibit great clarity or calling out his own tendency to sweat before someone else can beat him to the chase. “There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality is fractured,” Foster Wallace continues. “The difficulty about writing about that reality is that text is very linear, it’s very unified. I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting.”
“One of the things I was trying to do in this book was have something be long and difficult but have it be fun enough that somebody would be almost seduced into doing the work.”
Contrast, for example, the novel’s opening scene, which reads with the orgasmic intensity of a teen movie on hallucinogenics, with one some 80 pages later, a meeting between a Québécois separatist agent and a government operative set against a backdrop of Arizona shale. What appears to be a lesser endnote, a backstory concerning one of the agent’s superiors is itself twice noted, leading to an eight-page history of the separatist movement in question, narrated in and out of free indirect discourse, in the form of a semi-plagiarised term paper, which of course contains its own notes, one of which, most infuriatingly, requires us to turn an additional eight pages just to connect pimple cream to its chemical formula.
A bathos of almost absurd proportions, but cumulatively, all of Infinite Jest’s digressions and pages of impenetrable density test the reader’s attention, conjuring the very irritations and panics and highs and plateaux that Wallace describes at length in the minds of his characters, and then, after long spells of banal tediousness, compensate the diligent with some excruciating, unfathomable detail plucked from the secret interior of a flawed human being pulsing with life. If you allow yourself to trust-fall into the barbed intricacies of the writing, you will discover soft, exquisite humanity as its perennial landing.
These many valences of density are part of a larger meditation on life and art in the age of entertainment. For gen X, that mostly meant television, under the hegemony of which they came of age, when concerns about the death of the novel and the idea that fiction’s time had passed felt truly pressing.
It is tempting to see Infinite Jest as one final act of heroism in the name of fiction. Certainly, I think it’s no stretch to say it’s unlikely we’ll see another book like this in our lifetimes. Ten years from now, Infinite Jest may exist as an artefact of an era when humans still wrote, from a writer who could describe the weather with detail as compelling as the realists, a work that combines Shakespearean lexical boldness with literary brat-pack druggie precocious cool and mainstream momentum to create one of the enduring literary successes of the 20th century.
When I was approached to celebrate the novel’s 30th anniversary edition, it was perhaps hoped that I might assist in assuaging the unfair, outsized connotations of what it means to be a David Foster Wallace reader, which, at its worst, has come to signify misogyny, and at its best, someone who’s just slightly annoying.
When I emerged from those weeks of dedicated reading I had a feeling of intensified mental acuity, but more importantly, there was the sensation of grief. It was a type of mourning I had not experienced before, one contingent on the fact that this book had demanded so much of my attention for so long a time. I missed these characters. I had lived with Hal, Joelle, Orin, Stice, Pemulis, and meaty, square-head, heart-of-gold Don Gately, witness to their deformities and obsessions so meticulously detailed and made so alive on the page, and suddenly without them I felt hollow. And just as with real grief, I found myself wanting to be surrounded by fellow mourners, to seek them out and convene in our collective memory, people who I realised were defined by a set of attributes wholly different from those I had assumed, people who had committed an act of defiance and tenacity, curiosity and rigour, and after it all, were sad to see its end.
