Never mind the lit brethren: Infinite Jest is a true classic in 30| David Foster Wallace

II’m not what you would consider Infinite Jest’s target demographic. The novel’s reputation precedes it as a notorious book that few finish, and those who do tend to belong to a certain breed of college-age young men who talk to 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 do for aspiring literary young women.

Most readers come to fiction in their formative years, but I was reading it late. It wasn’t until the winter of 2023, when I was 34, smoking outside a party in Brooklyn, that I suddenly found myself eager to get down to writing the two-pound book. This was brought up by a boy I’d known since high school, and since I had by then developed a casual interest in those works that one might attribute to the “Lit-bro” canon (Bret Easton Ellis, Hemingway, etc.), it seemed like a good time to do them.

It is difficult to determine exactly what constitutes this canon outside of the readers who tend to be attracted to it, and therefore the readers who are repulsed by it, but its defining feature seems to be the emphasis on male unity. Isolated and misunderstood, the male protagonist stands at odds with social norms and expectations, struggling either internally to criticize them or identifying the source of the ideology and seeking violent revenge against it. The spaces in which these businesses operate are largely male-dominated – war zones, finance offices, fight clubs. Highly accessible on a stylistic level, extremely familiar on a psychological level, and as such, it has proven mainstream popularity – a bestseller, ripe for adaptation, and often critically supported alongside. In recent years, the backlash against this success, carried out online and in other public discourses, has done as much to create a perception of similarity throughout the canon as any single core commonality.

I think I became interested in this genre because I wanted to see for myself what exactly this community of young people was drawn to. So I bought a copy of Infinite Jest at the beginning of the new year. I aimed to read 50 pages a day. Some days, 50 pages felt fresh, cinematic, and interesting; Other days they felt like a slog. Although Enfield Tennis Academy or Innit House drug and alcohol recovery home is not an inherently male-dominated space, the majority of the characters are men, and all of them are, of course, quite lonely, but in terms of pacing and accessibility, the novel stands starkly far from the genre I associate it with.

For one thing, the reading is often interrupted by endnotes, of which there are 388 in small, 8-point font. They range in complexity and prominence from a single-word translation of the Quebec word for wheelchair to a nine-page list of a collection of archival footage from a fictional film director.

“The endnotes are very intentional and they’re there for certain structural reasons… It’s almost as if you have a second voice in your head,” Wallace said in a 1997 interview with Charlie Rose. He hesitated to go into further detail for fear of sounding pretentious, until Rose convinced him to “stop worrying about what you’re going to look like and what you’re going to be like.”

Wallace often appears in interviews as a kind of Charlie Kaufman protagonist. Aloof with his own wit, eager to connect, neurotic yet vulnerable, he speaks sweetly, often apologizing for convoluted answers that nonetheless show too much clarity or calling out his tendency to race before someone else can beat him to the chase. “It seems to me there is a way to make reality refracted,” Foster Wallace continues. “The difficulty in writing about this reality is that the text is very linear, and it is very uniform. I am, however, constantly looking for ways to break up the text without it being completely confusing.”

“One of the things I was trying to do with this book was for it to be something long and challenging, but it had to be interesting enough so that someone would be enticed to do the work.”

Contrast, for example, the novel’s opening scene, which reads with the orgasmic intensity of a teen film about hallucinations, with a scene some 80 pages later, an encounter between a Quebec separatist agent and a government agent against a backdrop of Arizona shale. What appears to be a lesser endnote, a back story involving one of the agent’s superiors is referenced twice, leads to an eight-page history of the separatist movement in question, told in and out of free indirect discourse, in the form of a semi-plagiarized term paper, which of course contains its own notes, one of which, most infuriating, requires us to turn an additional eight pages just to relate the wart cream to its chemical formula.

A bathhouse of almost absurd proportions, but cumulatively, all of Infinite Jest’s digressions and pages of impenetrable density test the reader’s attention, conjuring up in the minds of his characters the states of irritation and panic and the highs and lows that Wallace describes at length, and then, after long periods of banal tedium, the studiously compensates for with some excruciating, incomprehensible detail extracted from the secret interior of a flawed book. A Vibrant Human Being If you allow yourself to fall into the thorny complexities of writing, you will discover a humanity that is as soft and wonderful as its perpetual descent.

These many valences of density are part of a larger reflection on life and art in the age of entertainment. For Generation

It’s tempting to see Infinite Jest as a final heroic act in the name of fantasy. Certainly, I think it is not an exaggeration to say that we are unlikely to see another book like this in our lifetime. Ten years from now, Infinite Jest may exist as an artifact of an age when people still wrote, from a writer who could describe the weather in as compelling detail as the realists, a work that combined Shakespearean lexical audacity with the naughty literary drug of greatness and early mainstream momentum to create one of the enduring literary successes of the twentieth century.

When I was approached to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary edition of the novel, it was perhaps hoped that I would help mitigate the unfair and outsized connotations of what it means to be a reader of David Foster Wallace, who, at his worst, has come to be indicative of misogyny and, at his best, a slightly annoying person.

When I emerged from those weeks of dedicated reading, I had a feeling of intense mental acuity, but more importantly, a sense of sadness. It was a kind of mourning I had never experienced before, a kind conditioned by the fact that this book had been demanding so much of my attention for so long. I missed these characters. I had lived with Hal, Joel, Orrin, Stace, Pemolis, and the fat, square-headed, heart-of-gold Don Gatley, witnessing their deformities and obsessions so meticulously detailed and brought to life on the page, and suddenly I felt empty without them. And as is the case with true grief, I found myself wanting to be surrounded by fellow mourners, to seek them out and meet in our collective memory, people who I realized were defined by a very different set of traits than those I had assumed, people who had committed an act of defiance and perseverance and curiosity and rigor and, after all, were sad to see its end.