“Infinite Jest” Has Turned Thirty. Have We Forgotten How to Read It?
In 2023, the writer Patricia Lockwood chafed at Wallace’s supposed sainthood in a long piece for the London Review of Books. The essay, in its ambivalence, did things other than chafe; Lockwood’s Technicolor mind, much like her subject’s, tends to move quaquaversally, to use a word that perhaps only a sesquipedalian math nerd who modelled his thousand-page novel on a particular fractal (the Sierpiński gasket) would tolerate. Nonetheless, the following lines are representative of Lockwood’s general attitude: “What were the noughties? A time when everyone went to see the Blue Man Group for a while. Men read David Foster Wallace. Men also put hot sauce on their balls.”
Men! But Wallace, alert to the sexism of his forebears and eager to demonstrate his own feminism, once sounded a lot like Lockwood. First, “Infinite Jest” made Wallace the most famous young writer in America. Then it began a mighty, self-sustaining Newton’s cradle of acclaim and backlash, a momentum transfer that hasn’t stopped since. When the novel appeared, in 1996, it was more than a best-seller; it was a phenomenon, a widespread, must-read accessory and experience. A year and a half after “Infinite Jest” came out, Wallace, perhaps with a tinge of his own reception anxiety, reviewed a lesser John Updike novel, “Toward the End of Time,” for the New York Observer. His review seemed a prescient (if covert) attempt to head off the very criticisms that would later confront his own work. Wallace began by dismissing the book’s author, along with Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, as “The Great Male Narcissists.” But his sickest burn—the real hot sauce to the balls—was reserved for Updike, whom Wallace, invoking a friend’s verdict, characterized as “a penis with a thesaurus.” Here was a clear case of the pot calling the kettle atramentous. You don’t need a penis to read “Infinite Jest,” but you might need a dictionary.
Beyond the novel’s fondness for five-dollar words, what is it like to read? Perhaps the greatest disjunction between the book’s reputation and its contents lies in the notion that it’s a pretentious slog no one could honestly enjoy. I first read the novel in 2008, before D. T. Max’s 2012 biography and, later, Mary Karr’s 2018 tweets detailed Wallace’s upsetting and potentially criminal treatment of Karr, once his romantic partner. Fiction is so often the gold extracted from the dross of a damaged life. As Rivka Galchen wrote in her review of Max’s book, “The co-founder of A.A., Bill W., is a guru of sobriety precisely because sobriety was so difficult for him.” Wallace, by implication, was concerned with patience, steadfastness, and tranquillity precisely because these virtues often eluded him in life.
Encountering the novel in my twenties, I was unaware that I was committing a form of gender treason; I knew only that little or nothing I’d read had come close in terms of sheer pleasure. The book had more brio, heart, and humor than I thought possible on the page. It was bizarrely grotesque and howlingly sad; it was sweet, silly, and vertiginously clever. It was also, by virtue of its relentlessly entertaining scenes and the high-low virtuosity of its language, a work that enacted its own theme of addiction. When I finished, I experienced withdrawal: Where to go after “Infinite Jest”? It was, in short, a supposedly unfun thing I would do again, and did.
The novel takes place in a future America, specifically Boston and its environs, and is mainly concerned with two institutions as its zones of action. The first is the Enfield Tennis Academy, where athletically gifted boys and girls (but mainly boys) are drilled in physical and mental preparation for what’s known as The Show, a stab at professional tennis. The second, just down the hill, is the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, where men and women (but mainly men) reckon with their substance abuse. Ambition and addiction, the two traits these institutions respectively represent, share a fat slice of their Venn diagram—an overlap that might be labelled “how to live with yourself.” The self-torturing helices of thought twisting inside the young minds on the courts are no less fraught than the recursive neuroses tormenting the addicts down the hill. Among the former cohort is Hal Incandenza, a star student, teen-age tennis prodigy, secret marijuana addict, and Hamlet manqué. His father, James, an experimental filmmaker and the school’s founder, has killed himself via a MacGyvered microwave oven. Hal was the one who found him, or what was left of him. Hal’s mother, Avril, is having an affair with Charles Tavis, who is either her half or adoptive brother, and has summarily replaced Hal’s father as headmaster of the academy. Much, in other words, is rotten in the state of the Enfield Tennis Academy, or E.T.A. (This most prolix of writers can never resist an abbreviation.)
Hal’s voice begins the novel. As he responds to the authority figures questioning him about his recent “subnormal” test scores, they react with horror: the eloquence of Hal’s internal monologue is at odds with his ability to actually speak. Rather than producing words, he’s emitting “subanimalistic noises and sounds.” Soon, he’s gurneyed off to an emergency room. A notable oddity is the way in which Hal’s first-person narration is abandoned after seventeen pages until close to the end, even though he remains one of the book’s central characters. Why? The novel’s very Gen X diagnosis of the character offers a clue: “One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.” Wallace, once a regionally ranked junior tennis player in his home state of Illinois, later considered a career in academia. One of his undergraduate thesis advisers has said, “I thought of David as a very talented young philosopher with a writing hobby, and did not realize that he was instead one of the most talented fiction writers of his generation who had a philosophy hobby.” Hal, in his academic brilliance, tennis talent, and acute anxiety, is the character who most resembles his creator. To grant him ongoing first-person status would be to privilege the book’s most autobiographical consciousness. And Wallace is not much interested in himself. In “Infinite Jest,” he’s going for the least solipsistic rendering of humanity he can pull off, via more than a hundred borrowed selves.
This enormous cast of characters is diverse mostly in terms of the variegated peculiarity of inner lives. As for “diversity” in the sense of gender parity and racial representation: not so much. The two main female characters, Avril Incandenza and Joelle van Dyne, both happen to be gorgeous. When it comes to the novel’s handful of Black characters, some of whom speak in a cartoonish version of Ebonics, perhaps the most tactful thing to be said is something like: It was a different time. And yet from this horde of fretting, feeling, interfacing selves a truth emerges: that loneliness is a universal problem experienced by each person in a unique way. The novel also suggests—mumblingly, without making eye contact, not wanting to be corny about it—that one’s own self becomes a little less hideous the more one attends to other selves. Not all of whom are entirely hideous.
