How To Read Infinite Jest

What else would I bring to Jury Duty?

Coming in at just over two and a half pounds, Infinite Jest is one of those rare novels that is now primarily judged by cultural consensus rather than content. For a certain set of pretentious young people Infinite Jest is now shorthand for its’ author suicide in 2008, a Post-Post Modernist genre the critic James Wood dubbed “hysterical realism,” and, most of all, the self-congratulatory literary, young men that proselytize David Foster Wallace (known posthumously as D.F.W.) to the similarly literary young women who’d rather not hear about it, thanks. This association is so entrenched in the admittedly niche world of literary stereotyping that it became a popular sub-genre of the mid-2010s blogosphere—The Cut explained, “Why Literary Chauvinists Love David Foster Wallace” an award-winning (?) essay entitled “Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me,” ran on Electric Literature, and Vice, fearless defender of the bros, insisted, “Please Leave Infinite Jest Alone,”—before feminists presumably found a few sharper axes to grind.

Rarer than the man who brags about reading Infinite Jest is the man, or woman, who has read the thing from cover to cover. Jason Segal, who played Wallace in a contested biopic, recalls purchasing Infinite Jest. The woman at the register rolled her eyes, “Infinite Jest. Every guy I’ve ever dated had an unread copy on his bookshelf.” Even D.F.W. himself acknowledges the novel has a decidedly gendered appeal: “The people who seem most enthusiastic and most moved by [Infinite Jest] are young men…  I think it’s a fairly male book.” This book does strike me as distinctly male; there’s a definite fixation on bowel movements and a limited interest in female subjectivity. While writing Infinite JestWallace dated the poet and memoirist Mary Karr who alleges a volatile and sometimes violent relationship that is corroborated by his biographer. This was the man who wrote Infinite Jest: embittered, lonely, and as destructive to himself as everyone around him. Not the sort of man you’d like to date, but a writer capable of reaching deep into the wellspring of human pain because he knew the bottom.

In the foreword to my edition of Infinite Jest, journalist Tom Bissell writes that he first read Infinite Jest at twenty-two, “perhaps the perfect age.” Why is twenty-two the perfect age? As Catcher In The Rye is to the adolescent, Infinite Jest is to what psychologists know term the “emerging adult,” otherwise known as the 18-25 age group, persons who have left adolescence behind yet still don’t feel like adults. I believe books, novels especially, attend to different emotional needs at different periods of our lives. We read them when we’re ready for them. So, at 18 I bought Infinite Jest and let it sit on my shelf for over four years, mocking me until, this fall, I was ready for its lessons. Why I decided to read a famously arduous book in the days preceding a contentious election is a question for me and my psyche, but the short of it is that, at twenty-two, I was lost and despairing and wanted a novel that echoed my praticularly modern alienation.

It started with my phone. Like many young people who have grown up with the internet, I believe mass technology serves useful informational purposes and is a font of social destruction I often wish was left in Pandora’s box. I don’t need to proffer statistics about phone use and mental health, about how much less we read and the crisis of “hanging out.” Phones are kind of like artificial sugars or reality TV; we all know they’re bad for us but identifying and addressing the problem are different devils. Almost every young person I know feels bad about their phone use and knows their phone makes them feel worse about themselves. However, when the conversation turns to solutions self-awareness is exchanged for nihilism.

One of the driving themes of Infinite Jest is addiction. In most respects, I am a responsible steward of my health. I drink two to three times a week, probably more than I should, but less than I used to. I smoke very rarely and smoke nicotine almost never. My standing “Never Have I Ever,” trick is that I have never allowed an electronic smoking device to pass between my lips. (This is another way of saying I am a square.) I do not have TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, or X. Yet, I am hopelessly in thrall to my phone. I take my phone everywhere—on walks to the corner or even around my house—and the urge to check it is physical, a craving, an itch. My dependency on my phone was reiterated to me several weeks ago when, for about twenty-four hours, I was forced to go without it.

The day without my phone began like any other. Upon waking, I turned and grabbed my phone from my bedside table. Instead of a stream of messages and breaking news notifications, I met the dreaded “green screen of death.” My phone, ostensible keeper of my messages and preferences, was returned to its original inertness—a hunk of metal designed in Palo Alto. I quickly resigned myself to my new reality. After all, there wasn’t a marked difference between watching Grey’s Anatomy on my computer as opposed to my phone except that I was less reachable. The real difference came when I left the house. I was headed to New York the next day and needed to run some errands uptown. Normally, I am tethered to my noise-canceling headphones like a life-sustaining organ. I listen to music or podcasts whenever I can. In college, I was even known to wear my headphones on the short walk from my room to the shower. This is a natural cultural curiosity and the coping mechanism of someone desperate to be distracted from their thoughts.

It was only when my armor was stripped away that I realized how adroitly it had cocooned me from the world. I took two Ubers throughout the day and both drivers engaged me in conversation. Theirs was an eagerness for human connection that my headphones would have forestalled. It struck me that my Uber drivers, driving for a criminally low wage, probably often wanted to talk. That they were lonely when I turned the music up and stared out the window. I still missed my music. Uptown, I noticed more. Any city-dweller learns a healthy alertness for the homeless. How to tell the difference between the majority of the homeless population which is harmless and the minority that might grab at you. I had grown up learning to look without staring, but as I walked through the city without my phone, I was more affected than usual by the scale of human suffering behind the homelessness and poverty that peppered my city. And I noticed the tentacles of my ambient melancholy. Was that what infinite scroll was trying to inoculate me from? And were those shallow bursts of dopamine the source of the infection they presumed to cure?

A few weeks earlier I read novelist Alexander Chee’s nonfiction collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel where he explains his first attempts at writing fiction sprung out of boredom. He was spending the summer in Mexico on a language exchange program when he ran out of books to read so he started playing around with his own stories. Like many anecdotes from the pre-cellular age, this story seemed quaint. Then, lo and behold, on the first night without my phone, I watched some Grey’s Anatomy and when I reached my limit started to play around on my Word doc, reaffirming that my phone is one of the greatest obstacles to my creative practice.

Enter Infinite Jest. In the foreword Bissel credits Infinite Jest as the “first Internet novel” and while that honorarium remains contentious Infinite Jest connected addiction, mass-consumerism, desensitization, depression, and entertainment with unique foresight. To set out a plot for Infinite Jest at some level undermines the project of a novel that begins at the end and gleefully denies its readers the continuity of an ending. The novel’s closest gesture to a unifying structure revolves around an addictively entertaining cartridge (analogous to movies or TV) that the viewer is unable to pull themselves away from once they start watching—not to eat or use the bathroom—and if withdrawn from viewing these unfortunates drool, desiring only the pleasures of the cartridge. The threat of the cartridge is considered so great that dystopic enemy U.S. and Canadian operatives search for control of the cartridge in a kind of new Millennium nuclear arms race where Canadians have the moral edge. A Canadian agent reveals the American problem: “Why make a simple Entertainment, no matter how seducing its pleasures, a samizdat and forbidden in the first place if you do not fear so many U.S.A.s cannot make the enlightened choices?... Perhaps the facts are true, after the first watching: that then there seems to be no choice. But to decide to be pleasurably entertained in the first place. That is still a choice, no? Sacred to the viewing self, and free? No? Yes?”

The notion of a fatally addictive cartridge is a caricature, but how far does it stretch the imagination when you consider the ease with which an afternoon is passed binging Netflix or scrolling? Over ten years before Netflix launched its streaming service, Wallace predicted the psychological reach of at-home entertainment. His Americans live on a continent where 94 percent of entertainment is consumed at home and there is “so very much private watching of customized screens behind drawn curtains in the dreamy familiarity of home…Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad… nobody but Luddite granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no one can imagine living without.”  

The dominance of hyper-individualized entertainment is not without political consequences. Under President Johnny Gentle, a former Vegas crooner, America withdraws from NATO and assumes the ideal of “a more or less Spotless America that Cleaned Up Its Own Side of the Street. Of a new-era’d nation that looks out for Uno, of a one-time World Policeman that was now going to retire and have its blue uniform deep-dry-cleaned and placed in storage… an end to atomized Americans’ fractious blaming of one another for our terrible internal troubles.” Sound familiar? Reading Infinite Jest in the days before and after the election, I was forced to reconcile time and time again with Wallace’s prescience. He knew before so many of us that individualized technology encourages the user to look inward, meaning, those tablets and phones also disengage us from a collective set of facts or social responsibility. He would not, I venture, be surprised by the reach of Joe Rogan or the rise of Donald Trump.

Masculinity is one of the chief concerns of Wallace’s book and maybe because I’m writing in what will someday be postmarked as the advent of a new gender wars, I don’t find his preoccupation unworthy. The central character of his novel is Hal Incandenza—a descendant of the original depressed son of the Western canon, Hamlet— who supplements his junior tennis success and otherwise paralyzing depression by getting high at least, usually more, once a day. (Add weed to the list of Wallace’s borne-out predictions. His halfway house is peppered with addicts of all the usual substances as well as a few that insist on a destructive addiction to weed. In 1996, expressing trepidation at the effect of weed was tantamount to cosigning the parental lectures about “gateway drugs,” but in 2024, when much of the country has legalized weed, we are much less coy about its harms.)

With a drug test looming, Hal is forced to go cold turkey several weeks before an important tournament. The withdrawal precipitates many pages of self-isolation and depressive rumination: “inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside of him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely.” Driving Wallace’s point home, in his isolation, Hal lies on the floor and watches copious amounts of TV.  Hal’s mother, for what it’s worth, picks up on more than he realizes. When Hal’s brother obliquely expresses worry over him, she says, “There are, apparently persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.”

Get it? Infinite. Wallace’s erstwhile friend and literary rival Jonathan Franzen said the book might more aptly be titled Infinite Sadness as, “although the mode and quality of the humor never wavered, [the jest] became less and less and less funny, section by section.” The ending is where the novel falters to such an extent that, despite my deep personal enjoyment whilst reading, I’d hesitate to recommend the book. Endings are tough; any writer will tell you that. The problem with endings is that momentum only multiplies their demands. An adequate ending to a 300-pager begins to seem easy when compared to the Herculean task of ending a 1,000+ page meta epic like Infinite Jest.

From the first page, the reader understands this is not an ordinary novel, that Wallace is disinterested, if not outright disdainful of the conventions of plot and conclusion. According to the authority of the message boards, Wallace said of his ending, “Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book's failed for you.” Listen, I can get down with a non-linear narrative, but Wallace’s ending gives the reader the indelible impression that the breadth of subject and character overwhelmed the author so much that Wallace simply threw up his hands and left the reader with a beautiful final image that will nonetheless tempt many readers to throw that massive book across the room. Legendary critic Michiko Kakutani says it better: “Somewhere in the mess, the reader suspects, are the outlines of a splendid novel, but as it stands the book feels like one of those unfinished Michelangelo sculptures: you can see a godly creature trying to fight its way out of the marble, but it's stuck there, half excavated, unable to break completely free.”

Infinite Jest is already the work of a genius; only a disciplined editor prevents it from achieving its best shape. However, novels are not scored by a rubric. We remember art for the emotion it provokes that is beyond the rubric, beyond the rational. Wallace, Franzen, and Zadie Smith believe in fiction’s power to assuage loneliness. Any serious reader or writer and all serious writers are serious readers, treasure the solace of fiction—to a certain point. After all, who better than a writer to recognize the limits of the page? Fiction won’t allow us to outrun melancholy and loneliness. The balm it offers is in reminding our pain is not unique and is meant to be felt.

For a year and a half of my life, I was the sad drunk girl at the party. Every weekend, I drank as much as could without feeling sick. Almost always, there would come a point in the night when I was miserable. Either scanning the party for someone who broke my heart or keenly existential. Oftentimes, these miseries were not mutually exclusive. In company with my sad drunk act was a certain pinched look, maudlin muttering to my friends about love, and, very occasionally, tears. Though they rarely said anything to my face, my friends were understandably confused as to why I continued to embrace such ritualized dysfunction. It took me leaving college to realize the dysfunction was the draw. Only when I was drunk and uninhibited could I express the melancholy I suppressed in my sober life. What a relief to embrace that infinite feeling, to allow myself to be engulfed without worrying if I was still charming. I wish I could tell you that reading Infinite Jest prompted me to put the phone down. I go through cycles with my phone, make arbitrary rules, and beat myself up when I break them. Managing my relationship with my phone will likely be a lifelong project that, as anyone familiar with a 12-step program knows, is best taken one day at a time. In the weeks before I start a new, unruly chapter of my young life I’m eschewing technology rules and trying to focus on sitting in the uncomfortable feeling.