WE'RE FINALLY TAKING ON 'INFINITE JEST'

David Foster Wallace gets in way over his head. And so do we!

It’s a lot easier to fix something if you can see it.
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Everyone seems to hate on DFW these days. Personally, I don’t really know what it is about Dallas-Fort Worth that is really all that bad, but then again I’ve never been. When cool people talk about Texas it’s always Austin, Austin, Austin. Really makes you feel for the cities that have to compete—but I don’t get the hype because I HATE music, whereas Charles Barkley tells me if I go to San Antonia instead I can have “big ol’ women” and churros.

“DFW” can also stand for “David Foster Wallace,”¹ someone who no one has anything but positive feelings for. Incidentally, I haven’t been online much since 2009. I’m also having some trouble signing back into Friendster. Let me just look up David Foster Wallace’s name for a quick sec since I’m back online for the first time in so long and— oh. Oh dear. I don’t think that I thought the book was— well, I suppose that’s— a bit over-bearing, sure, but I mean— I mean, yes, the John McCain thing in that one essay, but— hey, look, that infinity book, I mean, math is hard, so— she was how old? That seems— okay well I don’t know if— but what about the— out of a moving car, you say? Oh me oh my. I suppose this may warrant some commentary.

David Foster Wallace casts a great shadow over twenty-first century literature. Yes, David Foster Wallace, that fat-headed nerd with his beady little eyes and his Axl Rose bandana, he who with One Big Book allegedly propped open the door to the new millennium. I read that book in my youth and I loved it just like everyone else seemed to, but then I noticed something odd as time went on. People would ask me if they should read Infinite Jest too, and I’d answer in the affirmative—yes! Of course! Great book! …I mean, aside from the infamously bad and racist “Wardine” chapter that everyone hates. Beyond that, great book. Well… I guess as a resident of Quebec in particular I don’t really understand the “Quebec” parts, which I think are just supposed to read as “wacky” and “random” and was frankly easier to swallow when South Park was doing it. So beyond that, I suppose, yes, great book. Although that’s not the only humour that falls flat, actually, in fact a lot of the jokes in hindsight are just sort of obnoxious or get overly laboured, or aren’t especially clever but still gratuitously self-congratulatory, and kind of feel like listening to a precocious teenager miserably attempting to “riff.”² But it’s still a great book. Aside from the characters, who feel like a bunch of manic squirrels bounding across a lawn, whose zany escapades and eccentricities get old fast and help to occlude a totally empty centre. And it’s honestly maybe a little padded, goes on for too long and doesn’t really justify its own length aside from just that “a lot of shit happens,” and yet in spite of everything going on in the book and all the layered allusions within, so much of it is just in service of some shallow and predictable Gen-X themes. Oh, and the prose is pretty inconsistent in quality. Boy, this “great” book sure has a lot of caveats to its greatness, huh?

The older I grew, the more mountainous this pile of caveats became, and the more I’d think on the book the more every blemish became harder and harder to overlook. I took my initial five-star GoodReads review down to a four. Then a three. There it remains, though some days when I’m in a particular state of mind it dangles over the precipice of falling to a two. It seems like I’m not the only one who has been gradually reevaluating the book—in fact there is something of an anti-Wallace jihad on our hands. The hate boner for Wallace is immense; he is by far the author we’re most frequently asked to cover, and our reputation being what it is suggests what we’re really being asked for is blood. And rest assured, you’ll get your blood by the end of this, but I think it BEHOOVES me to take stock of my victim, to understand what volume of blood I am to let and from where.

Some of the aspersions cast at Wallace feel at times like over-corrections—is Infinite Jest truly the Great Satan we as 21st-century writers must overcome? And how much of this is the book itself or what the book has come to mean? A few years ago, Freddie deBoer compared reading Wallace to driving a Tesla:

Teslas are such ideologically-loaded things. You’ve got their identification with environmental responsibility in a world wracked by global warning, similar to the ongoing public perception of the Prius. Then you’ve got the fact that they’re expensive, techy, and California-coded, and so associated with a certain class of bourgie coastal liberal. And now lately they’ve also taken on new negative tones, in certain circles, because of their association with Elon Musk, who is indeed an evil billionaire but not, perhaps, literally the biggest villain on the planet. [Ed: It was 2021.] The point is that a Tesla has become such a culturally-loaded object that (for those who are hip to the cultural conversation) it can’t just be a car. A Tesla is a car that you buy and then you have to explain to your friends what it does and doesn’t mean to you. A Camry, not so much.

“David Foster Wallace” has become such a figure. He is most often invoked now in denial and negation: you do not want to be the kind of person who reads David Foster Wallace.

“David Foster Wallace” has become a culturally-loaded object, a thing which cannot be just a thing, a thing which is indelibly attached to an unavoidable discourse, to an ideological food fight. “David Foster Wallace” has become a social test, especially for a specific class of hater, and God, the only thing as tiresome as an overenthusiastic Infinite Jest Stan is an overenthusiastic Infinite Jest hater. Obviously there are a lot of critical things to say about Wallace, but most Infinite Jest haters aren’t even actually haters of Infinite Jest: few of them have read it, some even engage in elaborate attention-starved rituals of not reading it that include eating it, making clothes out of it, smoking it like a bong, or literally shoving it up their asses. They are haters of what it means to like Infinite Jest. And, for whatever reason, the upsetting notion of “someone somewhere liking Infinite Jest” has taken such an outsized rent-free residency in these people’s minds (with included parking and housekeeping) that they develop a manic need to obliterate anyone who possesses this quality. But their searches must be fruitless indeed, because I don’t know many people at this point who would be caught dead publicly discussing the work of Wallace with much positive attention—nobody wants to be “that guy”—save for massive dweebs like Ian Cattanach who obsess over every little fucking grocery list the man penned.

It sort of seems like Cattanach is even trying to fucking groom himself like Wallace to boot. Good choice to opt out of the bandana, though.

But I do “get” the backlash, because the enthusiasm at its height most certainly got out of hand. In his characteristically overbearing introduction to the book’s tenth-anniversary edition, Dave Eggers goes so far as to say that the book will literally “make you a better person.” He continues:

It’s insane, but also hard to deny. Your brain is stronger because it’s been given a monthlong workout, and more importantly, your heart is sturdier, for there has scarcely been written a more moving account of desperation, depression, addiction, generational stasis and yearning, or the obsession with human expectations, with artistic and athletic and intellectual possibility. The themes here are big, and the emotions (guarded as they are) are very real, and the cumulative effect of the book is, you could say, seismic.

He claims that the book had just such a seismic effect on himself when he first read it, which is an interesting claim, because DAVE EGGERS IS A FUCKING LIAR. Here’s what Eggers had to say in his review of the book ten years earlier:

Things like tennis matches and math problems are described in excruciating detail. He has a fussy way with his adjectives and adverbs, while some—such as “ghastly,” which is used much too often—have that disingenuous feel that renders the narrative around them impotent.

Besides frequently losing itself in superfluous and wildly tangential flights of lexical diarrhea, the book suffers under the sheer burden of its incredible length. (That includes the 96 pages of only sporadically worthwhile endnotes, including one that clocks in at 17 pages.) At almost 1,100 pages, it feels more like 3,000.³

The mass hysteria was obviously immense—an arms race to determine just who could produce the assessment of the novel most likely to give Wallace a hands-free climax like Wilhelm Reich in an orgone accumulator. Evidently, some discrete anti-proliferation treaties were drawn, and the frenzy slowly died down with it. Now Wallace Stans are being hunted to extinction, and we’re going to have to start putting them in the zoo (unfortunately, as with the panda, they are still unlikely to sexually reproduce). Not that that’s going to stop me, cold-blooded hunter that I am—you folks want a hunt? Because we’re on the trail of some not-particularly-dangerous game. An animal that has already long been beaten to death… and yet—and this is why I’m still endeavouring to make the journey—still not beaten with precisely the appropriate whacks. It is, after all, very big.⁴

Bagging the Big Book.

During Infinite Jest’s halcyon days of universal critical acclaim, comparisons were bandied about to Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow in particular. I do not consider this a particularly fair comparison. For starters, Gravity’s Rainbow is about as faultless as a novel can get, with almost none of the caveats to my mind that I previously mentioned with regard to Infinite Jest. But what is perhaps more bizarre about it all is that the two books aren’t really all that alike, with Wallace’s being far closer to Don DeLillo’s White Noise (something I’m sure Wallace himself would agree with, as he was a massive DeLillo fanboy and also had a correspondence with the man), and rather derivative at that. Worse yet, almost everywhere that Wallace does depart from DeLillo’s path winds up being a massive misstep and a reminder of why DeLillo is still the superior writer—Infinite Jest really is in some regards a poor man’s White Noise, stripped of many of that novel’s most important qualities and stretched to three times its length.

Wallace’s book is far more accessible in tone than DeLillo’s, taking the deeply alienating atmosphere of the latter’s book and turning it into a fun, friendly, nearly-YA one. This may have helped with Wallace’s goal of “reaching” readers, but how could such a world as the one in Infinite Jest be as spiritually empty as it professes to be when everyone and everything inside the book is so spirited and charming? I don’t actually feel like any of these characters are particularly brought down by the weight of their society. They’re so buoyant they seem ready to bounce off the page and start doing the can-can in my living room. All these “escapes” that Wallace dwells on—what exactly are they escaping? Their lives already seem kaleidoscopic, they all have rather deep and “random”/“wacky” interests (in your typical YA fashion) such as “Byzantine erotica.” I highly suspect that if you polled most fans of the book, they would tell you that the world of Infinite Jest is one they’d love to go inside and explore. I doubt there has ever been a single person who has had that thought about White Noise. And that’s the point, right? I want to run screaming from the world of White Noise, and then I realize that it’s the world I already live in. This provides the urgency for change that Wallace is trying to produce but can’t because he often has all the restraint of the Three Stooges. Hal Incandenza might as well be Daffy Duck for all he reads to me as a tortured human being.⁵

Infinite Jest is not a particularly difficult read aside from its length (even Eggers in his worshipful intro concedes that the book is at least somewhat “not-as-difficult”). This is not to say that a book has to be difficult to be good, but I do suspect a lot of the response to the book, both positive and negative, relates to the perception that it is. Those haters who refuse to even open the book yet still obsess over it have a deep-seated Fear of Not Getting It (FONGI). They’re often the same people who reflexively shit on Joyce and Pynchon and whoever else, sometimes out of what they claim is an aversion to the imperious space-taking of “MALE WRITERS” or something—yet you seldom see these same people read particularly difficult women’s writing either. The truth, which perhaps the members of this insecure set would be pleased to learn, is that not only is Infinite Jest’s prose highly readable—with, at worst, some exhaustive lists and run-on sentences—it is also about as thematically-obvious as The Great Gatbsy, itself a book with literary devices so unsubtle that it’s basically used as a de facto textbook for teaching high school students what they are. But this is, I think, part of what drove the obsession with the book in the first place. It is such an immensely flattering book; it has the veneer of difficulty, but holds your hand throughout, making the reader feel smart. This is like catnip to a lot of people, nearly as seductive as the book’s own The Entertainment (the novel’s big MacGuffin⁶), a self-destructive work of immense and endless validation.

But Wallace couldn’t help but try and validate. Wallace was, after all, a desperate people-pleaser. Take a bit early on in David Lipsky’s account of his five-day-long trip with Wallace, at the outset of which Wallace simply cannot shut up about his desire to “get laid.” Within minutes of meeting Lipsky he references “getting laid” several times in just a handful of pages of transcript (“I would like to get laid out of it a couple of times.” “I didn’t get laid on this tour.” “I would have liked to get laid on the tour and I did not.” “Maybe I could get laid on this tour.” “would like to get laid offa this. The shallow stuff. I would like to get laid off it.”), something Lipsky aptly sums up with one aside: “He has sized me up as a guy who likes ‘laying.’” In the same book, Wallace confesses, “If I’m hanging out with you, I can’t even tell whether I like you or not, because I’m too worried about whether you like me”; and, a while later, “I just really hate to hurt people’s feelings.” D.T. Max’s biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, is even more revealing, saying of Wallace that he was “fragile in his confidence, even mild criticism hurt him,” and that “he worried… that to know him too well would be to dislike him.” A degree of self-consciousness is a must for just about any writer, yes, but when driven to the point of neurosis it can manifest in numerous maladaptive impulses, including a nauseating obsequiousness to one’s readers.

Wallace is clearly terrified of being misunderstood—his biography’s sources include an enormous amount of letters in which Wallace frets over every possible misunderstanding he might convey, always desperately trying to “clarify,” to communicate with as little friction as possible—fuck, it’s no wonder the guy hated “irony” so much, how could such a person take the added anxiety of duplicitous meaning? The thing is, beyond even simple irony, it is very difficult to write a novel that confronts something about society when you are this pathologically conflict-adverse. For a book so celebrated for its “depth,” this obsession with clarity often manifests in thematic simplicity. It is an especially bad sign that, when one finds fan discussion of Infinite Jest online, the focus is seldom on the book’s meaning and more often fan theorizing regarding about hidden or ambiguous parts of the plot—questions like “how could the master cartridge for The Entertainment embedded in Himself’s skull have survived the explosion of his head in the microwave???” There’s simply no reason to discuss the themes ad nauseum, as they’re all quite clear.

In one of the many places the themes are served to readers on a platter, there is the Socratic Steeply-Marathe dialogue, a recurring debate in which we see the values the book holds in tension being hashed out. It comes off as extremely didactic. Double/triple/quadruple-agent Rémy Marathe⁷ represents Wallace’s Neil-Postman-derived philosophy of condemning the spiritual bankruptcy of a dopamine-addled culture of voyeurs and addicts endlessly numbing themselves; Hugh/Helen Steeply represents Wallace’s simultaneous belief in the American value of “freedom” which by necessity constitutes the freedom to numb/destroy oneself,⁸ the synthesis between the two being Wallace’s liberal belief that the way out is to, as the noble Don Gately does at the book’s end, individually rise above the conditions of modern life and accept pain and discomfort and raw life without the anesthetic. (In most of our cases figuratively, in Don’s case literally—he is literally dying in pain and refusing painkillers.) Put that succinctly, that doesn’t even really sound that bad. Now copy and paste that summary I just wrote over and over until you surpass one thousand pages. That’s Infinite Jest.⁹ There’s nothing inherently wrong about being “obvious,” but there is when you’re obvious and also insistent, when you becoming overbearing, especially when you position yourself relative to your reader as having an enlightened, guru-like aspect in what you’re setting out to teach them. The “meaning” of the text is battering you over the head at all times, it insists not only on being understood but also on being learned, being agreed with, assimilated. It presents this with urgency, because it frames understanding of this thematic content as a matter of necessity for the reader’s betterment—if this sounds a little self-help-y, that’s because it kinda is.

The modern self-help genre likely sees its origin in, and possibly even derives its name from, Self-Help, a book by nineteenth century journalist Samuel Smiles, which drew on interviews with wealthy industrialists and espoused a philosophy of quasi-stoic acceptance and blissful passivity in the face of material inequality. Smiles’ successors retained much of his spirit but with manifold variations in packaging, ranging anywhere from The Power of Positive Thinking’s Norman Peale, a Protestant preacher and hawkish reactionary who vociferously defended the Vietnam War and the American system, to The Secret’s Rhonda Byrne, a vapid new-age hippy cipher with a white woman bindi who thinks the Holocaust happened because Europe’s Jews were too negative.

Ooga booga!

Wallace was obsessed with self-help books and read them widely, with books by authors like John Bradshaw being among the most marked up volumes in his surviving library, and this obsession inundated his work. The most charitable framing of this inclination that I can muster is that one might see Wallace as a less naïve and less reactionary preemptive answer to Jordan Peterson (whose work I have already stated my opinions on), searching for an “antidote to chaos” via an encyclopedic quest for meaning (though, like Moby-Dick’s similar attempt before it, its lamentations are matched by at least some degree of revelry in it). One may argue that the most authentic expression of this urge in modern secular western life (at least in DFW’s day) is the self-help book. But it’s still, effectively, self-help, and thereby inundated with its worst impulses, including the overwhelming condescension.

Novels should not offer therapy; novels should not try to, as Eggers put it above, “make you a better person.” Firstly, such an attempt would require “answering the question”; that is to say letting go of the golden thread of “negative capability,” of “not-knowing”—as Barthes put it, “literature is the question minus the answer” (or it should be)—and risks one of the gravest mortal sins in art, which is didacticism. But even if you disagree with that principle you must at least accept that a didactic work damns itself to mostly succeed or fail on the strength of its instruction, and how strong is Wallace’s? Far from being the wise sage with the sharpened insight that his work tries to sell him as, Wallace was immensely naïve, and is a terrible “therapist.” Take for instance his lionization of Alcoholics Anonymous, something Wallace tries to sell to his cynical postmodern reader as being an organization of immense power for positive change. The truth is much less rosy, as Alcoholics Anonymous, though of benefit to some, has been shown to more often hurt than help through its bordering-on-cult-like structure and misleading base assumptions about addiction. As much as Wallace is obsessed with “self-control” as a principal virtue of his personal philosophy, hardline substance abstinence is structurally antagonistic to actually overcoming addiction. Such a philosophy is an “all-or-nothing” affair that means having a single drink becomes a relapse crisis, and often thereby encourages relapse rather than preventing it. If you’ve already broken your sacred streak even remotely, then all is lost and it’s time to binge, and this is in fact what happens to most AA members—when you cut through their own misleading statistics, the actual success rate of AA may be as low as 5%, whereas less abstinence-oriented programs have a success rate of up to 75%. Wallace’s own decision to go off his medication was described by Jonathan Franzen in his elegy as effectively in line with his own message about interfacing with “real” life and pain without an intermediary. I assume everyone having read this far knows how that went. The philosophy of Infinite Jest killed its own author. It is a bad philosophy. Q.E.D.¹⁰

Wallace is deeply in debt to Neil Postman, and it’s a debt his work cannot pay back. Wallace greatly misunderstands Postman’s writing, or at least takes his ultimate conclusions too lightly. The greater political concerns Postman has about the utility of a soma-like induced stupor in the general public for the benefit of the powerful are largely elided. Don Gately’s personal “triumph” in accepting pain is ultimately meaningless. Like, yeah, “mindfulness” is great and all, but I think when confronted with the political reality of Wallace’s novel that the book takes great pains to emphasize through its world-building, amidst the dystopia that is O.N.A.N., the problem is certainly not “people watch too much TV and it make them unfulfilled :(.” Imagine writing a novel about Nazi Germany where you spend half the novel explicitly describing the horrible conditions imposed by the Nazis and then your primary concern is that people smoked too much back then and it was bad for their health.

Capitalism is not absent from the book, but its analysis is rooted in particularly Gen X attitudes focusing on authenticity’s degradation at the hands of consumerism—even the years, even time itself, is rendered a space for advertising commodities (in some of the book’s most groan inducing jokes—it’s the “Year of the Adult Depend Undergarment”! Get it! It’s a diaper! You go poopoo in it!). It’s less Marx than it is Adbusters (buy the Blackspot Unswoosher Shoe now!). Wallace chooses to focus on the individual as the space in need of change rather than the system which is rather peculiar considering how this is a FUCKING SYSTEMS NOVEL—a systems novel so systems that it is often written in the style of a fake ethnography report. This approach does mean that some systemic factors are revealed, as in the contrast between the well-to-do tennis academy and the drug-addled slums below (even resorting to the sort of on-the-nose geographic literalism favoured by Bong Joon-Ho of physically placing rich people up and poor people down), but the crux of the novel has a lot more to do with the drama of individuals wrestling with their respective vices than the system which has thrust the necessity of those vices upon them, which almost feels like a vague act of a cruel and strange god. Of course, the novel being rooted in the modern subject as a form makes it hard to produce a work of art from within it which can truly grapple systematically. The limits of the novel form require gesture to get at bigger systemic ideas, they require skill at depicting microcosms. Capturing a system perfectly isn’t something any novel has to do, but I mean, when you’re posing your own thought as the antidote to modern despair like Wallace is…

By forcing an “answer to the question,” Wallace puts his cards fully on the table, and so reveals his painful myopia, his deeply-ingrained ideological bias regarding the unquestionable nature of the political status quo. Ironically, for someone who is so fucking hell-bent on railing against the negative consequences of irony culture, Wallace’s position on politics seems to mostly be a disaffectedly smug smile, content in simply “seeing through the bullshit” in that classic Boomer/Gen-X manner. Marathe and his terrorist buddies are a joke to Wallace (much as I’m sure their real life counterparts in the F.L.Q. were to him, insofar as he actually knew a single thing about them)—the ones who are resisting American imperialism and want to break free of the shackles of their empire, the only ones really seeking to change the world. As Wallace once said in his TED Talk avant la lettre, “this is water,” be “mindful” of the world around you, but accept the base ideological assumptions that underly that world as a given.

So the book sucks? No, no, not really. I think there’s a lot to criticize about it but I would judge it firmly as “alright.” There’s a lot of heart and soul in this book, it’s a book with a helluva lot of ambitions though it fails at most of them, which I think can make the book itself look like a failure when those ambitions were so obvious and primary. But it isn’t without its charms—I actually quite enjoyed a lot of the Enfield Tennis Academy stuff and the cast of bit characters that populate it, for instance. And failing as a saviour isn’t the same as failing as a prophet, and I do think that Wallace intuited a number of things about the direction of modern fiction, or what fiction might need, even as he failed to provide it himself. As a work itself, as a novel, Infinite Jest may come short in a number of places (Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot, for instance, is a novel I’ve championed before as effectively the novel Infinite Jest could have been), but I think Wallace could see a dawning crisis in fiction with a perceptiveness I feel most of his contemporaries lacked, and it is a crisis I will write more of in my long-forthcoming essay, “The Death and Afterlife of the Novel.”

1. Sire: Only 7,000 words to go folks. And a lot of footnotes. I recommend reading 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 10.

2. From personal experience as a former precocious teenage dipshit. A great example of this tendency is an extended riff Wallace gets into about “video phones”:

But the real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way callers’ faces looked on their TP screen, during calls. Not their callers’ faces, but their own, when they saw them on video. It was a three-button affair: after all, to use the TP’s cartridge-card’s Video-Record option to record both pulses in a two-way visual call and play the call back and see how your face had actually looked to the other person during the call. This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just ‘Anchorman’s Bloat,’ that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. In an early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage’s appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71 % of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 1960. The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry’s psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or l /PD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking; and in fact it was those entrepreneurs who gravitated toward the production of high-definition videophonic imaging and then outright masks who got in and out of the short-lived videophonic era with their shirts plus solid additional nets.

Mask-wise, the initial option of High-Definition Photographic Imaging — i.e. taking the most flattering elements of a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone-consumer and — thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered by the cosmetics and law-enforcement industries — combining them into a wildly attractive high-def broadcastable composite of a face wearing an earnest, slightly overintense expression of complete attention — was quickly supplanted by the more inexpensive and byte-economical option of (using the exact same cosmetic-and-FBI software) actually casting the enhanced facial image in a form-fitting polybutylene-resin mask, and consumers soon found that the high up-front cost of a permanent wearable mask was more than worth it, considering the stress- and VFD-reduction benefits, and the convenient Velcro straps for the back of the mask and caller’s head cost peanuts; and for a couple fiscal quarters phone/cable companies were able to rally l/PD-afflicted consumers’ confidence by working out a horizontally integrated deal where free composite-and-masking services came with a videophone hookup. The high-def masks, when not in use, simply hung on a small hook on the side of a TP’s phone-console, admittedly looking maybe a bit surreal and discomfiting when detached and hanging there empty and wrinkled, and sometimes there were potentially awkward mistaken-identity snafus involving multi-user family or company phones and the hurried selection and attachment of the wrong mask taken from some long row of empty hanging masks — but all in all the masks seemed initially like a viable industry response to the vanity, -stress,-and-Nixonian-facial-image problem.

It just keeps going on like this. For pages. I don’t think I’ve read a more incisive send-up of Wallace’s rather annoying stylistic quirks and sense of humour than this bit by Justin Isis:

The atomic number of potassium is 19. In nature, potassium occurs only in ionic salts. Is this the first time you’ve thought about potassium today? Perhaps you already got 430 or so mg of it from a banana, which is an elongated, sweet, yellow fruit and is also botanically a BERRY. Which doesn’t change the fact that if you ask for ‘berries’ in your Quaker Oats cereal and someone slices in a banana, you might be positively nonplussed—which is another way of saying you might feel negatively, actively minused or maliciously misunderstood by this hypothetical early morning imbroglio: or might otherwise perceive the potassium-packed breakfast slightly less than favorably and enthusiastically. Speaking of banana breakfasts, there’s a sort of MBTI equivalent scenario that’s worth busting out as an icebreaker: does the Pirate Prentice menu as laid out in Gravity’s Rainbow strike you as appetizing or disgusting? You know: all the ‘tall cruets of pale banana syrup to pour oozing over banana waffles, a giant glazed crock where diced bananas have been fermenting since the summer with wild honey and muscat raisins, up out of which, this winter morning, one now dips foam mugsful of banana mead…banana croissants and banana kreplach, and banana oatmeal and banana jam and banana bread’ etc. etc. that Pynchon lovingly describes. It’s not always easy to tell who would be down for trying this in real life and who wouldn’t. And but so given that 97.6% of the human race at this point, especially Gens Z and Alpha, has read Pynchon in full, this is a fun and handy way of establishing up-front any deleterious disaffinities on your Feeld date or hip-hop dance circle meeting or management consulting seminar or whatever you go in for. Pynchon pastiche aside, it was truly excruciating wading through all the fellatial blurbese smegmatically gunked around DFW’s oeuvre and in the process being reminded of the existence of midwit lifer midwives of middlebrow lit like Zadie Smith who still presumably receive real world financial rewards for holding this sort of thing up as a generation-defining artistic achievement. Can you imagine actually BEING as talentless and inhibited as Smith or Dave Eggers or any of the other industry cretins who praised and defended this material and went on to personally write even worse books? The prospect of waking up inside their heads without a trace of not so much impostor syndrome as full-blown ontological aesthetic cringe horror is difficult to contemplate without invoking some sort of Thomas Nagel-style philosophical thought experiment along the lines of ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ It’s certainly easier to imagine the world sketched in prismatic echolocational graphs than it is to imagine Dave Eggers firing up his nervous system to navigate a world in which he imagines he can write prose that hits higher than a third grade reading level. There was never going to be any clarity about potassium here, any more than there is anything that can really be ‘taken away’ from the work of a legacy-published academia-approved suicidal stunt writer from the increasingly distant 1990s. The totemic tombstone itself has become the point for Ian Cattanach and other boosters, but it’s hard to deny that David Foster Wallace himself aspired to this dismal condition of replacing his physical body with a fetish-object image-concept of himself as ‘a writer.’ Pynchon again: ‘M-maybe there is a Machine to take us away, take us completely, suck us through the electrodes out of the skull ‘n’ into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it’s got stored there. It could decide who it would suck out, a-and when. Dope never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But we can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified, Electroworld—’

3. Eggers’ review of the book is still ultimately “positive,” but it’s hard to imagine these words from a man who would later write an introduction to the book claiming, and this is a direct quote, that “it has no discernible flaws.”

4. A note: Wallace’s personal life and wrong-doings—of which there are a lot, and they are certainly not all minor, including the stalking, harassment, threatening, and physical abuse of Mary Karr, documented in part by Wallace’s own letters—are not going to be a focal point in my assessment. While I think it’s worth at least addressing as a biographical detail to condemn his personal/interpersonal behaviour, I don’t think there’s enough in Wallace’s depiction of women in the book to say anything conclusive about his relationship to women outside of it through an analysis of the text. I don’t really think critique of a writer’s character is an outright condemnation of their work unless it clearly and directly informs the work itself (and even then, an “immoral” work can still have worthwhile qualities, sometimes a lot of them, sometimes even qualities relating to what it reveals about those flaws). I’m sorry if this all seems callous. If you don’t want to compartmentalize in your consumption of art, that’s your prerogative.

And a caveat: I haven’t read the book in at least a decade, so there may be a couple hiccups as I try to remember the book’s content. I consulted my copy of the book while writing this, but it is a long book, a lot happens in it, and some of my recollection remains a bit fuzzy.

5. The closest we get to an actual human is Don Gately, whose pathos brings him closer to a Hubert Selby Jr. character, something which in some ways is more a lateral move than an improvement, but many of the book’s best scenes are Gately’s, including the controversial “abrupt” ending. Most of the characters in the book are not only zany but also altogether a bit too “cute” for my liking—to return to Hal, just take a look at this block of dialogue:

“I’m ten for Pete’s sake. I think maybe your appointment calendar’s squares got juggled. I’m the potentially gifted ten-year-old tennis and lexical prodigy whose mom’s a continental mover and shaker in the prescriptive-grammar academic world and whose dad’s a towering figure in optical and avant-garde film circles and single-handedly founded the Enfield Tennis Academy but drinks Wild Turkey at like 5:00 A.M. and pitches over sideways during dawn drills, on the courts, some days, and some days presents with delusions about people’s mouths moving but nothing coming out. I’m not even up to J yet, in the condensed O.E.D., much less Québec or malevolent Lurias.”

I find most of Hal’s sections pretty unbearable. Wallace is also I think nodding to DeLillo yet again here in the way Hal’s precociousness in his speech doubles to serve at times as a narrator in situ. Compare this to Jack and Babette’s children in White Noise who give chorus-like sections of in-scene narration to themselves and the reader:

“She keeps buying that stuff.”
“But she never eats it,” Steffie said.
“Because she thinks if she keeps buying it, she’ll have to eat it just to get rid of it. It’s like she’s trying to trick herself.”
“It takes up half the kitchen.”
“But she throws it away before she eats it because it goes bad,” Denise said. “So then she starts the whole thing all over again.”
“Wherever you look,” Steffie said, “there it is.”
“She feels guilty if she doesn’t buy it, she feels guilty if she buys it and doesn’t eat it, she feels guilty when she sees it in the fridge, she feels guilty when she throws it away.”
“It’s like she smokes but she doesn’t,” Steffie said.

It’s a similar trick but when DeLillo pulls it off it’s very… uncanny. This isn’t to say that Wallace had to do everything the way DeLillo did, it’s just that the way DeLillo is doing it is so much more unnerving and interesting. Wallace, on the other hand, is a bit… precious? This speaks to not only similar techniques the two writers use, but also to some of their overlapping themes—DeLillo provides similar themes but they are richer and deeper and more thought-provoking, he is more cynical and arch than “cute,” he is fall less willing to instruct, etc.

As a further aside, I’m starting to think the writing and characters of Infinite Jest actually remind me quite a lot of xkcd of all things, which makes a lot of sense since Infinite Jest fans probably overlap a lot with xkcd ones (I mean that with every insult intended). In fact Michael Pemulis might be a sort of “Black Hat Guy.”

6. Wallace bristles at this specific phrasing. From Lipsky’s book, Wallace describes The Entertainment, the movie-so-entertaining-it-kills-you:

I mean the movie’s not just a MacGuffin, it’s kind of a metaphorical device.

Yes, David. We know it’s a metaphorical device. It is an extremely obvious and on-the-nose metaphorical device—“MacGuffins” tend to be metaphorical devices (the “One Ring,” perhaps the most popular and prototypical “MacGuffin” example, is a power metaphor).

7. Marathe is not only not a Québécois name, it’s not even a French name (the only “Marathe” I can find is Hindi). In Lipsky’s book, Wallace doubles down (in response to Lipsky trying to say the name) on the name being pronounced more-or-less phonetically with the Anglo-assumed inter-dental fricative intact (“th”) and it’s unclear whether he is aware that such a sound is absent from the French language.

8. Wallace describes Marathe as “basically a fascist” (Lipsky’s book again), which of course leads me to yet another tangent… Wallace doesn’t really know anything about politics? Wallace seems to believe that “fascism” is just any mode of political thought that limits “freedom.” When describing the hypothetical "National Socialist Neofascist
State of Separate Quebec” that Marathe and his boys want to form, Steeply refers to this dream as “Cuba with snow.” I suspect this is not just a poor assessment on Steeply’s part but a genuinely-held belief of Wallace. It would not make sense for Wallace’s obviously genuine rebuke of Marathe—this is said during Steeply’s rant about how important it is to not curtain freedom and respect individual liberty—to be weighed down by such a poor political assessment, even for a Cuba hater. Wallace also does not seem to understand that O.N.A.N. is not a place where there is “freedom,” not just in the sense that Marathe critiques it (that freedom to indulge and destroy yourself is not really valuable), but simply because America as it exists in Wallace’s day is already only something which “appears” to be free, when it absolutely is not, ditto Wallace’s exaggerated permutation. I should also note that in Lipsky’s book Wallace at one point cites Hayek’s Road to Serfdom as evidently a cornerstone of his political thought, which…

9. JLG Noga I think really hit the nail on the head with this one:

Too often, after arriving at a salient insight into mass entertainment, social isolation, or addiction-as-worship, Wallace proceeds to elaborate past lucidity into prolixity, and finally into vacuous risibility. If Infinite Jest is funny, it is only because the idea of Wallace overwriting interesting ideas with a thousand superfluous pages evinces hilarity.

10. “Ummm that’s not necessarily airtight proof that the philosophy was—” shut up, nerd.