Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, published in 1996, is the most argued-about American novel of its generation, which is appropriate because it is itself an argument-with entertainment, with addiction, with the novel form, with the cultural logic of a society that has confused pleasure with meaning. At 1,079 pages plus nearly 100 pages of footnotes, it is a commitment that many readers begin, fewer complete, and almost none forget.

The novel’s twin narrative threads-life at a tennis academy in a near-future Boston, and life in a halfway house nearby-are connected by a film called “Infinite Jest,” a work of entertainment so pleasurable that its viewers become incapacitated, watching it on loop until they die. This Macguffin is Wallace’s central metaphor: what happens when the desire for pleasure is fully satisfied? The answer-death, or something indistinguishable from it-is the novel’s argument against the entertainment culture he saw consuming American consciousness.

Wallace’s prose is maximalist in the extreme-footnoted, hyphenated, digressive, fiercely comic-and within this maximalism he contains passages of extraordinary tenderness and precision. The halfway house chapters, which render addiction and recovery with documentary faithfulness, are among the most compassionate writing about substance dependency in American fiction. The tennis academy sections, frenetic and brilliant, capture adolescent consciousness with unusual accuracy.

Infinite Jest rewards the investment it demands. Its ambitions are not always realized, and its length exceeds what the novel’s pleasures can fully justify. But those pleasures are real, and its central argument-that irony is insufficient, that genuine feeling requires putting oneself at risk-remains both unfashionable and necessary.