Infinite Jest

novel by Wallace

Written by Margaret Anne Doody, J.E. Luebering•All

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Last Updated: Nov 20, 2024 • Article History

Infinite Jest, novel by David Foster Wallace, published in 1996, that satirically attacks the vacuous predilections of contemporary American culture mercilessly while shamelessly reveling in them.

Where does one begin with a book of over a thousand pages, of which nearly a hundred pages consist of 388 detailed (and wildly funny) footnotes? A plot synopsis is sadly doomed to inadequacy.

Set in the near future, Infinite Jest is the title of a film made by the maverick avant-garde filmmaker James Orin Incandenza that is apparently so funny that the viewer watches and rewatches it, at the expense of everything else in their life, until they ultimately die in a state of uncontrollable hilarity. All manner of sinister individuals, government agencies, radical groups, and others attempt to track down the master copy of this film, and the ensuing chaos incorporates the recovering addicts of Ennet House (a Boston dependency clinic) as well as the nearby Enfield Tennis Academy.

Portrait of young thinking bearded man student with stack of books on the table before bookshelves in the library

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These two locations provide two opposing points of focus for the text. One allows Wallace to explore the centrality of addiction to consumer culture and the place of narcotics within that culture. The other is an extraordinary vision of a hothouse sports school producing children for an industry that will disregard most of them.

Wildly inventive, linguistically original, extravagantly detailed, and playful, Wallace’s text is the one you would take with you to a desert island.

Strictly speaking, these “footnotes” are endnotes, because they’re at the end of the book. But you expected this sort of pedantry in this article, didn’t you? Let’s double down: according to a 2009 article by D.T. Max in The New Yorker, Wallace wrote in 1994 that he resorted to endnotes because they “allow…me to make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story, 2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence. 3) have a lot more technical/medical verisimilitude 4) allow/make the reader go literally physically ‘back and forth’ in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns… 5) feel emotionally like I’m satisfying your request for compression of text without sacrificing enormous amounts of stuff.” Wallace provided this explanation to Michael Pietsch, his editor at Little, Brown, as the two were working through the manuscript of Infinite Jest. Margaret Anne Doody J.E. Luebering