Off the Shelf: Why Is Infinite Jest So Good, Anyway?

Off the Shelf is when we talk about books we've read lately. A book is a really antiquated thing that people pretend to like when they want to sound smart, which fits the goal of this website quite nicely.

Infinite Jest is a fantastic book, but it’s near-impossible to recommend. There’s too much of it. Not in a “this is bloated and overlong and self-congratulatory” way, but more in a “reading this book is such a commitment, such a time-suck, such an intense, consuming undertaking, that urging someone else to read it feels more detrimental and sabotaging than earnest and exciting.” By all means, everyone should read Infinite Jest, but if no one read it, it’s understandable.

For example’s sake, reading Infinite Jest took me six weeks. I read about 25-50 pages a day, and I made myself read every day, because if I didn’t, I knew I’d fall out of the habit, and if reading Infinite Jest doesn’t become habitual, you’re probably not going to make it all the way through. Plus, the book is so complex and intricate that to skip a day means you might lose track of the themes or the characters or the momentum of the plot, and if any of that happens, the book immediately becomes work. So really, there’s one way to read Infinite Jest: relentlessly. Best of luck.

It took David Foster Wallace about ten years, from 1986-1996, to write Infinite Jest. One is reminded of this fact every time they attempt to explain the plot. It’s not easy. There are multiple storylines, and those storylines may or may not intersect. One is about a tennis academy (the easiest parts to read, and also the parts with the most fun footnotes), another is about a halfway house (the longest tangents happen here, many of them stick with you), and another is about a league of wheelchair-bound assassins (the funniest parts, but also the parts containing the most “state of the world today” monologues, which you read and struggle with because they all feel like David Foster Wallace is really trying to say something here, but it’s hard to deduce what when you’re just kinda laying on your couch with Tostitos crumbs on your shirt, you know?). The book takes places in a dystopian America, though that’s never explicitly said and you can only start to figure it out around page 300, and the book is packed full of the aforementioned footnotes, 30-percent of which are brow-furrowing, 30-percent of which are hilarious, and 40-percent of which are appalling tangents that you can’t imagine the book without. Look at the effing size of this paragraph. This is an attempt to explain the plot of a 21-year-old American novel. That novel is over 1,000 pages, but still. Yeesh, man.

Despite all that, it still feels important to insist that Infinite Jest is great, a one-of-a-kind, borderline-essential media experience. Your time with it instantly stands out as something distinct amid all the movies and shows you’ve watched, albums you’ve listened to, and other books you’ve read. It kind of forces its way into your life and dominates a particular season—“the winter I read Infinite Jest.” You spend time so much time with the book that it becomes a part of your routine—another roommate, really—and while that might be plenty of ammunition for some people to criticize it, there’s weight to the idea that Infinite Jest could only be as long as it is. Otherwise, it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t have the same heft (…).

David Foster Wallace was peculiarly prophetic. Perhaps just as essential as Infinite Jest to this assertion is his essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, which includes writings about the Illinois State Fair, television, and a luxury cruise adventure. We’ll focus on the middle essay in a second, but as a whole the book emerges as a relic of a man who struggled with the pleasures and pains of being an American consumer. Wallace was a self-professed television addict, but he hated TV. He loved junk food and relaxation, but he resented every ounce of excess his life presented him. His personal world was contradictory, and while that’s hinted at in his essays, it’s underlined in a fat red marker in Infinite Jest.

Especially when it comes to the way modern Americans treat entertainment, Wallace had things figured out, even if he hadn’t risen above the conflicts himself. In the 1990s, he predicted a world without channel-surfing. He predicted on-demand entertainment. He predicted consumer-friendly virtual reality. He predicted binge-watching (indeed, in the book, Infinite Jest is the name of a movie that its viewers literally cannot stop watching). It’s as surprising as it is horrifying as it is sad; imagining a David Foster Wallace essay in the era of Netflix is so deprivative it’s overwhelming. The insight into that potential is one of the bonuses Infinite Jest lends the reader. It’s just nuts.

But then that’s the final irony of Infinite Jest, which so often critiques, mocks, and comments on our obsession with culture and entertainment: It can never be anything except a book. The work is so nebulous and web-like and complicated, that it’s literally—and I know how confident and brash this sounds—it’s literally impossible to make into a movie, a TV show, anything. It won’t happen. The book that has more to say about screen cultures and pop entertainment than perhaps any other modern read will never become a part of those sectors. You won’t be able to watch Infinite Jest as you scroll through Twitter on your phone. You’ll never be able to splitscreen it with your ESPN Gamecast at the airport. You won’t even be able to read the book with a television on in the background; you just won’t keep up. As modern as it is, Infinite Jest will forever be stuck in its archaic, old-fashioned format (and to all the sticklers asking about an audiobook—there is one, but it doesn’t include the footnotes, so suck it).

The point here isn’t to convince you to read Infinite Jest—remember, a recommendation feels irresponsible. The point here is to affirm that yes, if you wanted to, reading the book would be worth it. There’s nothing like it. It’s funny, it’s weird, it’s challenging, there are moments you’ll remember for a long time. But most importantly, the book’s themes will seep into the rest of your entertainment life. It’s a cultural artifact that comes to affect all others. Whether that’s for better or for worse is a matter of perspective, but Infinite Jest makes that perspective achievable.