Infinite Jest at 20: still a challenge, still brilliant

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Infinite Jest at 20: still a challenge, still brilliant

Finding my way around David Foster Wallace’s monumental maze of a story has ruined my social life and made my brain hurt – but its rewards are as big as its size, writes Emma-Lee Moss

The first of February saw the 20th anniversary of a work considered by many to have changed the rules of fiction: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Last year, having never progressed beyond the book’s first chapter, I decided to mark this occasion with a personal commitment: by midnight on its birthday, I would give up membership to the ordinary world, and join the club of determined readers who have made it to the end of the novel.

At more than 1,000 pages – with copious footnotes – Infinite Jest is a famously difficult read. It is the Gen-X Ulysses that even those like me, who consider themselves DFW superfans, are nervous to attempt, many preferring to feed their devotion with his essays and short stories. Set in a North America of what was, in 1996, the near future, the novel follows a breathtaking number of characters. They are all somehow tied to the destiny of the Incandenza family and its youngest son, Hal, a tennis prodigy who, before the novel begins, finds his father’s body after a microwave-based suicide.

But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the grooves will open up. And once the magic descends you don’t want to change even the smallest detail. You don’t know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated can’t-miss feeling, and you don’t want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out, but you don’t want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun.