Infinite Jest might be a “Jamesian melodrama,” but it was also the big shit he’d been working on for almost ten years, his bid for a seat at the table with Pynchon, and for that he had to preserve his unfamiliar political setting. He also around this time wrote what would become the beginning of the novel, the memorable scene, set a year after the end of the rest of the book, in which Hal Incandenza has a nervous breakdown during an admission interview at the University of Arizona. What transpires is an exaggerated version of Wallace’s own experience on his college tour fifteen years before,
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