Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

We age alongside the novels we’ve read, and only one of us is actively deteriorating.

Infinite Jest is the first great Internet novel.

In interviews, Wallace was explicit that art must have a higher purpose than mere entertainment, leading to his most famous and bellicose thought on the matter: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”

Infinite Jest, in other words, can be exceedingly frustrating.

Both are too big. Both contain too much. Both welcome you in. Both push you away.

Wallace’s flat, minor, one-note characters walk as tall as anyone,

microscopically close third person.

What did it cost Wallace to create him?

What I am trying to say is that it should have been difficult to focus on the doings of Hal Incandenza, Don Gately, Rémy Marathe, and Madame Psychosis. But it wasn’t.

Most great prose writers make the real world seem realer—it’s why we read great prose writers. But Wallace does something weirder, something more astounding: even when you’re not reading him, he trains you to study the real world through the lens of his prose.

He didn’t name a condition, in other words. He created one.

My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.

an I’m-eating-something-that-makes-me-really-appreciate-the-presence-of-whatever-I’m-drinking-along-with-it look

I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.

cannot make myself understood, now.’ I am speaking slowly and distinctly. ‘Call it something I ate.’

left off here he ate some stuff and the mom‘s concern. This is some sort of flashback thing.

am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I’m complex.

‘I read,’ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you’ve read. Don’t think I haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.” My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect.

I feel and believe. I hav...

‘I am not what you see and hear.’

I am concentrating docilely on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to regain control.

‘But the sounds he made.’ ‘Undescribable.’ ‘Like an animal.’

The boy reads like a vacuum. Digests things.’

And who could not love that special and leonine roar of a public toilet?

etiology and diagnosis by Socratic method,

So yo then man what’s your story?

She’d promised to come at one certain time, and it was past that time.

Thinking back, he was sure he’d said whatever, which in retrospect worried him because it might have sounded as if he didn’t care at all, not at all, so little that it wouldn’t matter if she forgot to get it or call,

He’d been too casual with the woman,

Once he’d been set off inside, it mattered so much that he was somehow afraid to show how much it mattered.

He felt similar to the insect inside the girder his shelf was connected to, but was not sure just how he was similar.

It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him. He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that would be required to explore the question.

He could not remember the color of this new last and final bong.

with whom he’d had intercourse twice, to honor her casual promise. He tried to decide whether the woman was pretty.

He didn’t even know why he liked it anymore.

He couldn’t even be around anyone else if he’d smoked marijuana that same day, it made him so self-conscious.

this would simply be his very last marijuana debauch.

He would smoke it all even if he didn’t want it.

He’d cure himself by excess.

The new bong in the Bogart’s bag was orange, meaning he might have misremembered the bong before it as orange.

The moment he recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and that he was potentially missing it. He realized that he would have plenty of time to enjoy all the cartridges, and realized intellectually that the feeling of deprived panic over missing something made no sense.

He considered masturbating but did not. He didn’t reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and drying out and floating dryly away, and felt on some level that this had something to do with him and his circumstances and what, if this grueling final debauch he’d committed himself to didn’t somehow resolve the problem, would surely have to be called his problem, but he could not even begin to try to see how the image of desiccated impulses floating dryly related to either him or the insect, which had retreated back into its hole in the angled girder,

without a thought in his head.

I’m a continentally ranked junior tennis player who can also recite great chunks of the dictionary, verbatim, at will, and tends to get beat up, and wears a bow tie? Are you like a specialist for gifted kids? Does this mean they think I’m gifted?’

might have to burp a little bit in a second, from the soda. I’m alerting you ahead of time.’

Himself is my dad. We call him Himself. As in quote “the man Himself.” As it were.

I’m the potentially gifted ten-year-old tennis and lexical prodigy whose mom’s a continental mover and shaker in the prescriptive-grammar academic world and whose dad’s a towering figure in optical and avant-garde film circles and single-handedly founded the Enfield Tennis Academy but drinks Wild Turkey at like 5:00 A.M. and pitches over sideways during dawn drills, on the courts, some days, and some days presents with delusions about people’s mouths moving but nothing coming out. I’m not even up to J yet, in the condensed O.E.D., much less Québec or malevolent Lurias.’

‘Dad,

‘Son?’

But I think Roy Tony gone kill Reginald if Reginald go. I think Roy Tony gone kill Reginald, and then Wardine momma beat Wardine to death with a hanger. And then nobody know except me. And I am gone have a child.