My attempt to explain Infinite Jest
I've become somewhat obsessed with Infinite Jest again after reading the Matt Lakeman post about it, having somehow made my way through it1 some time during high school. Like most other things involved with the author David Foster Wallace, the book is deeply insight laden but also at times incomprehensible, puerile or just plain distasteful. But somehow it has stuck with me through the decade since I've read it, and despite, or perhaps because of its density and fractal detail it has become a foundational text for me. And with time its deepest ideas have not merely stuck with me but have started to feel even more prescient each time I come across them again.
Wallace in all his prescience didn't predict social media2 but he does predict the increasing potency and ubiquity of entertainment with striking precision, where even something as tiny and niche as a weird YouTube channel or a niche Discord server or a sub-sub-genre of online anthropomorphic art can consume your waking hours for days at a time, enabled by infinite scrolls and attention-grabbing page layouts but more so by the sheer inexhaustibly of what is out there. Somehow, with just paper, ink and the aforementioned endnotes, Infinite Jest manages to replicate a sense of this exhausting abundance, which for something © 1996 is an achievement in itself3.
Of course, with this ever growing buffet of distractions, you might wonder what the point of reading this 1000+ page novel with a narrative that mostly doesn't even take place on the page and all manner of irrelevant and distasteful tangents is. I don't have a great answer to this, even with all the clever people who have written reviews and summaries and analyses of it online and in print. Perhaps its most meaningful and prescient ideas would be better promulgated through readable, accessible blog posts or essays rather than buried in endless stream-of-consciousness quasi-dream sequences 800 pages in. But maybe the purpose of a novel is to present these ideas, in all their messiness, for others to find and extract. So once in a while I find myself pulling out my well-worn copy of Infinite Jest and turning it to a random page, and when I read there's usually something fresh and gripping and true I find in there that, unlike the vast majority of what's online or even in most printed text, cannot be found or substituted someplace else.
Have thoughts? Post them in my feedback form!