What Is Infinite Jest About? A Reader's Guide

- 8 minutes read - 1643 words

In my previous post, I positioned Infinite Jest as the quintessential Generation X novel and an entrant to the canon of “Great American Novels.” Before we attack that, let me give a small summary of book and advice for approaching it. Let me try to break it down.

The Maximalist Marvel

Infinite Jest is a novel: hilarious, touching, depressing, erudite, indulgent, maximalist, nonsensical, and visionary. As a result it has an exceptionally high page count.

It is also a monument to an editor who fought valiantly and just gave up.1 And honestly, it’s hard not to have sympathy for the editor. The book starts in media res and tells its story in a circular, Wallace might have said annular format (rings are very important in this book as they are infinite). Further inflicting despair, Wallace badgered, beat, and ignored editorial cuts by relocating ideas to hundreds of footnotes.

Lingering on the footnotes a moment, they are not mere authorial commentary; some offer that, but they offer a fictional and non-fictional corpus of riotous accumulated facts: science, erotic Byzantine art, tenderness, film back-catalogs, pharmaceutical fact-sheet style insights into various drugs' highs, the metric system, and Boston 12-step program culture. Wallace’s footnotes demonstrated that a gathering of facts can be funny – even when, or perhaps especially when they’re entirely made up.2

Back to the main text: there are (at least) two well-developed novels inside it. I have enough time badgering simple posts like this one into shape – and I have superior editing tools and even access to large language models to help. With each page, Wallace spun himself and his editor into a deeper labyrinth of plot and character obligations and, largely, he pulls it off.

The Book’s Purpose

With all those pages, what’s the point? That’s a lot of dead wood to sacrifice just to tell an overlong yarn. The book is a warning, a cry for earnestness in a world that was growing ever more ersatz (and that was based on looking at it 1992-ish).

It’s a deep consideration of pleasure and what we’re escaping from when we flee into distraction all its various forms – when we try to manipulate our brains chemicals with substances, movements, and entertainment.

And I know it may not sound like it, but it’s really funny.

What’s It About (Abstractly)

Here’s a take of what it’s all about. With 1,000+ pages, legions of interpretations can be found, but here’s my stab. In the book…

America is a culture on suicide watch, broken, craven, and hungry. Glossing over this inconvenient truth has fueled the growth of low-value-add capitalist enterprises that wallpaper over it, chiefly of two types: technology/ entertainment and drugs — which, in case you didn’t notice it, are the same.2

The public of the new North American country (“ONAN”) remain distracted by drugs and the spectacles in order to keep capital and its masters satisfied. In exchange, it aligns to the fascist-leaning regime of germaphobe president, huckster, and better days gone by pitch-man, Johnny Gentle, a former lounge crooner. Gentle’s pitch for keeping what once was the US neat and clean by relocating trash (of which the hyper-consumerist culture produces tons) via giant slingshot (see, it’s funny) has kept the public in line (well, not all of them, as the book tells).

Against this backdrop the activities of the academy, athletics, and ample drug consumption continue in a way that looks and feels like the factual time of the book’s release, the late 90s. Grad students still house party, but they pass Quebecois refugee convenience stores. Athletic scholarships to colleges are still given, but they’re given at the Whataburger Invitational in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar.

Capital, for its part, has noticed that a soul-crushing revolution has happened under the velvety-voiced direction of the Gentle administration and its foreign-born Svengali “Rod the God.” But the profits are so good and the market opportunities so great in this dystopia that it just goes along.

In this world, we are given two major tales and one hell of a mystery. Yes, all that was set dressing. I think you can see why Wallace needed a lot of pages.

What’s It About (Less Abstractly)

Infinite Jest hinges on three major foci playing out in the world just described:

  1. A community of people recovering from drug addiction wrestling with life in recovery
  2. A community of young athletes drunk on postmodernism, over-education, film theory, and…tennis. Full of anomie in a sadly-close-to-the-current hyper-capitalist, imperialist media and culture wasteland, they medicate their brains with sports, a levitating guru, a martinet German coach, and…drugs
  3. A flawless bit of media, “The Entertainment” which is so soothing and engaging people will watch it, literally to death. What is so engaging? No one can say exactly, but it seems to be a beautiful nude woman, a universal mother, filmed exactly as she would appear to a baby, lovingly apologizing for making anyone go through this thing that we call “life"3

While it would seem impossible, these three foci have tendrils that interconnect them.

Metaphors for Our Age

So let’s loop back (heh-heh: like Wallace attempted to do) to the book’s purpose a moment and see how it is served by happening at the intersection of the 3 foci and the abstract socio-political/economic backdrop previously described.4

Wallace recognized that technology promising connection would paradoxically isolate us further and that absent family, church, etc. there would only be intellectual dithering, pursuit of shallow sorts of fame, and pursuit of ever-more-novel diversions. He could see these trends in American society extending out in parallel perfection like power lines across the Arizona desert. He realized that those who needed his message were not yet socially atomized and maybe his book would vaccinate against such a world.

He understood that unlimited entertainment options would become their own form of prison of a form like drug addiction. His audience of “normal people” were just about to become like a distasteful (to them) segment of society: the addicted/those in recovery. Wallace saw that those he needed to save could learn a lot from those in recovery, but they were too arrogant to see how they were uncomfortably a lot like the addicted.

And since he understood that since the American audience fears addiction and hates the addicted, the book must (at the cost of many more pages) teach his audience to love addicts and help us find empathy for the absurdly humorous Hell that they live. From withdrawal constipation ruining one’s feather boa-clad outing to the curious interaction of being obsessive-compulsive while on cocaine leading an immaculate bathroom, Wallace makes his addicts, relatable, silly, and flawed. He makes them real. A slightly less egotistical reader can see that they’re addicted in a new and novel way, can learn from the drug-addicted of the halfway house, and then realize that their “normal,” consumerist, entertainment-and-distraction-swilling life is a choice, a choice that can be un-made.

Infinite Jest has a cautionary payload: if we don’t learn to relate, if we don’t learn to care, if we remain singly, mastubatorially self- and fame-focused the outcome is the vapid vanity of the world of the book…or 2025 America.5

It’s a Big Book. How Should I Read It – Physically?

If you’re intrigued enough to tackle this masterpiece (and I hope you are), here are some tips:

  1. Don’t listen to the audiobook. You’ll miss the crucial footnotes and the experience of flipping back and forth, which is part of Wallace’s intended reading experience

  2. Use the “three bookmark method”: One bookmark for where you are in the main text, another for your current footnote location, and a third for page 223, which lists the years covered by the novel in chronological order, from the “Year of the Whopper” onward (Source: kottke.org)

  3. Consider digital versions. Kindle editions work well for this approach and save you from lugging two pounds of book around. I looked very pretentious indeed while holding this thing up as I shot up and down the 2/3 lines of Manhattan. I often had to read it at a table like a reference work in a library. That might have been intentional

  4. Don’t rush. This is a book that rewards patience and close attention. The connections between seemingly disparate plot elements often reveal themselves slowly, in footnotes, or outside of chronological order

  5. Embrace confusion. Wallace intentionally disrupts linear storytelling. Trust that apparent loose ends will eventually connect. I can’t say they all reconnect (a dejected editor and a maximal page count make the odds of that nigh impossible), but the big ones do

Some dedicated readers have even been known to take razor blades to the physical book, cutting it into more manageable tomes. I don’t recommend this drastic approach, but it speaks to the lengths people will go to engage with this work.

Coming Up Next

In my next post, I’ll explore Wallace himself - the brilliant, troubled mind behind this generation-defining work - and examine how Infinite Jest’s predictions about American culture have proven remarkably accurate. We’ll look at how a novel from 1996 somehow managed to foresee our current cultural landscape with uncanny precision.

Footnotes

  1. In this, it’s like Land of Lisp or the doorstops Neal Stephenson put out as part of The BaroqueCycle books or in Cryptonomicon.
  2. This insight was used to great comedic effect by John Hodgman in his My Areas of Expertise books
  3. If the idea that love of entertainment and love of drugs are the same is a striking thesis to you, Infinite Jest will make sure that you don’t think it is at the end of its last chapter
  4. The e-book format makes it clear to me that this book might have been optimally read as a web artifact or a “Xanadoc.”
  5. Yes, I was thinking of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” as I wrote that. Electric word, “life.”