As is the case with many twenty-something white men of a certain demographic upbringing, I am thrilled announce that I have finished Infinite Jest.

(Crowd erupts in applause)

As is the case with at least some of my compatriots I’m sure, I began reading it with some apprehension. There’s the obvious obstacle of steeling yourself for a novel of 1,000+ pages (including foot/-endnotes), but then there’s the double feint of acknowledging that apprehension as cowardly before brushing it off in favor some more philosophical reason(s). For me, those reasons took the form of some vague notion of where David Foster Wallace and his oeuvre sit in the memeological framework. In other words, there’s a certain kind of Guy Who Reads Infinite Jest, for lack of a better explanation. He’s related to the Guy Who’s Seen Every Tarkovsky Film in the sense that both exude a kind of quasi-intellectualized douchebaggery purely by virtue of having some consumptive proximity to a Specific Kind of Artist. In many ways this reputation is not un-earned – thousands of people every second no doubt are made victim to the kind of navel-gazing and beard-stroking personality who finds countless ways to make their impeccably cerebral tastes known. Those with particularly mesmerizing navels and/or particularly long beards also have a habit of intimating that these tastes not only suggest but borderline demand acknowledgment of their superiority. Mercifully, I have only met maybe one or two of these guys face-to-face (that is of course assuming that I myself am not one of Them – a disturbing question to even have to consider). In any case, I’m not here to re-litigate the case of Guys Who Read Infinite Jest, as I think they probably exist and if so are due a commensurate degree of derision. What I would suggest is perhaps that the reputation of Guys Who Read Infinite Jest should be divorced from that of Infinite Jest, as well as from that of its author. All three of these players are of course related, but are too often conflated.

Infinite Jest, to fawn for just a moment, may be my favorite book that I’ve ever read so far. There are the obvious reasons that it became a sensation and that, by and large, its critical reception was largely positive: it is truly vast in its ambition, scope, creativity, and of course, size. But not only is it really fucking big in several ways; its size is endowed in such a way that, miraculously, there doesn’t seem to be any wasted space. There is intentionality, even if that intentionality is veiled behind three layers of satirical and/or thematic and/or atmospheric and/or narrative meandering. Almost paradoxically, I found none of the book’s chaos to take away from what to me seemed a cohesive and purposeful tapestry. I also did not expect it to be so damn funny. After some much-needed contextual buttressing vis-a-vis some of Wallace’s essays, it makes more sense in retrospect. That being said, to carry one’s humor so deftly into a capital-L long form work was not just impressive, but a complete joy to read. I came to recognize and repeatedly experience a specific kind of reflexive discomfort associated with laughing at a passage in Infinite Jest in public (particularly if that passage is about a certain filmmaker and the smell of that filmmaker’s microwave post-op).

Ultimately though the more salient takeaway for me, beyond the mechanical triumph of a 1,079-page novel making sense and even beyond making that sensical novel funny, was the success of a shockingly resonant and consistent emotional through line. After all, as anyone who has read it can attest, not all of it is funny. In fact, there are passages that are not only macabre, but unequivocally disturbing. Held though between these poles is a warm pool of call-it-understanding. Nearly all of the characters who are afforded narrative voice are somehow adjacent to your life, even if their lives are millions of miles removed from your own, and they feel so very noticeably. Even Randy Lenz, the unrepentant rat-, cat-, and dog-killer, seems to have a grounding wire in a very human kind of suffering – a very human kind of existence. It’s not that he’s excused from whatever unconscionable thing he’s in the middle of doing because of it, but he’s demystified, he’s defused¹. On the other side of the coin (or at least somewhere far away from Randy Lenz) is someone like Hal Incandenza. Though Hal’s story is often also suffused with humor, I felt crushed by his tragedy in an almost familial way. What could possibly be worse in life than utterly losing the ability to communicate?

These attributes speak to me of an almost obsessive interest in/love for humanity or humanism, or both. This is of course reinforced by many of DFW’s other works, perhaps most directly his “This Is Water” speech. This was a man who, despite his personal failings, seemed at all times concerned with the human element/condition. A sort of heart-on-the-sleeve mentality that might be cloying if it weren’t so visibly counterweighted by deeply present internal conflicts. As such it makes perfect sense to, following a few surfing expeditions around his name, find that DFW was a sort of crusader for authenticity, or at least against irony. Not, in my estimation, an irony of style, but an irony of identity. Much of his philosophy, if you will, seems to condemn the obfuscation of one’s beliefs, convictions, and so on behind a curtain of irony, jokes, meta-jokes, meta-commentary, etc. That’s not to say he’s against irony as an intentional device, but rather its use as a shield. This is something I’ve written about before, and is part of the reason why I feel DFW has hit me in just the right place at just the right time. Without belaboring the point too much, suffice it to say that I feel cynicism and irony have taken a far too prominent seat at the table. There are myriad reasons for such a shift (if it is indeed a shift – I defer to any empirical studies and/or some reasonably objective anecdotal evidence from my seniors), but we’d be hard-pressed not to at least engage with the Internet as a potential steward, if not progenitor, of such feelings. For all of the beautiful and convenient things that the Internet has given us, there are its darker sides that balance the equation. Forget about the truly darker sides of the equation for a moment (4Chan, disinformation, neo-fascism, etc.), and consider the more boringly darker sides. Think, for example, about the desire everyone has to in some way forge their own path. Whether this is accomplished through some combination of artistic or creative pursuits, career success, romantic bliss, or whatever, I would posit that most Americans grow up sculpting what they want and how they’d like to fit into/contribute to the world. Put another way, call it the Pursuit of Happiness. People may take many different roads to get there, but that’s ultimately what being an American is in some way predicated on. Now again, think about the Internet. In an age where everything has been done before and has been made visible to you and, in some cases, has been identified and engineered to appear in front of you, specifically, how is one meant to find that path?² There is true anonymity in the inability to express yourself in a way that, maybe even if it isn’t unique, at least feels unique. The recourse in this kind of existential identity pickle is to merely cast everything as meaningless. The final declaration of uniqueness and expression then is to subvert the concepts entirely – to embrace a nihilism that isn’t even self-serious enough to embrace nihilism. A double envelopment of laughing at sincerity and then laughing at the laugh you just had. By my reading, these are things that David Foster Wallace was concerned about in the 90s and 2000s. I can only imagine how he would feel given the quaint hamlet of an Internet he had compared with what it is today.

So another thing that’s enduringly present about Infinite Jest, then, is this grappling with all-American questions. In the vein I’m told of many before it, IJ deserves its title of an “encyclopedic” novel, as it captures not only what it means to be an American growing up and living in a confusing and turbulent time, but how it feels. Not only how it is, but how it might be. How it looks and how it smells. Instead of offshore wind, we erect giant fans to direct trash into a designated area for the most creative and ludicrous form of renewable energy you can think of in annular fusion. Instead of reining in the invisible hand of corporatism, we let it sponsor our calendar years. Instead of chess, we have Eschaton. The book is hilariously satirical and deadly serious in the same breath, just like its subject matter. And it takes a lot of pages to get it done. The wonder is that, like many of my other favorite books, I felt myself longing for even more of it as I approached the end. That’s not to say I don’t sympathize with the complaint of size-as-intimidation (as mentioned before, I felt it very much myself before starting), but I don’t subscribe to the criticism that it is unedited word-vomit, nor to its being particularly overwrought for the sake of self-aggrandizement. I’m of course paraphrasing these critiques, but they point to some of what undergirds the aforementioned conflation between art and artist, namely that IJ’s gargantuan size and the complexity of its prose (and structure, etc.) signals the author’s wish to convey their own superiority. Hopefully, the previous paragraphs are at least convincing as to why it feel that way for me.

What brought a lot of this into even sharper relief for me was watching The End of the Tour not long after finishing Infinite Jest. An instant success of the film right off the bat was that it was not a biopic, a genre I’ve developed a firm distaste for. Instead, it covers a snapshot of about a week or so in which two artists meet, converse, and seemingly become quick friends. This early-romance type dynamic is obviously pockmarked by the fact that David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) is on this trip with DFW (Jason Segel) for his own reasons: he’s writing a profile on the author for Rolling Stone. This simple, nonfictional backbone I found to be very compelling (it should come as no surprise that I am also a huge Richard Linklater fan).

The film is not of course without its faults. I have not read David Lipsky’s book from which it was inspired, nor to my knowledge have I read any of his other material. That being said, I have to credit the man with self-awareness if he knowingly portrayed himself as insufferably as he appears via Jesse Eisenberg. Again, assuming most of the material is true and pulled directly from the real Lipsky’s recordings, it’s pretty tough to watch the journalistic process unfold. Not just resentful and envious, but, in the case of a few particular scenes, evincing those qualities with reckless abandon. On one hand, you feel the warmth of a genuine bond forming between these two men, but it’s tainted by the inescapable fact that at least one of them (and I’ll get to that) has an at least partially compromising ulterior motive. At times the separation is jarring, like when Lipsky sucker-punches a question about attempted suicide partway through a conversation.

You may be tempted to rejoin with a “cost of doing business”-type rebuttal. DFW knew he was being interviewed for a magazine and, obviously, David Lipsky knew he was interviewing DFW for a magazine. That’s fine, and maybe offers some reasonable defense of the real-life events. It may even offer some reasonable defense of what of those events appears in the film. What’s harder for me to get my head around in the film is how much presence seems to be foisted onto Lipsky. While it is, in a sense, his story to tell, it’s hard to flush the parasitic element from his side of it. It’s hard to be touched and moved by the tender moments and then bludgeoned with some Lipskyan boondoggle wherein he chews out his girlfriend(?) for fangirling at the chance to speak to her new literary hero over the phone.

Where the film is most successful though is by far its (and Segel’s) portrayal of DFW himself in the degree-removed role of quasi-secondary protagonist. Of course, it’s impossible to capture anyone’s personality in the span of a few hours, but the timbre of Segel’s performance and the lines he’s given echo sentiments that I feel are evocative of the real author. I don’t presume to speak for Wallace, but my observational reading is that he seemed extraordinarily conflicted about his place in literature – like he believed in the brilliance that was widely ascribed to him, but didn’t want to out of a sort of obligation to the worthiness of any Other, as well as a true reverence for those he saw as better or more accomplished authors/cultural critics. This comes to a head in the biggest argument between the Davids: Lipsky accuses Wallace of putting on an act such that he can “fit in” with the lesser specimens around him, hiding his superlative intellect so as to not embarrass or belittle his subjects. It’s his “social strategy,” as Lipsky puts it. In retrospect, and this is where I may have to give credit to the real Lipsky, this scene manages to hit the nail on the head in terms of how I, and hopefully others, see David Foster Wallace: As someone so concerned with human experience and legitimacy that he holds onto his ability to perceive and understand it like a vice. It’s that belief in seeing others without “observing” them, eschewing people-watching in favor of connection, that becomes so evident in his writing – what gives Infinite Jest its exceptionally compelling emotionality. This is what convinces me that Wallace wasn’t operating on some ulterior motive, at least in the same manner that Lipsky was; he was seeking that connection that would come of the meeting. It’s why there was such an instant chemistry between the two and why, I think, the friendship blossomed and contracted with such intensity. It’s the reason why Lipsky a.) didn’t end up writing his Rolling Stone piece, and b.) wrote his most famous book about a series of conversations. That’s what makes his accusation of falseness so heartbreaking – I imagine that Wallace felt a little bit like Hal in that moment.

Like most people, David Foster Wallace was a complicated person. He was not perfect, but maybe helped show some of us what it means to be imperfect in an imperfect world. Having now read some of his work, I find myself longing for his voice in These Troubling Times. Not as a prophet, but as the witty and comprehending companion he was, to join us in new-wave absurdity – a Tarrou personified. Above all, I would hope that, were he still here, Wallace would appreciate the impact that just a few conversations with him yielded. My guess is he might also be disturbed by it.

“I just think that to look across a room and to automatically assume that someone is less aware, or that their interior life is somehow less rich and complicated and acutely perceived as mine would make me not as good a writer. Because it means I’m going to be performing for some faceless audience instead of having a conversation with a person.”

1. In true DFW fashion, here is a footnote. There is a corollary here somewhere to America’s (and others?) fascination with serial killers. Contrary to the exhausting mental autopsies that typically accompany a given serial killer, Lenz doesn’t feed off the insatiable curiosity of an audience hungry for explanation. His story, while disturbing, is not mysterious or titillating in the way that seems to beget constant revisitation. You could make the argument that Lenz’ cartoonishly macabre backstory merely preempts such a retrospective exhuming and pursuit of reasons why, but, in its own way, the story just isn’t remarkable enough. Randy Lenz is just “there,” for better or for worse. That’s not to suggest that he (or any serial killer for that matter) is just “a person like any other with X,Y,Z difficulties” but simply that the way in which the subject is broached can dampen its ability to seduce. I for one would contend that such a dampening would be a welcome relief to the amount of outsized attention given to the most grotesque villains we have in the real world.
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2. It seems appropriate here to note a few things:
   a. There’s a reasonable argument, in my eyes, that the Pursuit of Happiness should not be ideologically instilled as an independent pursuit. Many, more erudite and thoughtful Marxists for example, have already covered the major issues with the Supreme Guiding Principle qua economic invention of rational self-interest, and the hypothetical benefits of a more collectivized form of Happiness (or utility, if you’re so inclined). The goal of this piece is not to provide a solution for what the Collective Pursuit of Happiness looks like, or even to proselytize its supremacy over Individual Pursuits of Happiness, but I do think it’s important to consider the ramifications of the latter.
   b. Related to a., I also don’t think that the tension between Individual Pursuits of Happiness and our current age’s capacity to provide them means they are not possible or worthy of pursuing in the first place. On the contrary, finding ways to root oneself in some form of meaning becomes even more important in the post-postmodern world, which seems at many times to threaten you with its undertow.
   c. I’m realizing it probably seems like I think rabid cynicism is the number-one plague that’s infecting everyone, everywhere. I’ll make a proviso here that this could very well be one person’s interpretation of a very anecdotal set of interactions and experiences. I merely feel as though this kind of current infects some of this era’s flirtations with neoreactionism and some recent manifestations of horseshoe theory.
   d. It’s worth mentioning also that I don’t believe unilateral condemnation of these kinds of attitudes is warranted. While I think at their worst they are dangerous and encourage apathy, it’s important to approach the phenomenon with understanding. It seems that empathy is an appropriate response to disillusionment, even if you run the risk of appearing trite and complacent. ↩︎