Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
Summary
Set in a near future North America reorganized into the Organization of North American Nations, where corporations buy the naming rights to each calendar year, the novel weaves together tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza at the Enfield Tennis Academy his father James founded; recovering addicts, particularly Don Gately, at the halfway house Ennet House next door; and a cell of wheelchair using Quebecois separatists hunting for the master copy of a film called Infinite Jest, made by James before his suicide, so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses interest in everything else and eventually dies of neglect, wanting only to watch it again. Wallace tells almost none of this in order, interrupting the main narrative with three hundred eighty eight endnotes, some running for pages and carrying their own footnotes, so that following any single thread means constant movement between the front of the book and the back. The novel withholds a conventional ending entirely; its last scene, chronologically, sits in the middle of the book's internal timeline, and Wallace himself said the story resolves outside the right frame of the picture, leaving the fates of Hal, Gately and the missing film's whereabouts to be assembled by the reader from clues scattered across the whole book rather than delivered at its close.
It is enormous and formally difficult, genuinely funny in long stretches even as it treats addiction and depression with real, unflinching seriousness; the endnote structure asks real physical patience of a reader, and Wallace's own closeness to his characters' pain is what keeps the book from reading as merely a formal stunt.
Historical Context & Significance
Little, Brown published Infinite Jest on February 1, 1996, one thousand seventy nine pages after Wallace's editor Michael Pietsch cut roughly two hundred fifty manuscript pages during editing; it took no major literary prize. Reviews split immediately and have never fully settled. Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times called it a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Wallace's mind, and the critic Dale Peck called it bloated, boring, gratuitous and uncontrolled, while Steven Moore in the Review of Contemporary Fiction called it instead a profound study of the postmodern condition.
Sales were modest at first, forty four thousand hardcover copies in its first year, before growing steadily into more than a million copies worldwide and a body of academic study substantial enough that the Chronicle of Higher Education has referred to Wallace Studies as its own subfield. Time named it to its 2005 list of the hundred best English language novels since 1923, and more than one critic who dismissed it on arrival has since revised that verdict upward in print.