{"id":172958,"date":"2026-02-23T10:00:29","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T15:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=172958"},"modified":"2026-02-26T15:13:30","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T20:13:30","slug":"whats-so-funny-about-infinite-jest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/02\/23\/whats-so-funny-about-infinite-jest\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s So Funny About Infinite Jest<\/em>?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph by Slashme, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Standing beside a shelf of bestsellers with some friends at McNally Jackson Seaport in downtown Manhattan, Meg Charlton, a writer, recalled the time a man sat down next to her at a caf\u00e9, pulled out a copy of Infinite Jest<\/em>, and opened it to page one. Her friends laughed\u2014there was something humorous about the image, its sincerity and its hope\u2014though, as her public defender husband, Alec Miran, mused a moment later, \u201cHow else do you start?\u201d<\/p>\n

How does one start Infinite Jest<\/em>? In the year 2026, thirty years after its initial release, the book is a distinctive cultural object. It has been memed to oblivion, its author eulogized and criticized and transformed into an enormous posthumous celebrity. Infinite Jest<\/em> has a reputation for being brilliant, transcendent, transformative, genius. But it\u2019s also thought to be tricky, long, confusing, pretentious, unfashionably male, and embarrassing to read on the subway. \u201cThere\u2019s that horrible joke: \u2018If you go to a guy\u2019s house and he has a copy of Infinite Jest<\/em>, don\u2019t fuck him,\u2019 \u201d Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson, told me. \u201cI profoundly disagree with that,\u201d she added, laughing. To the contrary, she said, she finds the book quite \u201cseductive.\u201d<\/p>\n

David Foster Wallace meant for the novel to pull readers in; he wanted, among other things, for people to like it. He said a few months after Infinite Jest<\/em> came out that \u201ca lot of the avant-garde has forgotten that part of its job is to seduce the reader into being willing to do the hard work,\u201d and that he feared that people would find his new book gratuitously difficult. What Wallace can\u2019t have intended or predicted, prescient as he was, is that in the 2010s the novel would crest into a sort of synecdoche for youthful chauvinism, a signifier so potent that it would threaten to overtake the book itself. Readers now seem eager to leave behind its \u201clitbro\u201d baggage, an artifact of the Twitter and Bernie Bro era, and to engage with this complicated, pleasurable novel on its own terms. People, my reporting suggests, are ready to be normal about Infinite Jest<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In my conversations over the past month with a couple dozen Infinite Jest<\/em> readers, many of them young millennials cracking open the novel for the first time, a sense of wonder at the novel\u2019s readability and poignancy emerged\u2014a refrain of, We didn\u2019t know it was this fun! As Hermione Hoby writes in a wonderful New Yorker<\/em> essay, \u201cPerhaps the greatest disjunction between the book\u2019s reputation and its contents lies in the notion that it\u2019s a pretentious slog no one could honestly enjoy.\u201d Happily, it seems, more readers\u2014beyond, as the tropes would have it, the toxic sophomore boy; the most patronizing guy in an M.F.A. program; the too-smart-for-their-own-good, aspiring-intellectual type who prizes information over human feeling\u2014are lately turning to the novel, and loving it.<\/p>\n

Infinite Jest<\/em> follows a sprawling cast of characters as they deal with the crushing toll of being anxious, ambitious, lonely, brilliant, addicted, traumatized by generational pain, and, generally, human. Its heroes include Hal Incandenza, a teen genius\u2013cum\u2013tennis star, and Don Gately, a square-headed, kindhearted recovering Demerol addict working in a halfway house. Hal\u2019s filmmaker father has recently killed himself in a gruesome fashion (in Wallace-speak, \u201cdemapped\u201d himself), leaving behind a film so entertaining that it permanently incapacitates those who view it. This turns the family and its associates into people of interest to a set of wheelchair-bound, Quebecois-separatist terrorists in a speculative near-future version of North America (in Wallace-speak, the Organization of North American Nations, or onan). The novel is both deeply silly and dead serious; its structure, inspired by a type of fractal called a Sierpi\u0144ski gasket, lets its author dip into the consciousnesses of a stream of characters, roving between perspectives and transcripts and film scenes and time and place (though most of the book takes place in Boston). Famously, much action plays out in the endnotes.<\/p>\n

The novel holds obvious appeal to postadolescent boys, or to those concerned with issues that affect them: the major characters are male; they do drugs and live hard and thrash for meaning and play tennis and do injury to one another\u2019s balls; there are lots of references to scat, vomit, and the male form. This is less of a \u201cDudes rock\u201d novel than one about how dudes struggle, sometimes profoundly, against others and themselves. (\u201cIt is not one of our great feminist books,\u201d McNally said, adding that it is also bad on race; its Black characters in particular read as caricatures and slurs recur.) (The leading women are, by the way, smoking hot.) But Wallace was concerned with the ecstasy and the banalities of a wide range of human experiences; that his ambition seems to have been nothing less than to comment on the nature of everything has made him both revered and ridiculed. We get to know the lengthy backstories of the many players, including minor ones\u2014as the book insists, correctly, that each person\u2019s life involves dear hopes and deep sorrows. Characters take seriously the pat slogans of AA, and they flirt with the idea that maybe platitudes really do have something to them; that taking things one day at a time can, for example, help.<\/p>\n

A couple of recent events in Manhattan, both anniversary-pegged and not, have invited people to read and discuss the book in community. At a meeting of the Infinite Jest<\/em> Fest reading group at McNally Jackson in mid-January, almost seventy people, many of them women in their thirties, gathered to talk about pages 396 through 508 and the relevant endnotes, passing page 480\u2014the point at which Jay McInerney, in his New York<\/em> Times<\/em> review of Infinite Jest<\/em> upon its publication, suggested he would be inclined to shoot Wallace if he were any less talented. To kick things off, after McNally welcomed everyone, people passed a microphone around and shared a favorite line from the section. Many gravitated toward funny lines\u2014people read about \u201ca kind of reverse-Buddhism, one of Total Worry\u201d; about how Gately \u201chad never once eaten broccoli or a pear until last year\u201d; of \u201crampant, indiscriminate hugging.\u201d As McNally told me, noting that any two pages of this novel could trigger an hour of discussion, \u201cpeople remember different things, because the density of happenings per square centimeter is so high.\u201d<\/p>\n

The room was divided into small circles of folding chairs and couches; I sat in on a group of seven, an enthusiastic mix of writers and legal and tech professionals. There were a few true fans in the crowd\u2014one person had a tattoo of the novel\u2019s circular section dividers on his wrist, and his friend said she was reading the novel for the fourth time. But most were just now picking it up. In my circle of chairs, the conversation was sincere and unpretentious, focused on everyone\u2019s reactions to what they had read. A gregarious lawyer who said she found the book hilarious added, a moment later, \u201cI\u2019m just gonna say it\u2014it can also be extremely boring.\u201d Someone brought up a theory she\u2019d read: that flipping back and forth to the endnotes echoes the back-and-forth of playing tennis. \u201cI thought he was just being an asshole,\u201d another reader chimed in.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the evening, I heard Infinite Jest<\/em> compared to Love Actually<\/em>, in that various storylines converge; to the Harry Potter series, in that much of it follows young people at a specialized boarding school; and to Lost<\/em>, for reasons I didn\u2019t totally follow, as I haven\u2019t watched that show. The recent M.F.A. graduate Taryn Hendrix said that she envied the people who come to the book without knowing about the discourse surrounding it. \u201cIt\u2019s such an earnest, heartfelt book. That\u2019s been the biggest surprise,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Uptown, a couple of weeks later, Laura Miller, Deborah Treisman, Bennett Sims, and Greg Jackson convened for a panel about the book and its author at the 92nd Street Y. Treisman, who first published Wallace in the nineties in Grand Street<\/em>, read a portion of a long email Wallace had sent quibbling with copyedits\u2014evidence, she said, of his \u201cobsessive commitment to his style.\u201d Jackson recalled that, as a younger writer, \u201cyou almost didn\u2019t want to admit\u201d to adoring Wallace, in part because \u201cit was almost this private, intimate feeling we all had with his work.\u201d It would be like admitting he had the same poster as everyone else up in his room and that he \u201cwhispered to it at night,\u201d he added. Sims, who studied under Wallace at Pomona, argued that the novel\u2019s fearsome reputation is more about its size than about the contents: \u201cNone of its difficulties are line-level or stylistic. It\u2019s not hard to read. It\u2019s pure pleasure,\u201d he said, recalling Wallace-the-professor\u2019s emphasis on having mercy on readers. The audience seemed to agree.<\/p>\n

In the lobby afterward, Megan Mitchell, a comedian who read Infinite Jest<\/em> last year, said that, after hearing about it for so long, she was pleased to find how \u201cgood and normal\u201d it was (she also tweeted from the event: \u201cThere\u2019s legit so many hot men here\u201d). Melissa Finley, a botanical-garden curator who admitted she learned about the event from a tweet reading \u201cFinding my husband at this\u201d (Mitchell was also behind that one), said that any sheepishness she’d had about attending had less to do with the book\u2019s reputation than with fear of breaking her private communion with the characters, whom she thinks of as \u201cmy little friends.\u201d Her friend Eleanor Wing, an art director, reflected that, since she read it in 2015, the discourse around the book has faded\u2014Mitchell\u2019s cheeky but affectionate posts aside\u2014perhaps in part because people don\u2019t read.<\/p>\n

Still, many people who talk about Infinite Jest<\/em> in public in 2026 do so with a reflexive self-awareness, an urge to signal that, yes, they know. Michelle Zauner, the writer and musician who performs as Japanese Breakfast, opens her foreword to the new thirtieth-anniversary edition by saying, \u201cI\u2019m not what you might consider Infinite Jest<\/em>\u2019s target demographic.\u201d She writes that \u201cI\u2019m sure Little, Brown was aware of the slight incongruity of their selection, and perhaps hoped I might assist in assuaging the unfair, outsize connotations of what it means to be a David Foster Wallace reader, which, at its worst, has come to signify misogyny, and at its best, someone who\u2019s just slightly annoying.\u201d Zauner\u2019s intro is brief and deft; after getting that bro stuff out of the way, she writes of how the novel rewards those who give it attention, and she nods at its almost freaky prescience about entertainment (Wallace basically predicts TikTok, Zoom culture, and Trump). But maybe ten years from now, whoever introduces the next edition can skip some of the discourse commentary and just get into the novel itself, in all its sincere, self-contained glory.<\/p>\n

For all its kooky absurdity and formal inventiveness, Infinite Jest<\/em> is also very interested in earnest effort and the fearsome work of approaching life head-on. There\u2019s a passage I like that I think slyly signals the sincere nature of Wallace\u2019s project: Gately, in his reflection on AA meetings and the stories people share, reflects that \u201cthe thing is it has to be the truth \u2026 It can\u2019t be a calculated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lora Kelley is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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