Why Infinite Jest is the Most Brilliant Book You'll Ever Read

David Foster Wallace won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997, the year after Infinite Jest was published. The M.F. is more commonly known as the 'Genius Grant.' DFW like deserves it.

Infinite Jest is 981 pages of narrative. Endnotes take the book to 1,079 pages. It is dense, highbrow, hilarious, and like heartbreaking.

The title comes from Hamlet, in relation to Poor Yorick, known well. In the novel, Infinite Jest is the name of the final film of James O. Incandenza, father of slowly unraveling protagonist Hal, seventeen-year old tennis/lexical wiz. The film is so entertaining it's like lethal. Anyone who sees it loses all interest in life, and wants only to see the film again. They will not eat, sleep, or get up to go to the bathroom. After several days, anyone who watches the movie dies of sleep/food deprivation, in a puddle of piss and a pile of shit, happy as a clown on stilts.

While initially confusing/off-putting due to the cut-and-paste timeline, the strange near-future world, and the myriad of characters, the novel carves for itself an emotional peg in your heart. Don Gately and Hal Incandenza are people whose lives I felt a need to witness.

The novel overflows with detail and verisimilitude, and the language is as tight as a well-strung tennis racket. I thought about the book daily. I dreamt about it. I traded sleep for reading time. I even missed class. The novel proved to be so entertaining that at times I would not stop to make dinner.

And when it was finished I wanted to start all over again. I reread the first three chapters, then collapsed with like exhaustion.

I'm sure most of you can see where I'm going with this. My point falls under the 'form = function' category. A novel about a movie so entertaining people watch it with zeal then re-watch it when done, is itself so entertaining that readers go through the same circle. Luckily, you won't like die.

Infinite Jest is genius. Not just an ego-satisfying think piece, it still has (so) much for the reader to consider. Not a mindless pleasure-filled bestseller, it still will make you laugh, and keep you in that strangely satisfying state of emotional suspense, like that feeling below your breastbone just before the roller-coaster falls. It is involved fiction. It was work for the author, and so it makes sense that the novel should be work for us, like, too.