Infinite Jest
A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.
Stats for nerds
145recommend
549mentions
421people
2007–2026years
31% recommend62% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- It's one of my favorites. But I prefer to reread with two bookmarks, just as I did when I first encountered it (and just as I did with Infinite Jest years later).
- damn I miss David. of course I never knew him personally, but I read and loved his books, so in a way I did know him. I would like to read his perspectives on social media, Trump, and AI slop. I know it's fashionable to either love or shit on Wallace, but I dare anybody to read Infinite Jest and not fall in love with it. I've read it over 10 years ago and and still to this day haven't read another book that would captivate me as much, and maybe I never will
- The second and third times through get easier, once you can appreciate the patterns and links that seem extraneous and confusing at first. Totally different kind of book, but I’d put it up with Infinite Jest as far as being convoluted but incredibly rewarding. And of course more SD / tech focused.
- If you grew up writing (and reading) a lot, it's quite natural to have a "voice." It makes sense too: it's akin to having spent a lot of time with a certain person.
Although, I do not know if this is really that shining of an example of anything, although a fine blog post!
If you are surprised, I wholeheartedly recommend just reading more. Something clicks after 1000 pages of Swann's Way, or Infinite Jest, or even the Gnus manual where you simply must reckon with a certain kind natural voice that can be cultivated and exhibited without exertion, without even a "thought."
And I know the implication here is maybe underhanded, and that you feel its "entertaining" as a party trick is; where one compensates for content with flowery prose. That might be fair, but I see this charge more and more, and I just worry one day everyone is just going to deem reading and writing itself as a waste, as a compensation for some unnamed other thing we should all be doing (optimizing productivity). Which is why I must defend every labored, silly metaphor I read now to my death from all yall editors that popped up three years ago.
- I am in (perhaps) a tiny minority in that I love American literature but just don’t get what the fuss is about The Great Gatsby. I just don’t think it’s that good a novel. Off the top of my head I could come up with a list of at least 10 American novels that I have read that I think are significantly superior.
In no order here goes
1. Blood meridian
2. The Bell Jar
3. Of Mice and Men
4. Mason and Dixon (everyone’s gonna say “Gravity’s Rainbow” but I think since this is an explicitly American list, the themes of Mason and Dixon of the North/South divide etc put it more squarely on this list)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird
6. Moby Dick (I’m not the biggest fan of this actually but it’s way better than Gatsby for me)
7. Walden (Does this count? Anyway whatever. Walden)
8. Portrait of a Lady
9. Infinite Jest
10. Go tell it on the mountain
Honestly this is right off the top of my head and looking back I haven’t even got any Hemingway on here, or Ralph Ellison, or Toni Morrison. I could make a case for Slaughterhouse 5 or Catch-22 or The Naked and the Dead or a bunch of other things. Like even though I think he’s a total tool, Bonfire of the Vanities probably has a good case for being on the list
I just genuinely don’t get the fuss about Gatsby. I’m glad people like it, but there seem far, far better American novels.
Edit to add: And yes I did read it. Twice in fact, once in my late teens after I had read a lot of serious literature and thought it was ok but not great and then again in my late 30s because I was sure I must have missed something and was very disappointed to come to the conclusion that I really hadn’t.
I have two theories for why maybe people like it so much. Firstly, because the author is such a stylist and they get strung along by some of the prose. But when you read a truly jawdropping stylist like for example in my book Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Cormac Macarthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald really doesn’t stand well in that company.
Second theory (perhaps cynical) is that it’s the first novel in the US school syllabus that gets really serious literary criticism applied to it and so for a lot of people it is the book that awakens them to the power of literature. I could totally see that if you had a really great teacher introducing you to proper literature by means of the book you might love the experience and, because of that, the book.
- Often for me it’s not about not liking the book, but not wanting to read it right now. This is particularly true with philosophy, but also true of fiction (I’m currently reading and loving Infinite Jest, but I’m not always in the mood for it).
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