‘Infinite Jest’ Came Out Thirty Years Ago This Week. If You’ve Never Read It, There’s Never Been a Better Time

This week marks the 30th anniversary of Infinite Jest, the 1996 Clue-murder-weapon-heavy masterwork that made author David Foster Wallace a celebrity and shifted culture in an era when a genius novel still had the cachet to do that. This milestone is being remembered/monetized with a handsome Hachette reissue, complete with a foreword from Crying in H Mart author Michelle Zauner, better-or-at-least-as-well-known as the indie-pop artist Japanese Breakfast.

Just three decades later, the book exists in a culture radically different from the one that produced it. To the extent that it’s remembered and discussed at all, Infinite Jest is spoken about less as the defining diagnosis of American life in the 1990s and more as an indicator that the guy you’re hooking up with (if he’s got the book positioned conspicuously on his shelf) might be a douchebag. Partially because we know men don’t read anymore and partially because American literacy itself is endangered—although anxieties over declining readership were no less present amongst the intelligentsia when the book debuted—the natural presumption is that the book is being used as little more than an accessory, which would admittedly be douchey.

The fear of presenting as a stereotype or cliché may dissuade genuinely curious readers from taking a crack at it, which sucks, because Infinite Jest is more relevant to American life than ever. Most great American novels are about the hollow core of the American dream, but Wallace’s particular thousand-layer maximalist pop summation of that disappointment has only become more pertinent since its release.

IJ presents the same challenges it did in early 1996, when its publisher Little Brown issued the book. Even as a physical object it was a provocation. One critic clocked his time reading the book for review: eight hours a day for five days. Its 1,079 pages contain over a half million words, annotated with pages-long footnotes. The first editions weighed 3.3 pounds and would strain the sturdiest canvas tote. It’s fair to ask: What book could be worth committing an entire work week’s worth of discretionary time to, when you could watch Heated Rivalry eight times over the same period?

Part of IJ’s earned reputation for difficulty comes fairly, because of who Wallace was and what he represents in culture. Born in 1962, Wallace descended from an experimental, dense, and often stuffy postmodern tradition that includes old straight white men like John Barth and Donald Barthelme and Don DeLillo and William Gaddis, and emerged alongside a cohort of younger but equally straight and white men, including Donald Antrim, William Vollman, and Mark Leyner. Wallace’s pronounced whiteness and maleness is, unto itself, a turnoff and object of ridicule for some online, and anyone who has read Wallace’s lit-nerd examination of hip-hop, Signifying Rappers, can confirm that he was a genius who understood doctorate-level philosophy but bumped on Schoolly D. Infinite Jest doesn’t really attempt diversity, and in the specific moments when it does, you might wish it didn’t. Like many (most?) writers, Wallace could be annoying and pretentious and (reportedly) kind of a dick, and for a long time there was A Type Of Guy who built his entire personality around DFW’s style, from his prose to his wardrobe.

Wallace’s first book The Broom of the System, and his short story collection Girl With Curious Hair are good, but they’re not as smart as they are clever, and often seem preoccupied with fucking with the form and function of literary fiction than with telling a good story. But Wallace began to differentiate himself as a writer in the early 90s, particularly through his journalism, which is still my preferred delivery system for his writing. “The problem,” Wallace once said of his avant-garde predecessors, “is they’re not very fun to read.” As Wallace got older, his life became less confined to academia, and perhaps as a result, he began to see the types of novels that once lit up his brain conceptually as airless, masturbatory homework in execution. He aspired for Infinite Jest to serve as an antidote to all that—challenging, but also deeply pleasurable, a book the reader wants to read. And this is what has been lost in much of the Infinite Jest discourse; it’s the point where Wallace made the leap from literary exhibitionist to humanist composing profoundly with his whole chest.