Here’s What I Love About Infinite Jest

In this very large book, the best moments are the smallest ones

Earlier this month, Infinite Jest reached the 30th anniversary of its publication. This triggered a slew of retrospective essays from major outlets, each attempting to grapple with the book, its legacy, and What It All Means Now. Given that the late David Foster Wallace’s 1,079 page opus has come to be viewed more as a meme than a work of art these days, this was no easy task. Some focused on the social baggage of Infinite Jest, how it became a totem for a certain kind of annoying, know-it-all “lit bro” that would recommend the book to girls at parties. Others wrote about Wallace himself, dredging up the more unsavory aspects of his biography to place the work in context with the man who created it. A few leaned heavily into the prescience of Infinite Jest, a novel published in 1996 that takes place in a semi-distant dystopian future where a famous entertainer runs the country and citizens rot their brains by staring at screens all day.

Whatever angle a particular piece took, it usually landed on the complimentary, seemingly heterodox opinion that “Infinite Jest is good, actually.” After years of derision and condescending smirks, it appears the chattering class has come around.

I agree. Infinite Jest IS good, actually. But I think all these pieces are missing the point of why.

The retrospectives I saw were mostly about the discourse around the book and/or the very broad strokes of the story. They feel like they were written by someone who has Infinite Jest placed prominently on their bookshelf, but has never actually gotten around to reading it. By zooming out and focusing on the big picture, they neglected the best parts of the novel and lost sight of what makes it great.

Yes, it’s fun to marvel at how accurately Wallace predicted the future. Yes, this book is mind-bending in its scope and ambition. Yes, you absolutely need two bookmarks so you can flip back and forth between the main text and the 388 endnotes that appear at random intervals with widely varying lengths. But the best parts of Infinite Jest - the parts that stick with you and rattle around in your brain for years after you’ve finished reading - are incredibly, unbelievably small and human. They’d be more at home in a slim work of realist fiction than a massive post-modern masterpiece. And in the midst of all this hype around the 30th anniversary, these highlights have gone unremarked upon.

Infinite Jest opens on Hal Incandenza, one of the primary protagonists of the story, awaiting a college entrance interview. This scene takes place about a year after the primary action of the plot has been resolved and functions as a sort of flash-forward. The book doesn’t really kick off - in my mind anyway - until the first sentence of the second chapter: “Where was the woman who said she’d come?”

This is a question put forth by Ken Erdedy, a ravenous marijuana addict awaiting a woman who said she would come to his apartment and sell him 200 grams of high quality pot. What unfolds over the next ten pages is a deep dive into Erdedy’s psyche as he prepares for what he claims is one last debauched marijuana binge. Never mind that he’s made this claim many times before and always finds a way to relapse, whether it’s a month or a week or even a couple days later. According to Erdedy, this time he really means it, and he has a plan to enforce his decision.

He would smoke it all even if he didn’t want it. Even if it started to make him dizzy and ill. He would use discipline and persistence and will and make the whole experience so unpleasant, so debased and debauched and unpleasant, that his behavior would be henceforth modified, he’d never even want to do it again because the memory of the insane four days to come would be so firmly, terrible emblazoned in his memory. He’d cure himself by excess.

Of course, this strategy does not work, but I could have told you that without reading any further. It’s the same mindset I have during the week between Christmas and New Year’s when I tell myself that by eating leftover cheesecake and cookies for breakfast I’m actually setting up a massive dietary and fitness turnaround on January 1st, and that next year I will finally have abs and be able to run a six-minute mile, all because of how slothful and gluttonous I was during one reckless week. It’s cope, all the way down.

This chapter showcases what I believe is Wallace’s greatest strength. I have never come across another writer who can so clearly map out the specifics of interior life. He knows exactly how to lay bare all of the insane contradictions and rationalizations that occur when one is suffering from a debilitating sense of self-consciousness, second-guessing and over-analyzing every possible decision and action.

Erdedy describes all the disgusting ways he lies to the people around him, how he fakes sick and calls out of work, parks his car around the corner so friends and family think he’s out of town, and modulates his behavior so that he can convince one specific person to sell him an unreasonable amount of pot without being “creepy” about it. Of course, he’s doing all of this because he knows it’s wrong and that he has a serious problem. All of these mental and logistical gymnastics are just an elaborate way to avoid confronting and reckoning with what he knows is the truth: He’s an addict and he’s unable to correct his issues on his own.

Wallace shows us all of this with only a brief tour of Erdedy’s sickened mental state. Hardly anything actually happens in this chapter. Erdedy spends most of it just sitting on the couch, thinking of everything he’s about to do. But through the clarity and honesty of Wallace’s prose, we know exactly who this man is, even if he refuses to admit it to himself. We are given a front row seat to the war playing out within his own soul.

Whenever I talk to someone who is thinking about reading Infinite Jest, I tell them to read this chapter first. If they like it, they’ll probably enjoy the rest of the book.

It’s not all despair and pain in Infinite Jest, however. Yes, it’s a story filled with addicts and depressives, but there are many parts that are not sad at all. In fact, some are downright inspirational. My personal favorite is a speech given by a stern, authoritarian tennis instructor named Gerhardt Schtitt.

A large part of Infinite Jest takes place at Enfield Tennis Academy, a prep school where junior tennis players learn how to become pros. There’s a scene a little less than midway through the book that chronicles an early morning workout. Here, a collection of teenage prodigies are put through a gauntlet of conditioning drills in freezing Boston winter temperatures. Not only does Wallace do an incredible job describing what it feels like to run pre-dawn sprints while there’s still snow on the ground (When I first read this passage, my memories of off-season college football workouts came rushing back to me), but he also utilizes Schtitt to reveal a profound and powerful truth.

Once the conditioning drills are finished, Schtitt asks the players what they should do when they’re in the middle of a match and they feel too cold or too hot or too tired or they suffer an injury or their opponent is cheating or they’re not getting the right calls from the line judge or they experience any of the myriad setbacks that could befall someone playing highly competitive tennis. One young player suggests that they learn to adjust to the given conditions. Schtitt tells him, in his heavily accented broken English, that they should do the exact opposite.

Adjust. Adjust? Stay the same. No? Is not stay the same? Is it cold? Is it wind? Cold and wind is the world. Outside, yes? On the tennis court the you the player: this is not where there is cold wind. I am saying. Different world inside. World built inside cold outside world of wind breaks the wind, shelters the player, you, if you stay the same, stay inside.

It can be hard to parse through at first, but Schtitt is telling these players that they need to build an unbreakable world inside themselves. If they develop a secure sense of interiority, cultivated over years of discipline and effort, then what happens in the world around them won’t matter. As long as they stay the same on the inside, the outside world can never exert its influence over them. A strong, stable sense of self is the best defense against all of the difficult things life will throw at you.

About a week after I first read this passage, I found myself thinking about it while in the middle of a long run. I usually listened to music to stay motivated while running, or thought about cool scenes from movies to push through fatigue, but never in my life had I thought about a book in order to stretch myself physically. Now I find myself coming back to this scene on a regular basis, whether I’m in the middle of a difficult workout, grinding through a challenging day at the office, or taking care of my son while on minimal sleep. It’s had that much of an impact on me.

Like the Erdedy chapter, nothing really crazy or outlandish happens here. The scene Wallace describes - of young athletes pushing themselves physically and mentally - is one that has played out at countless high schools and colleges across the country. On its face, it’s nothing special. But through the power of his insight and advanced writing ability, Wallace takes something seemingly small and common and elevates it to the realm of moving and profound.

It would be hard to talk about Infinite Jest without mentioning Don Gately, a character who many readers (myself included) consider to be the true hero of the story. Gately is a former thief and opiate addict who checks into Ennet House, a Boston area rehab facility, to get clean and escape a handful of criminal charges that could land him in jail for a very long time.

The Gately-centric chapters that focus on the realities of addiction - on the mindset and decisions and choices made by someone who is in total thrall to a particular substance - are so powerful, so deep and moving and insightful and empathy expanding, that they completely changed the way I look at addicts. A few years back I was on a trip with some friends when one of our sober buddies fell off the wagon. Myself and another friend volunteered to bring him back to the hotel so he couldn’t do any more damage to himself. Once we got him up to his room, I decided we needed to wait in the lobby for ten more minutes before going back out. My other friend didn’t get it at first, but sure enough, here comes our buddy five minutes later, trying to escape into the night and head to another bar. My one friend asked me “How did you know he was going to do that?” It was because of Infinite Jest and Don Gately.

But Gately’s story is ultimately one of triumph, and the pivotal moment takes place while he’s lying in a hospital bed, suffering from bullet and stab wounds, trying desperately not to ingest the painkillers the doctors have prescribed to him.

Towards the end of the novel, Gately is shot and stabbed while defending his housemate from a handful of vicious gang members. He then spends the last hundred or so pages in a feverish dream state, fighting like hell to try and stay sober in the face of unimaginable physical pain. He eventually comes to the below realization.

No single instant of it is unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants lined up and stretching ahead, glittering.

…He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen.

…It wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for the Substance: everything unendurable was in his head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

It’s a metaphor for AA’s “One day at a time” mantra, but it’s also the perfect companion piece to Schtitt’s directive to build a world inside yourself. While Schtitt tells you what to do, Gately tells you how to do it. And it’s not with some vague advice about “staying present in the moment,” there’s a visual metaphor of hopping walls and looking ahead that you can imagine and embody to make the advice feel real and actionable. “Don’t hop the wall” is what I tell myself when I’m in the middle of a difficult task with no end in sight. It’s fantastic advice that I’ve visualized and implemented many times since I first read Infinite Jest, and it usually works.

There’s a tinge of sadness to all of this considering that Wallace, a lifelong depressive, eventually committed suicide in 2008. One day he hopped the wall and believed the unendurable news he reported back to himself. But even though his end was ultimately a tragic one, we can never know how many times he actually endured and made the correct decision to stay with us. All you have to do is lose that argument with yourself one time, and the outcome is final. But winning it just means you have to do it again the next day. He had a pretty phenomenal batting average, due in large part to the fiction he wrote. It was the one loss that ended his story.

While I’ve focused exclusively on the small parts, I won’t deny that the big, flashy parts are also pretty awesome. The lore and world-building in Infinite Jest are phenomenal. During the six weeks it took me to finish, I felt like I was inhabiting an entirely different universe. It’s like The NeverEnding Story for nerdy adults. It’s fun to go down Reddit rabbit holes to try and decode who it was sending the killer video tapes, what Madam Psychosis looks like under that veil, or what actually happened when Hal, Wayne and Gately went to dig up James’s Incandenza’s head.

But while these moments are very large, it’s the small moments that have the most scope. During these scenes, you inhabit someone else’s interior life. You sit with them and bear witness to everything going on inside their head and their heart. That’s way bigger than an international espionage plot involving government spies and wheelchair bound Québécois separatists. And by witnessing that reality, by seeing the grandeur that everyone carries within themselves, you accomplish the goal that Wallace always had for his fiction. You feel less alone.