OCTOBER, 2026

Book at a glance

• Author: David Foster Wallace

• First published: 1996

• Genre: Literary Fiction / Postmodern Fiction

• My copy: Abacus, Paperback, 2006/2007

I first came across Infinite Jest in the way one often comes across books of this kind: through its reputation. I knew it was enormous, knew about the endnotes, knew that people abandoned it, and knew that finishing it had somehow become an achievement in itself. None of this made me particularly keen to read it. In fact, there is something faintly irritating about a book arriving with instructions about how formidable it is supposed to be. But I eventually started it, and for quite a while the reputation seemed entirely justified. It is a difficult book, and I don't mean difficult in the slightly flattering sense in which we sometimes describe books we think we ought to admire. It is genuinely hard work in places. It is more than a thousand pages long, with nearly a hundred pages of endnotes, some of which have their own footnotes. The chronology jumps around. People appear without much explanation. Wallace uses abbreviations long before you know what they stand for. He can spend pages on tennis drills, pharmaceuticals, recovery meetings, video cartridges and the mechanics of things I wasn't always convinced I needed to know about. There were occasions when I reached the bottom of a page and realised that although I had technically read every sentence, very little of it had actually entered my head, so I went back and read it again. Quite often.

The strange thing is that after a while this stopped bothering me. I stopped expecting the book to meet me halfway and began reading it on its own rather unreasonable terms. I don't know exactly when that happened, and there was certainly no moment of revelation when all the pieces suddenly fell into place. Plenty of them never did. But somewhere in those thousand-odd pages I stopped thinking about how difficult Infinite Jest was and started thinking about the people in it. Published in 1996, the novel is set in a version of America just far enough into the future to be recognisable and ridiculous at the same time. Years have corporate sponsors. The United States, Canada and Mexico have been rearranged politically. There is an environmental catastrophe involving an enormous amount of rubbish. There are Quebec separatists in wheelchairs. There are terrorists, academics, addicts, tennis prodigies and a family called the Incandenzas who are damaged in enough different ways to keep a considerably shorter novel occupied.

Much of the book moves between two places. The Enfield Tennis Academy is full of gifted young players being trained to become even more gifted. Nearby is Ennet House, where recovering addicts are trying to get through another day without drinking or using drugs. At first the two worlds seem very different. One is about discipline and achievement, the other about people whose lives have fallen apart. Gradually they begin to look much more alike, because almost everyone in both places is trying to get somewhere else. The tennis players want to become better than they are. The addicts want not to be the people they have become. Parents want things from children and children want things from parents. People want success, drugs, alcohol, sex, approval, distraction, love. Sometimes they simply want whatever is happening inside their heads to stop for a while. Wallace is very good on that particular human desire, and also on how easily something that gives relief can become something one can no longer live without.

Then there is the Entertainment, a film made by James Incandenza, filmmaker, founder of the tennis academy and father of Hal. It is supposedly so entertaining that anyone who sees it wants nothing except to see it again. They stop eating, stop talking and stop caring about anything outside the screen; given enough time, they will die watching it. Reading this in 2026 makes the obvious comparison almost impossible to avoid. Wallace wrote the novel before smartphones, social media, streaming platforms and algorithms became part of ordinary life. We now carry devices containing more entertainment than anyone could consume in several lifetimes, and those devices have become rather good at learning what will keep us looking at them. It would be easy to say Wallace predicted all this, but I'm not sure he did, and I'm not sure it matters. What he understood was much older than the technology: our desire to be distracted from ourselves.

That part interested me enormously, perhaps because I have spent most of my adult life telling stories. Filmmakers are always talking about holding an audience. We worry about pace, whether a scene is too long, whether somebody will become bored and look away. When we succeed, we call it engagement. Wallace takes that perfectly respectable ambition and pushes it to a rather horrifying conclusion: what if you made something from which the audience simply couldn't look away? There is something uncomfortable about that question when you have spent years trying to do precisely the opposite of losing an audience, and it made the Entertainment much more interesting to me than simply treating it as a remarkably prescient joke about television, streaming or the internet.

What surprised me more was how sad the book is. That isn't what I had expected from everything I had heard about it. I expected cleverness, and there is an exhausting amount of cleverness. Wallace can be very funny and very showy, sometimes on the same page. There were moments when I wanted to tell him that I already understood he was extraordinarily intelligent and that we could perhaps now continue with the story. But beneath all that is an extraordinary amount of loneliness. Hal Incandenza is intelligent, articulate and talented, yet increasingly unable to make himself understood. Don Gately, a recovering addict with a violent past, became the character I cared about most. His world is much less intellectually dazzling than Hal's. He is trying to stay sober, and sometimes that means doing things he thinks are ridiculous because somebody who has stayed sober longer than he has tells him they work. At Ennet House, people repeat clichés that Wallace knows perfectly well are clichés. The interesting thing is that the clichés occasionally help and intelligence occasionally doesn't.

That reversal is one of the things I liked most about the novel. We tend to assume that understanding something gives us power over it, whereas Infinite Jest repeatedly suggests otherwise. You can understand perfectly well why you are unhappy and remain unhappy. You can understand addiction and still be an addict. You can be exceptionally intelligent and have no idea how to live. Conversely, you can say something embarrassingly simple to somebody in pain and occasionally it is exactly what they need to hear. For a book famous for being complicated, some of its best observations are surprisingly uncomplicated, and I found myself remembering those moments more readily than many of the elaborate constructions for which the novel is famous.

I also began to wonder whether the difficulty of reading it was connected to what Wallace was writing about. I don't want to push that argument too far because it can become a convenient way of excusing almost anything a difficult novel does. Sometimes a long passage is simply a long passage, and there were certainly places where I wished an editor had been standing behind Wallace with a slightly larger red pencil. But Infinite Jest doesn't allow much passive reading. It interrupts itself, makes you turn to the endnotes and then find your way back, introduces somebody and expects you to remember them hundreds of pages later, withholds explanations and gives you explanations for things you hadn't particularly wanted explained. You have to participate in reading it, which seems rather appropriate for a novel containing a film whose audience doesn't have to participate at all.

I didn't love every part of the book, and I don't know that I completely understood every part of it. There were sections I admired rather than enjoyed, others I endured, and a few where I wondered what would actually be lost if twenty pages quietly disappeared. I don't subscribe to the idea that difficulty itself is a virtue. A book isn't profound simply because it makes the reader work hard, any more than a film becomes serious because it is three and a half hours long. But I am glad I read it, and what is odd is that I can't quite say I have finished with it. Most novels become smaller once you've read them. You know what happened, you know who mattered, you remember certain scenes and forget others, and eventually the book settles into a reasonably manageable place in your head. Infinite Jest hasn't done that for me. Parts of it remain unresolved, some deliberately and some perhaps because I missed things. I suspect that if I opened it again I would find connections I didn't notice the first time, although the prospect of immediately beginning another thousand pages is not one I am going to pretend fills me with joy.

I finished the book some time ago, and what I find myself remembering most is how lonely it is. For all its scale, its cleverness and its exhausting abundance, Infinite Jest is full of people trying to get away from themselves, sometimes through ambition, sometimes through addiction, sometimes simply through distraction. Every so often, someone manages to make another person stay where they are for a little longer. Those are the moments that have stayed with me. For all Wallace's intelligence, all the structural games and all those pages that made me wonder whether I had entirely lost the thread, that is the part of Infinite Jest that seems to me the most worth carrying away.