David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest is an interconnected sequence of events, told out of timeline order that focuses on addiction in all its forms. Whether it’s drugs, sex, or fame, the novel’s primary goal is to examine the need for these addictions and show that it is possible to addicted to addiction itself.

It is a vast and sprawling novel whose challenge is not in the mere heft of 981 pages plus another 100 pages of endnotes.

Set in a near future in which the U.S., Mexico, and Canada have become unified as one country known as the Organization of North American Nations, the book is concerned with the dissemination of a film cartridge that is so powerfully entertaining and addictive to watch that it renders its viewers incapable of any action other than repeated viewing, until eventually they die of dehydration.

The film’s director, J.O. Incandenza is a key figure in the novel, as is his Canadian wife, Avril, and their three sons, Orin, Hal, and Mario, all of whom spend their formative years at the prestigious Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA), founded by the Incandenza’s themselves in Boston.

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.

Wallace assembles a vast and heartbreaking cast of drug addicts and alcoholics of every stripe appear on the streets of Boston. Many of these individuals, besides being hopelessly addicted to substances, suffer from clinical depression, a condition with which Wallace himself struggled, and many of the characters in Infinite Jest have gruesome back stories of misuse at the hands of family members.

Wallace is so painstakingly detailed and accurate in his depiction of the insanity of the disease of addiction as well as the white-knuckled, exposed-nerve roller coaster of early recovery as to make the experience transportive and visceral to the reader.

Drugs and alcohol are not the only vehicles through which Wallace’s characters attempt escape. Sex, love, success and entertainment offer alternative routes. This notion of escape from life is in fact a central theme in the novel. Even the tennis prodigies at ETA are seen as delaying their own lives in the pursuit of athletic prowess whose ultimate goal is "the show,” the professional tennis circuit.

The title is a sly wink at the book’s massive girth—it’s 1,000-plus pages in most editions. There are, beside the challenge of the length of the novel, some stylistic challenges too. There are frequent references to endnotes throughout the novel. In an interview with Charlie Rose (on PBS), Wallace characterized their use as a method of disrupting the linearity of the text while maintaining some sense of narrative cohesion. Acronyms are another signature device in Wallace’s work and are used frequently within the novel.

Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction, features a huge cast and multilevel narrative, and questions essential elements of American culture - our entertainments, our addictions, our relationships, our pleasures, our abilities to define ourselves. Ironically, Wallace himself who had suffered from severe depression for most of his life committed suicide in 2008.

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