Infinite Jest at 30, New Yorker

Hermione Hoby has a piece in the New Yorker this month called “Infinite Jest has turned 30. Have we forgotten how to read it?” I recommend people go read it if they’ve ever seen Infinite Jest on someone’s bookshelf and thought “that’s a funny looking bible,” or “what kind of dictionary is that,” or “oh that kind of reader lives here,” or “when will I ever have time to read a thousand page book, must be nice,” or “I bet they’ve never actually read it.”

I read Infinite Jest and I did enjoy it but, unlike Hoby, probably won’t read it again. I was 22 when I started it and 23 — almost 24 — when I finished it. I remember feeling a sense of accomplishment when I finally finished it. The book itself is almost like a game. It’s not a book you can sit down and read for 20 minutes before bed, because you might, in the middle of a paragraph, be taken to an endnote that is the entirety of a Hal Incandenza essay for his English class at Enfield Tennis Academy.

I think this is why Hoby’s essay resonated so well with me. The book’s physicality is a rhetorical act. It represents a challenge to readers to engage deeply with culture, to read fiction and do it by putting your whole self in the book. It wasn’t easy in 1996, and it hasn’t gotten easier with the likes of TikTok, Instagram, X (and twitter before it), etc. With Infinite Jest, DFW says to readers: Here. I made this book specifically to train you to break free of those attention sinks. Someone who needs that liberation is the kind of person who should consider reading Infinite Jest or, as Hoby notes, any of a number of others that approach the same literary challenge.

The ICYMI podcast had an episode recently on “Friction-maxxing,” a term I kind of dig. I guess? The idea is you intentionally make it harder to use social media or other attention sucking brain rot sources. (I use Wisconsin company Brick‘s gadget to do this.) If Friction-maxxing is something you aspire to, Infinite Jest might be a good challenge. You don’t have time for TikTok or Facebook or Bluesky. You need to know what’s going on with Don Gately, Hal, and whether the Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents will get their hands on The Entertainment!

PS: For fun, here’s a photo of me reading the book in a park in South Korea in 2009, one hand holding the place for the endnotes.