David Foster Wallace - “Infinite Jest”

Wednesday, 3 December 2025 15:51

A modern classic, albeit requiring active participation and ultimately leaving (too?) many things unsaid. Some say liking this book makes you a douchebag. Fuck those people. They’re weak.

Let’s start with the highest level question: how it made me feel. The story arc is touching, some of the events depicted are shocking, a lot of it is just sad. But well worth it. DFW is a fantastic wordsmith and reading this humongous book was not a chore simply because he is so good at making irrelevant detail fun. When you read the book, it’s almost as if the main story is just background to the flowery language and vivid scenes DFW builds. If you don’t enjoy those, you’ll have trouble getting through the content. And you’ll miss the main story, which is powerful.

That main arc is both better and worse than I expected. There’s some incredibly smart writing there, and some of it cuts really deep. But since a lot is left for the reader to piece together, and large swaths of the content ultimately don’t push the story forward, this is no easy entertainment. But again, even when you’re inside a footnote to an end note, the lightness of the prose makes up for lack of action. DFW’s pen is very colourful, he writes with a sense of humour, even in some of the darkest places. Yes, he uses elaborate language that some judge as pretentious or show-offish. Fuck those people. They wish they could write like DFW.

I can’t tell you yet what the most lasting bits will be to future-me, but today-me can definitely see why the book is considered a masterpiece and the self-labeled “new sincerity” genre definitely fits the content. Addiction seems to be the main subject here, as the author spends the most time on it, and even the other story arcs revolve around it in one way or another. The clarity in which DFW talks about it is impressive, and helps with treating the subject matter seriously. It made an impression on me.

To an extent, I’m ambivalent about the somewhat retro-futuristic setting. The “future” of the 1996 book hits too close for comfort when it comes to the Organization of North American Nations, the “concavity” being a satirical take on environmental outsourcing, and the (timeless?) addiction content. But that futurism entirely misses the mark when it comes to video calls, physical media vs. cable TV and streaming, analog film recording, digital data sizes, computer specs, and so on. And stuff like a telescopic antenna on a cordless phone receiver puts the work firmly in the mid-1990s.

Normally I’d ignore those sorts of discrepancies through suspense of disbelief and acceptance of the world depicted being fictitious, but this time around it was harder than usual given the otherwise sincere narration and down-to-earth subject matter. Ironically then, you can treat my whining about the futurist misses in the book as an endorsement of the work.

Working through it

I started reading this in July and just finished on December 3rd 2025. I went with the 2024 audio book read by Sean Pratt ¹ as I imagined such a book can be a good companion for walks that I try to do daily. At first glance, simply going through a 65-hour audio book seemed like enough of a challenge, but then it turned out that the narrative structure is intentionally fractured and the copious end notes and footnotes add to the complexity. You need to pay attention. The fact that an audio book “reads itself” is an additional obstacle in this case. I used three separate websites with summaries and notes to help me along the way ². Doing this is part why I think I succeeded in the end.

65 hours of runtime is barely “6 seasons of a TV show with 10 episodes of 1 hour each”, and I’ve done more than that in a span of months. Also, given five walks per week, each one hour long, I could expect to be done in less than 4 months. And that’s what happened.

Thoughts after seeing “The End of the Tour”

There’s a low-budget 2015 movie that’s an adaptation of a 2010 book that’s a memoir by David Lipsky of a five-day 1996 interview with DFW that was never published in “Rolling Stone”. I was curious to see it, but I don’t necessarily recommend it (the movie, that is) ³.

Not 100% sure if we should trust quotes in the movie. Hell, even if they are faithful to Lipsky’s book, I’m not sure we should be trusting that guy either. But there’s some interesting thoughts ⁴ that resonate with the theme of “Infinite Jest”. I’ll paraphrase a few:

• in 1996, DFW predicts that in the future it will become more convenient and pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen. He was entirely right about that;
• at some point DFW says that at 28 he had this nihilistic spiritual crisis where he discovered what the Fight Club manifesto says (we were lied to, following the rules doesn’t lead to happiness). He claimed that this was both better (because of awareness) and worse (because it removed the will to function);
• passive consumption is annihilation, a kind of death-in-life. The pursuit of pleasure becomes its own prison;
• being part of “the Show” is powerfully seductive and can destroy a person’s raison d’être, replacing it with attention seeking. People deeply wish to be recognized and celebrated, but this leads to loss of independence.

Themes

“Infinite Jest” is many things, but if I was to risk summing it up in one word, that word would be “addiction”. In “The End of the Tour”, however, DFW says “it’s a fairly male book, it’s a fairly nerdy book about loneliness.” He says that young (under 45) people’s sadness “has something to do with pleasure and achievement and entertainment, like a sort of emptiness at the heart of what they thought was going on”.

And fair enough, this seems to be on his mind. But it didn’t strike me as the theme of the book. Rather, it’s clear DFW cares about the issue of the hedonic treadmill. In fact, he’s scared not just of the meaninglessness of the hedonic pursuit, but also fears that modern life provides too much pleasure too easily, further contributing to the treadmill effect. We’re still deeply dissatisfied, but it only gets us spinning in the hamster wheel faster and faster. That’s why, as the book mentions at some point, you can get addicted to anything.

Another theme that plays a major role in “Infinite Jest” is the parent-child relationship. In the stories DFW chose to paint, none of the relationships I can recall were healthy. It seems like each one was dysfunctional in some way, mostly due to the parent’s mental state or living situation leaving (lots) to be desired. Failing their children, the parents leave them scarred and broken, furthering the chain of misery. Parental damage propagates through generations.

Even in cases where people don’t flat out hurt each other in “Infinite Jest”, they often can’t (or won’t?) communicate. They seem to talk past each other even during long conversations, they don’t react to each other’s cues, they ignore each other’s questions. It’s pretty jarring to experience those dialogues, to the point where I wanted to interrupt the characters and ask them to communicate more clearly and openly with each other. To not just say their parts, but to listen and respond. I guess my reaction is literally what DFW wanted the readers to do. To not be passive consumers.

This communication collapse, as well as sets of conflicting information across the book, makes me wonder whether any narrators in the book can be trusted. For a book so hell-bent on sincerity, it’s surprising to see how suspicious it made me.

Spoiler-free review ends here

I have some thoughts on the actual events and themes. Those will be meaningless if you haven’t read the book, and at worst harmful to your own reading enjoyment.

DFW as JOI

The book was clearly made as a sincere attempt at forcing readers to engage, to become active. It’s not meant to be a deliberately ironic epitome of graphomania as some seem to suspect. The book itself made that obvious to me, but seeing “The End of the Tour” only enforced this opinion. DFW really cared about that.

This sincerity of intent is similar to JOI’s work on the namesake entertainment for his son.

I understand the circumstances of DFW’s suicide and the reasons for it are much different from the JOI character in the book. I get that real life tragedy cannot be equated with a piece of fiction. The symmetry of outcome is poignant, though.

Connecting the dots of the plot

Years

We know the years exactly, because November 20 YDAU was a Friday. So that’s 2009 and therefore the chronology is:

• 2002 - Whopper
• 2003 - Tucks Medicated Pad
• 2004 - Trial-Size Dove Bar
• 2005 - Perdue Wonderchicken
• 2006 - Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
• 2007 - Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile
• 2008 - Products from the American Heartland
• 2009 - Depend Adult Undergarment
• 2010 - Glad

There’s a popular chronological reading guide that I might follow during a second reading.

So, JOI was born in 1950. Orin was born in 1983. Mario was born in May 1991. Hal was born in October 1992. JOI killed himself in 2004.

Joelle

As with many details in the book, it’s not entirely clear whether we should trust the account of Molly Notkin as to how Joelle’s face was disfigured (or “deformed” as in “the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed"). Or in fact whether it is disfigured at all. Most readers probably want Joelle to be fine, but whether that makes it true in the world of the book is another matter.

Personally, I think it’s a more impactful interpretation to have Joelle van Dyne hide behind her veil due to her being objectified rather than scarred with acid. That also fits the power of the irresistible Entertainment.

Disguise

It seems that the author suggests that technology allowing people to disguise their identity got really advanced in the world of the book. Maybe as a side effect of the videocall privacy phenomenon he describes ⁵, or as military technology turned commercially-available product? Hugh Steeply fooled many people, including me, for an embarrassingly long time during my read. And it seems Orin was fooled all the way through, and was really into “Helen” Steeply. So this opens up questions about whether Avril was Luria Perec. That’s an anagram of “Auril Creep”.

However, the filmography end note for “Dial C For Concupiscence” describes events where (a person that’s very much like) Avril was mistaken for the another one (that would have been Luria) in an assassination attempt. A lot of JOI’s work was autobiographical. Marathe/Steeply discuss both women addressing them separately. Additionally, while masks in the book can work well enough for conversation, I doubt they’d be good enough for “contact sports”. After all, Hal recognizes his masked father as the “conversationalist” in part due to the mask imperfections. So it seems the masks are not really that robust. It would also explain why the hideously deformed don’t wear masks but rather veil themselves, which is a much less high-tech solution.

In the end, I think that the imperfect anagram is meant to hint at Orin’s oedipal sexual preferences rather than suggest a literal equivalence of persons. I’m also doubtful that Molly’s rumors about Avril abusing Orin in childhood are true given the practical parenthood of her other two boys that we observe in practice in the book. Sure, Avril had John Wayne dress up as a football player, which muddles the waters somewhat.

The missing events

Yeah, I guess leaving crucial stuff out was a way for the author to encourage engaging with the content, to become active. And given how much discourse about the book can be found online (including literal whole-ass books written about the book), I’d say he was successful at that. The reviews on GoodReads average to a pretty high 4.25/5, also supporting the notion that the effort was a success.

In interviews DFW opined that the book leaves enough “parallel lines” for the reader to project where the story went after the last page. This is plausible as the way the events are ordered throughout the book makes it loopable after you finish. When you come back to Chapter 1, you’re now in the future, so you can connect the dots of “before” and “after” and figure out what fits in-between. And while you can’t be sure whether that’s indeed what happened, well, with DFW you can’t be sure even about the stuff that he explicitly spells out (like the Molly Notkin revelations).

Personally, I think the amount of uncertainty left in the book is excessive and requires some leaps of faith and personal judgment calls as the “parallel lines” are either too thin, or in fact not parallel enough to say for certain. And there’s conflicting information in the book in quite a few cases. This makes it somewhat frustrating to disentangle the truth, especially if you assume DFW used the Chekhov’s gun rule where no facts would be throwaway facts.

It’s surprisingly poignant that one of the most popular explanations of what happens at the end of the book is by Aaron Swartz (yes, this Aaron Swartz): Infinite Jest ending explained. I mostly agree with his reading, but things aren’t actually as 100% clear:

• Hal eating mold in childhood is a likely reason for his robotic behavior ("inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows");
• JOI was the only person to notice Hal’s robotic interior and tried to get to him through conversation and entertainments;
• there’s strong evidence it was Orin sending out copies of the entertainment to enemies of his late father. He sends out suspicious snail mail as he tells Hal in a phone call and at least one copy was sent from AZ where he lives. The filmography end note literally says “privately distributed by Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited through posthumous provisions in the filmmaker’s will”, but that doesn’t rule out Orin was the one doing the deed. He didn’t even need to copy the material himself, maybe there were enough copies left. He didn’t need to dig the skull out for the master;
• the wraith is JOI, that’s clear enough, and he must be able to perform telekinesis around ETA as evidenced by the tennis ball during Hal vs Stice;
• Gately is recovering from the infection, him seeing the sea in the final scene isn’t death;

DMZ

I’m entirely torn on whether Hal’s toothbrush was dosed with DMZ (by the wraith or Lyle) or he synthesizes DMZ himself due to the eaten mold as a child. Either way, the effects starting on Nov 20 YDAU are visible beyond doubt. By the time Hal and Gately dig up JOI’s skull and Hal tells G they were “Too Late”, he is essentially mute. Sure, on Nov 19 YDAU, Hal noticed a woman at the gas station recoiling at his facial expression, which he couldn’t explain, but this might have been marijuana withdrawal.

What I do know is DMZ was not invented by JOI. It wasn’t spelled out in the novel and it would have been very unlikely given JOI’s profession.

Conclusion

If you’re still reading those notes on “Infinite Jest” without having read the book first, I’m not sure what to tell you. You spoiled lots of it for yourself.

And if you already know the source material, then I don’t have to recommend it. Either you liked it yourself, or you didn’t.

So in the end all that’s left to do is to say whether I personally liked it. It’s a hard question. The writing style is fantastic. The scenes are so vivid. The characters are complex and believable. The story is moving. At the same time, I don’t feel the humongous volume of the book is entirely justified. I also don’t feel like I needed to bear witness to every shocking thing it depicted. But I do expect that I will re-read the book. It was definitely worth getting through it in 2025. I keep thinking about it.

It’s somewhat surprising that while I didn’t like “The End of the Tour” as a movie, I do feel like it completed the loop of the book for me in a way that the book itself couldn’t. Obviously, the movie wouldn’t exist without the book. But to me it’s almost like the book isn’t that good and impactful without the movie.

#Books