Infinite Jest

The Enfield Tennis Academy and Ennet House

Infinite Jest is organized around two institutions that face each other, literally and thematically, across a hillside in Boston. The Enfield Tennis Academy is a school for prodigiously talented young players whose excellence requires the near-total suppression of the self: to play tennis at the highest level is to become a machine of controlled response, to eliminate the interiority that gets in the way of the shot. The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House sits at the foot of the same hill and is full of people learning the opposite lesson — that the self they have been protecting and feeding and soothing with substances is precisely the problem, that recovery requires surrendering the ego that addiction was built around.

At the center of the academy are the Incandenzas. Hal is a sixteen-year-old tennis prodigy of extraordinary ability who has secretly been smoking marijuana since childhood and who, in the novel’s opening scene set years later, finds himself unable to communicate with the university officials interviewing him, producing only animal sounds when he tries to speak. His father James Incandenza was a filmmaker and optical physicist who created the film called Infinite Jest before killing himself by putting his head in a microwave. His brother Orin plays football professionally and seduces women compulsively. His gentle, physically unusual brother Mario makes documentary films and is perhaps the novel’s only character with uncomplicated access to feeling. The Incandenza family is the novel’s emotional centre: a portrait of a brilliant, damaged American family in which achievement and annihilation have become indistinguishable.

The Entertainment and the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

The novel’s satirical architecture is one of Wallace’s most audacious inventions. In the near-future Infinite Jest depicts, years are no longer numbered but named by their corporate sponsors: the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, the Year of the Whopper, the Year of Glad. The United States, Canada, and Mexico have merged into the Organization of North American Nations, and New England has been turned into a giant toxic waste dump called the Great Concavity, gifted to Canada in a political maneuver the novel treats with deadpan absurdity.

Into this world, Wallace introduces the film called Infinite Jest — a work so perfectly entertaining, so precisely calibrated to the pleasure centres of the human brain, that anyone who watches it loses all desire to do anything else and eventually dies of self-neglect. A cell of Quebecois separatists called the Wheelchair Assassins is attempting to obtain the master cartridge and use it as a weapon against the American entertainment complex. The search for the film, and the various parties pursuing it, generates the novel’s plot — but Wallace is less interested in the thriller mechanics than in what the conceit reveals. The film that kills by entertaining is a literalization of Wallace’s argument about television, advertising, and the culture of distraction: that entertainment in America had become a system for providing the self with relief from itself, and that this system and addiction operated on identical logic. The satirical sections and the deeply realistic Ennet House sequences coexist in a deliberate friction, each making the other more legible.

Why the Footnotes Matter

The 388 endnotes in Infinite Jest — constituting 96 pages of additional text, some of which are themselves footnoted — are not a literary trick or a display of cleverness. They are a structural expression of the novel’s deepest concerns. Wallace was writing about minds that cannot stay on topic, about consciousness that perpetually sidetracks itself, about the impossibility of saying everything you need to say within the linear constraints of a page. The main text is the official story; the footnotes are the uncontrollable overflow, the parenthetical thoughts and qualifications and digressions that the official story cannot contain but cannot honestly exclude.

Wallace struggled throughout his life with severe depression and was in recovery from alcohol dependence during the years he wrote the novel. The Ennet House sequences carry the weight of that experience: they are written with a specificity and a lack of sentimentality about addiction and recovery that could only come from genuine knowledge. The novel’s continuing relevance is striking. Wallace completed Infinite Jest in 1995, before the smartphone, before social media, before the algorithmic optimization of attention. And yet his diagnosis — that a culture organized around entertainment and the relief of discomfort would produce a population incapable of sustaining genuine connection or tolerable consciousness — reads as prophecy. The novel is harder to dismiss now than it was when it was published, and that is not a comfortable thing to note.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — The most important American novel of its decade, and the one that most accurately predicted what was coming next.