What is Infinite Jest about? The setting is an alternate history America that is wacky and largely established for comedic and thematic purposes, the plot matters even less and barely exists across 52.5 hours/1,100 pages but consists mostly of groups of people living their lives at an elite tennis academy and a drug/alcohol rehab facility, the characters matter a lot and many are very deep but there are a billion of them and their stories are told temporally out of order in a way that leaves you (the reader) often not understanding them until, like, 45 hours/800 pages into the book. The vast majority of chapters are devoted to describing characters in little snippets of their lives in ways that have some thematic relevance but usually no story relevance.
But Infinite Jest is also about is the rot of cynicism and the painful catharsis of earnestness and the trap of excessive entertainment potency and figuring out how to find meaning in giving your life to something.
It’s a lot, it’s confusing, sometimes it’s dumb, sometimes it doesn’t always work, but it’s impossible to read Infinite Jest and not recognize the late David Foster Wallace as some kind of genius. A sub-genius couldn’t write this. And although I was bored throughout significant chunks of the book, and although I think there is a half-way decent case that Infinite Jest would be better if you cut down 30-60% of it, I also found it brilliantly insightful, and it ended up resonating with me in a way books rarely do.
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So I’m going to try to extract the value I got from Infinite Jest by going over my understanding of its setting, plot, and themes to present them in the most condensed form possible to readers so they can hopefully get a significant portion of the value to be gleaned from the book without necessarily spending 52.5+ hours reading it.
Needless to say, FULL SPOILERS FOR Infinite Jest AHEAD, but I’ll also note the caveat that this is a book where the plot doesn’t really matter.
From the article:
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