Forget its reputation as a performative read for a certain breed of intense young man, thirty years after its publication, David Foster Wallace’s epic novel still delivers, says the Crying in H Mart author
I
’m not what you might consider Infinite Jest’s target demographic. The novel’s reputation precedes it as a book infamously few ever finish, and those who do tend to belong to a particular breed of college-age guys who talk over you, a sect of pedantic, misunderstood young men for whom, over the course of 30 years, Infinite Jest has become a rite of passage, much as Little Women or Pride and Prejudice might function for aspiring literary young women.
Most readers come to the novel in their formative years, but I was a late bloomer. It wasn’t until the winter of 2023 that, at the age of 34, smoking outside a party in Brooklyn, I found myself suddenly motivated to embark on the two-pound tome. A boy I knew from high school brought it up, and as I happened at the time to have developed a casual interest in those works one might attribute to the “lit-bro” canon (Bret Easton Ellis, Hemingway, etc), it seemed the appropriate time to take it on.
It’s difficult to pin down what exactly constitutes this canon beyond the readership that tends to gravitate toward it, and by extension the readership it repels, but its defining feature seems to be the centering of male loneliness. A male protagonist, isolated and misunderstood, stands at odds with social norms and expectations and either grapples internally to critique them or identifies the source of ideology and seeks violent revenge against it. The spaces these works operate in are largely male-dominated – war zones, finance offices, fight clubs. They are largely accessible on a stylistic level and deeply familiar on a psychological one and, as such, have proven popular mainstream fare – massive bestsellers, ripe for adaptation, often critically championed besides. In recent years, the backlash against such success, carried out online and in other public discourse, and the backlash against that backlash have done as much as any single intrinsic commonality to create the perception of similitude throughout the canon.
