Book of a lifetime: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

From The Independent archive: Nat Segnit tackles David Foster Wallace’s hallucinatory exploration of 21st century addiction

His style is so relaxed, and so sparsely punctuated, that the eye speeds past phrases another writer might have cushioned in commas (Getty)

For all David Foster Wallace’s formidable and, to a bunch of woolly humanities graduates, estrangingly mathematical intelligence, when my friends and I first read Infinite Jest about a year after it came out in 1996, we felt the instantaneous devotee’s delusion of ownership.

This guy was ours. Here was a way of writing that restored to literary English the crackle of contemporaneity it lacked, absorbing the registers of psychotherapy and street slang and hard-core analytic maths into a style that might have sagged under the weight of its own syntactic ambition had it not been underwritten, always, by Wallace’s whistle-bright logical clarity, comic inventiveness and unexpected largeness of heart.

When, a few years later, I began to write myself, it took a conscious effort to wean myself off the rhythms and loop-the-loop habits of mind of a writer to whom, judging by my concave-spined and painstakingly sellotaped copy of Infinite Jest, I had perhaps become a little addicted.