Debunking the myth of the toxic ‘Infinite Jest bro’

Thirty years after publication, David Foster Wallace’s 1996 opus remains a seismic literary achievement, writes Louis Chilton. Anyone complaining about its readership is fixating on the wrong thing

David Foster Wallace, the late author of ‘Infinite Jest’, a book that’s many contradictory things: self-aware and indulgent, thoughtful and ostentatious, sentimental and nasty, deeply personal and completely abstracted (Getty)

There are few books that carry quite so much baggage as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The 1,079-page tome is a sprawling, indulgent, prescient, imaginative and altogether utterly idiosyncratic novel, about things both vast and specific: media consumption, drug addiction, political subversion, and the punishing demands of junior tennis. Today, 30 years after its publication, and more than 17 years after Wallace’s death by suicide at the age of 46, Infinite Jest remains one of the 20th century’s most noteworthy literary achievements. But then again, I would say this. I am a man.

The association of Wallace’s book with a certain brand of insufferable male reader – “lit bro” is sometimes the term used – dates back to the early days of Jest’s reception. Even during his lifetime, Wallace acknowledged the gender disparity in his readership. “What I’ve noticed at readings, is that the people who seem most enthusiastic and moved by [Infinite Jest] are young men,” he told interviewer David Lipsky during the Infinite Jest book tour. “Which I guess I can understand – I think it’s a fairly male book, and I think it’s a fairly nerdy book.”

“Nerdy” isn’t really the half of it, but then what word can sum up a book like this? At a glance, Infinite Jest explores the tangentially connected lives of a web of drug addicts, an emotionally dissociative tennis prodigy, and an arthouse movie so entertaining that everyone who watches it dies in a state of transfixed catatonia. It’s not so much nerdy, as deeply, confoundingly involved. And it’s not merely young men who have supposedly monopolised discussion around Infinite Jest, but a particular type of young man: the abrasive poseur. It is the kind of book, after all, that inspired The 1975’s preening, problematic frontman Matty Healy to name a song after a line from it (2018’s “Surrounded by Heads and Bodies”).

It’s remarkable that a book this long and experimental still merits discussions outside of niche literary circles; as literary phenomena go, ‘Infinite Jest’ is a complete aberration

The thing is – ignoring the fact that many women have also read and enjoyed Infinite Jest, and the argument is, on some level, compromised from the ground up – this line of criticism ultimately has little to do with the book itself. Infinite Jest as a text is hardly what you would consider bro-lit. Its size and difficulty make it hard to even talk about, except at length and in considerable detail. It’s a book that’s many contradictory things: self-aware and indulgent, thoughtful and ostentatious, sentimental and nasty, deeply personal and completely abstracted. Perhaps it is because it’s so hard to reduce to a quick and digestible “take” that criticisms of the novel have so often focused on its readership.

The sheer size of Infinite Jest is often used as a cudgel against it – the idea that a 1,100-page novel is not just bloated and unnecessary, but also probably an act of barely disguised phallic symbolism. It’s a line of argument you hear with a lot of long books authored by men – from Ulysses to Gravity’s Rainbow – and one that extends to other forms of art, such as movies. (Martin Scorsese is someone who has drawn specious accusations of macho maximalism over the protracted runtimes of his films. Christopher Nolan, too.) But to suggest that length, even great, unwieldy length, is an inherent flaw, is a blinkered notion indeed; part of the joy of a book like Infinite Jest lies in the ambition, and to bemoan its length is to wish it to be a whole other thing entirely. And of course, the conflation of length with male excess fails to account for the women who have penned similarly extravagant endeavours. No one is suggesting that Middlemarch was written to compensate for anything.

There is also, it has to be said, a degree of anti-intellectualism surrounding the Infinite Jest discourse. Over the past couple of decades, conventional snobberies around literature have, to some extent, dissipated, and the culture has shifted to a “let people enjoy things” approach. Whether you’re reading Mrs Dalloway or Heated Rivalry, it’s generally agreed that the important thing is the act of reading itself. But this permissiveness often frays in the other direction. To read something trivial is to simply have fun, but to read something too hard? Well, that has to be performative. But even if men were reading Infinite Jest as a sort of flaunt, is that not still an enriching use of their time? There are far less edifying ways to peacock. At a time when every study of reading habits suggests that men are being left in the mud, literarily speaking, it’s unhelpful to attach stigma to any book that seems to inspire genuine enthusiasm for the written word.

Infinite Jest is not without its problematic elements, especially concerning Wallace’s dubious estimation of Black vernacular. Allegations around Wallace’s private life, which include claims of abuse by his former partner, the writer Mary Karr, are also not to be taken lightly, and have likely contributed to the book’s reputation as a favourite of toxic men. Separation of art and artist is its own unresolvable debate, not to be litigated here – but it’s worth noting that some of the backlash against the book is on moral grounds.

Wallace reads selections of his writing during the New Yorker Magazine Festival in 2002 (Getty)

In any case, Infinite Jest seems built to weather its flaws. Thirty years after publication, its status as a modern classic – proclaimed by many the moment it was out – has only ossified. It’s remarkable that a book this long and experimental still merits discussions outside of niche literary circles; as literary phenomena go, Infinite Jest is a complete aberration.

A few weeks ago, unrelated to the anniversary, a friend of mine began reading the novel for the first time, and has been leaving me a succession of five-minute-long voice memos. Maybe this counts as obnoxious “lit bro” behaviour. I’m probably ill-placed to judge. But I’ve relished the chance to revisit the bizarre world Wallace conjures up.

In a recent message, he spoke about the wider context of Wallace’s career, and Infinite Jest’s peculiar place in it. Wallace’s early fiction writing was defined by a fiddly archness – works such as The Broom of the System (his first novel), and the short story collection Girl with Curious Hair, do not have Infinite Jest’s narrative conviction – while Wallace’s post-Jest opus, the dense, opaque and unfinished The Pale King, seemed to bristle against the limitations of what a novel even is.

“[Wallace] has to resort to endnotes and various intrusive authorial tricks,” said my friend, “but Infinite Jest is the one time when it seems as though his ability as a writer matches his belief in the possibility of fiction writing. And that, I suppose, is the beauty of it.”

Then, an endnote of his own: “And I’m only 350 pages in.”