The Oakland Review Archival Blog

Blog posts from graduated members of the editorial staff.

February 13, 2025

Why You Should Try Reading Infinite Jest

By Jack Kiggins

On average, people are awake for 900 minutes a day. Nowadays, kids in the United States devote about a third of that time to devices, spending roughly 270 minutes on weekdays glued to screens. From 2003 to 2023, face-to-face socializing has taken a nosedive — particularly for unmarried individuals and those without a high school diploma. During COVID, time spent inside skyrocketed due to quarantine mandates; yet this tendency to remain at home has persisted since 2020. There is a rapidly increasing number of opportunities for engagement with technology, which pulls us away from each other and the world.

This data comes from Derek Thompson and Max Guther’s recent article in The Atlantic, entitled, “The Anti-Social Century.” Throughout, they make light of how our society is evolving in response to our devices; innovations such as webcamming and artificial intelligence have altered the world to a point where we can, and frequently do, derive entertainment in solitude. Complete isolation is a possibility, and, for some, a habit.

Infinite Jest, a novel by David Foster Wallace, addresses this idea of total solitary absorption in one of its subplots; a character’s father is a diligent filmmaker and created as his opus a film so engaging that anyone watching becomes completely engrossed in it. Viewers lose all regard for the world and slowly decay before the screen, watching and rewatching the film ad nauseam.

Interestingly, Infinite Jest precedes our current affair with technology by about twenty years, having been first published in 1996. One of the most prophetic works from Wallace’s library, the novel takes a critical look at the state of consumerism in the United States, satirizing our obsession with products and novelty. Take, as an example, the chapters of Infinite Jest, which are each devoted to a particular year. Yet years in this dystopian world have been commodified and sold to the highest bidder — what would be “2009,” for instance, is the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.” Others include “Year of the Whopper” and “Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar.”

The plot dives more deeply into American cultural identity, following a wide array of characters, principal among which being Hal Incandenza and Don Gately. The former is a student at Enfield Tennis Academy in Massachusetts, struggling to cope with the pressures of academia and competitive sport. The latter, Gately, is a recovering narcotics addict at a halfway house in the same area as the Enfield Academy, surrounded by a cast of characters at different stages of the recovery process. Undoubtedly, it’s grim; but Wallace intersperses moments of wry commentary to create a balance between clever humor and heavy emotional hits.

Fundamentally, Infinite Jest is a story about pleasure and the paths we take to achieve it; there are the unparalleled highs and cavernous lows of competition, the immediacy and subsequent fallout of drug abuse, the dangers of overindulgence. Understanding why and how we seek the pleasures that we do is one of the great philosophical questions and a defining element of what makes us human.

If you enjoy dystopian fiction, this book could certainly be up your alley. Its plotline is non-linear and fragmented, with chapters told from different perspectives that lack a real sense of singularity — we learn so much about so many places and people that keeping yourself grounded in one of them can be tricky. Some stories merge, others remain separate, creating moments of intersection here and there.

One of my personal favorite traits of the book is Wallace’s unique use of language, as he throws neologism after neologism at you in quick succession. I’m a huge fan of authors getting creative with language, molding it to fit their story and add depth for the reader, and I think Wallace does an excellent job of that here. If you decide to read and want to learn more about the diction, there is a website — infinitejest.wallacewiki.com — with annotations for every page. I relied on it quite a bit.

Those ideas aside, it is long. Roughly a thousand pages in total, footnotes included (yes, there are footnotes). There are countless videos and essays on the internet trying to answer the question of whether or not you should read this book, and, despite having reviewed several of them, I’m not sure there’s a clear answer.

There are plenty of arguments in favor of reading Infinite Jest simply because it’s one of the great American novels. However, I would argue that its significance extends slightly deeper than that. It is certainly long, and occasionally tedious; at points, I, myself, thought Wallace could have taken a red pen and trimmed some of the detail. But the story itself is worth a read for its relevance alone, as we try to answer many of the same questions driving the book’s characters. Given our evolving relationship with technology, it’s valuable to ask ourselves how we truly want to be entertained with the time that we have.