Brilliant and polarizing, David Foster Wallace wrote one of the defining novels of the ’90s. Three decades later, what does it say about who we are?

The 1990s was the decade when history ended. At least that was Francis Fukuyama’s provocative thesis in “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992), in which he interpreted recent events in the Soviet Union and China as a sign of liberalism’s world-historical triumph over communism.
Yet the cultural mood — captured by albums like Nirvana’s “Nevermind” (1991) and Leonard Cohen’s “The Future” (1992) — was angsty, gloomy, an unstable mix of ennui and rage. The fall of communism seemed to have made capitalism even more vapid and voracious. When, in 1997, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, starred in a Pizza Hut commercial, it seemed less like history had reached its rational conclusion and more like it had sat down at random and begun devouring itself.
“Infinite Jest” (1996), David Foster Wallace’s 1,000-page magnum opus, is above all an attempt to grapple with this malaise and its implications for human happiness. The novel takes place in the near future, when the Gregorian calendar has run its course and been replaced by “subsidized time,” with each year hosted by a new corporate sponsor: Year of the Whopper, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken. As a result of its uncontrollable consumerism, the “U.S. of A.” has begun a policy of “experialism,” off-loading a handful of northern states onto Canada to be used as a country-sized dump called the Great Concavity. (A year after “Infinite Jest,” Don DeLillo’s “Underworld” would also take up the theme of “waste management.”)
The novel’s plot, such as it is, orbits around various attempts to track down the master copy of “the Entertainment,” an underground film so compelling that anyone who sees it is helpless to do anything but keep watching. (A group of “wheelchair assassins” from Quebec want to use it as a weapon of mass destruction.) The “cartridge” is of course a potent symbol for the way we find ourselves increasingly beholden to whatever keeps our attention: in the 1990s, Wallace had TV in mind above all, but the internet and its ever-more-addictive permutations have only deepened the point.
But “the Entertainment” is also in important respects the anti-“Infinite Jest,” the original title of which was “A Failed Entertainment.” “The Entertainment” requires so little of its viewers that they melt into a puddle of psychic mush. Wallace’s novel, by contrast, works hard to delay the reader’s gratification, most notoriously by including more than 100 pages of footnotes — but also by inundating the reader with hundreds of minor characters, rafts of all-but-obsolete words, and exhaustingly specific descriptions of fictional technologies. “Infinite Jest” creates a richly textured tedium that is meant to teach us to attend to the infinitely detailed world around us. It’s meant to be the antithesis of sitting slack-jawed in front of a screen.
If this all sounds moralizing, it often is. One reviewer of Wallace’s last novel, “The Pale King,” wrote that “Wallace’s intellectual sophistication and prowess were entwined with a moral and social simplicity that feels almost childlike.”
But it’s nevertheless worth trying to figure out what Wallace was up to, if only because the novel has meant so much to so many people. It’s likely that blend of erudition and moral earnestness that made Wallace so attractive to a generation of listless young people.
While the previous generation of postmodern giants like Thomas Pynchon were content to bewilder all but their most brilliant readers, Wallace seemed sincerely to want to be understood. He wanted connection, however awkward. As a character in one of his short stories put it, love is getting your fingers through the holes in the other person’s mask, and who cares how you do it.
For Wallace, this connection is what’s missing. People at the end of history have become self-centred and ironic to the point of nihilism. They’ve put too much trust in what the early-American theologian Roger Williams called “the great god Self.” In their devotion to this god, they’ve slowly drained the world around them of meaning. They can’t seem to take themselves or anyone else seriously, and so they willingly lose themselves in entertainment, or sport (large chunks of the novel take place at an elite tennis academy), or incredibly narrow technical pursuits. Wallace’s goal is to draw us out of ourselves.
But draw us out into what? Marathe, one of the wheelchair assassins, accuses Americans of having forgotten the fundamental fact that everyone must worship at one or another temple, and that some temples do more to enlarge our hearts than others. Here Marathe sounds a lot like Wallace in his famous 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College: “There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships.” Yet patriotism of the kind Marathe advocates for seems impossible when the state has become, in another character’s words, “not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears.” Who could devote themselves to that?
Maybe love offers a way out. In his commencement speech, Wallace suggests that we might get out of our “tiny, skull-sized kingdoms” by dedicating ourselves to others, by committing “to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways.” This way out is modelled in “Infinite Jest” by a recovering addict “the size of a young dinosaur” named Don Gately, who finds a kind of salvation in the various platitudes pushed by his recovery programs. Gately is contrasted with the novel’s other main protagonist, the tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza, whose debilitating brilliance slowly isolates him from the rest of the world until he literally can no longer make himself understood.
Thirty years on, Wallace’s intensely personal solution to the problem of modern happiness seems partly the product of a misguided fatalism about politics. It no longer seems to us that we live at the end of history. This is scary insofar as the consumerist liberal regimes Wallace found so stultifying now seem like the last bastion against authoritarian nationalism, but it’s also liberating: it no longer feels like the liberal state congealed once and for all in the early ‘90s. It has started to feel again as if the state can be more than a sloppy intersection of desires and fears.
Even so, there’s a deeper problem with Wallace’s insistence that we all need to worship something, the more heart-enlarging the better. It’s with the language of worship itself. Like Fukuyama, Wallace seems to have thought that reason had run its course by the ‘90s. But Wallace thought reason had culminated in the self-indulgent pyrotechnics of the postmodern novel. Reason had revealed itself as the engine driving us further and further into ourselves. So we had to abdicate our reason in favour of worship, in favour of the kind of platitudinous dogmas that saved Don Gately from himself.
This kind of vilification of the intellect seems more like another dead end than a way out. Rather than settling the question of how we ought to live once and for all through an act of selfless devotion, we might choose instead to keep the question alive, to apply ourselves to it in full awareness of our inability to answer it definitively. terrorist Marathe is right that “you are what you love,” it seems all the more urgent to think about what we love, to find out what other people love and to try to understand why.
“Infinite Jest” remains a fascinating act of rebellion against what one of its characters calls the “only public consensus” left: that we must all commit ourselves to the unswerving pursuit of a “flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.” But for all its gargantuan efforts, the novel remains stuck in that strange decade at the end of history.