What’s So Funny About Infinite Jest?

Standing beside a shelf of bestsellers with some friends at McNally Jackson Seaport in downtown Manhattan, Meg Charlton, a writer, recalled the time a man sat down next to her at a café, pulled out a copy of Infinite Jest, and opened it to page one. Her friends laughed—there was something humorous about the image, its sincerity and its hope—though, as her public defender husband, Alec Miran, mused a moment later, “How else do you start?”

How does one start Infinite Jest? In the year 2026, thirty years after its initial release, the book is a distinctive cultural object. It has been memed to oblivion, its author eulogized and criticized and transformed into an enormous posthumous celebrity. Infinite Jest has a reputation for being brilliant, transcendent, transformative, genius. But it’s also thought to be tricky, long, confusing, pretentious, unfashionably male, and embarrassing to read on the subway. “There’s that horrible joke: ‘If you go to a guy’s house and he has a copy of Infinite Jest, don’t fuck him,’ ” Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson, told me. “I profoundly disagree with that,” she added, laughing. To the contrary, she said, she finds the book quite “seductive.”

David Foster Wallace meant for the novel to pull readers in; he wanted, among other things, for people to like it. He said a few months after Infinite Jest came out that “a lot of the avant-garde has forgotten that part of its job is to seduce the reader into being willing to do the hard work,” and that he feared that people would find his new book gratuitously difficult. What Wallace can’t have intended or predicted, prescient as he was, is that in the 2010s the novel would crest into a sort of synecdoche for youthful chauvinism, a signifier so potent that it would threaten to overtake the book itself. Readers now seem eager to leave behind its “litbro” baggage, an artifact of the Twitter and Bernie Bro era, and to engage with this complicated, pleasurable novel on its own terms. People, my reporting suggests, are ready to be normal about Infinite Jest.

In my conversations over the past month with a couple dozen Infinite Jest readers, many of them young millennials cracking open the novel for the first time, a sense of wonder at the novel’s readability and poignancy emerged—a refrain of, We didn’t know it was this fun! As Hermione Hoby writes in a wonderful New Yorker essay, “Perhaps the greatest disjunction between the book’s reputation and its contents lies in the notion that it’s a pretentious slog no one could honestly enjoy.” Happily, it seems, more readers—beyond, as the tropes would have it, the toxic sophomore boy; the most patronizing guy in an M.F.A. program; the too-smart-for-their-own-good, aspiring-intellectual type who prizes information over human feeling—are lately turning to the novel, and loving it.

Infinite Jest follows a sprawling cast of characters as they deal with the crushing toll of being anxious, ambitious, lonely, brilliant, addicted, traumatized by generational pain, and, generally, human. Its heroes include Hal Incandenza, a teen genius–cum–tennis star, and Don Gately, a square-headed, kindhearted recovering Demerol addict working in a halfway house. Hal’s filmmaker father has recently killed himself in a gruesome fashion (in Wallace-speak, “demapped” himself), leaving behind a film so entertaining that it permanently incapacitates those who view it. This turns the family and its associates into people of interest to a set of wheelchair-bound, Quebecois-separatist terrorists in a speculative near-future version of North America (in Wallace-speak, the Organization of North American Nations, or onan). The novel is both deeply silly and dead serious; its structure, inspired by a type of fractal called a Sierpiński gasket, lets its author dip into the consciousnesses of a stream of characters, roving between perspectives and transcripts and film scenes and time and place (though most of the book takes place in Boston). Famously, much action plays out in the endnotes.

The novel holds obvious appeal to postadolescent boys, or to those concerned with issues that affect them: the major characters are male; they do drugs and live hard and thrash for meaning and play tennis and do injury to one another’s balls; there are lots of references to scat, vomit, and the male form. This is less of a “Dudes rock” novel than one about how dudes struggle, sometimes profoundly, against others and themselves. (“It is not one of our great feminist books,” McNally said, adding that it is also bad on race; its Black characters in particular read as caricatures and slurs recur.) (The leading women are, by the way, smoking hot.) But Wallace was concerned with the ecstasy and the banalities of a wide range of human experiences; that his ambition seems to have been nothing less than to comment on the nature of everything has made him both revered and ridiculed. We get to know the lengthy backstories of the many players, including minor ones—as the book insists, correctly, that each person’s life involves dear hopes and deep sorrows. Characters take seriously the pat slogans of AA, and they flirt with the idea that maybe platitudes really do have something to them; that taking things one day at a time can, for example, help.

A couple of recent events in Manhattan, both anniversary-pegged and not, have invited people to read and discuss the book in community. At a meeting of the Infinite Jest Fest reading group at McNally Jackson in mid-January, almost seventy people, many of them women in their thirties, gathered to talk about pages 396 through 508 and the relevant endnotes, passing page 480—the point at which Jay McInerney, in his New York Times review of Infinite Jest upon its publication, suggested he would be inclined to shoot Wallace if he were any less talented. To kick things off, after McNally welcomed everyone, people passed a microphone around and shared a favorite line from the section. Many gravitated toward funny lines—people read about “a kind of reverse-Buddhism, one of Total Worry”; about how Gately “had never once eaten broccoli or a pear until last year”; of “rampant, indiscriminate hugging.” As McNally told me, noting that any two pages of this novel could trigger an hour of discussion, “people remember different things, because the density of happenings per square centimeter is so high.”

The room was divided into small circles of folding chairs and couches; I sat in on a group of seven, an enthusiastic mix of writers and legal and tech professionals. There were a few true fans in the crowd—one person had a tattoo of the novel’s circular section dividers on his wrist, and his friend said she was reading the novel for the fourth time. But most were just now picking it up. In my circle of chairs, the conversation was sincere and unpretentious, focused on everyone’s reactions to what they had read. A gregarious lawyer who said she found the book hilarious added, a moment later, “I’m just gonna say it—it can also be extremely boring.” Someone brought up a theory she’d read: that flipping back and forth to the endnotes echoes the back-and-forth of playing tennis. “I thought he was just being an asshole,” another reader chimed in.

Over the course of the evening, I heard Infinite Jest compared to Love Actually, in that various storylines converge; to the Harry Potter series, in that much of it follows young people at a specialized boarding school; and to Lost, for reasons I didn’t totally follow, as I haven’t watched that show. The recent M.F.A. graduate Taryn Hendrix said that she envied the people who come to the book without knowing about the discourse surrounding it. “It’s such an earnest, heartfelt book. That’s been the biggest surprise,” she said.

Uptown, a couple of weeks later, Laura Miller, Deborah Treisman, Bennett Sims, and Greg Jackson convened for a panel about the book and its author at the 92nd Street Y. Treisman, who first published Wallace in the nineties in Grand Street, read a portion of a long email Wallace had sent quibbling with copyedits—evidence, she said, of his “obsessive commitment to his style.” Jackson recalled that, as a younger writer, “you almost didn’t want to admit” to adoring Wallace, in part because “it was almost this private, intimate feeling we all had with his work.” It would be like admitting he had the same poster as everyone else up in his room and that he “whispered to it at night,” he added. Sims, who studied under Wallace at Pomona, argued that the novel’s fearsome reputation is more about its size than about the contents: “None of its difficulties are line-level or stylistic. It’s not hard to read. It’s pure pleasure,” he said, recalling Wallace-the-professor’s emphasis on having mercy on readers. The audience seemed to agree.

In the lobby afterward, Megan Mitchell, a comedian who read Infinite Jest last year, said that, after hearing about it for so long, she was pleased to find how “good and normal” it was (she also tweeted from the event: “There’s legit so many hot men here”). Melissa Finley, a botanical-garden curator who admitted she learned about the event from a tweet reading “Finding my husband at this” (Mitchell was also behind that one), said that any sheepishness she’d had about attending had less to do with the book’s reputation than with fear of breaking her private communion with the characters, whom she thinks of as “my little friends.” Her friend Eleanor Wing, an art director, reflected that, since she read it in 2015, the discourse around the book has faded—Mitchell’s cheeky but affectionate posts aside—perhaps in part because people don’t read.

Still, many people who talk about Infinite Jest in public in 2026 do so with a reflexive self-awareness, an urge to signal that, yes, they know. Michelle Zauner, the writer and musician who performs as Japanese Breakfast, opens her foreword to the new thirtieth-anniversary edition by saying, “I’m not what you might consider Infinite Jest’s target demographic.” She writes that “I’m sure Little, Brown was aware of the slight incongruity of their selection, and perhaps hoped I might assist in assuaging the unfair, outsize connotations of what it means to be a David Foster Wallace reader, which, at its worst, has come to signify misogyny, and at its best, someone who’s just slightly annoying.” Zauner’s intro is brief and deft; after getting that bro stuff out of the way, she writes of how the novel rewards those who give it attention, and she nods at its almost freaky prescience about entertainment (Wallace basically predicts TikTok, Zoom culture, and Trump). But maybe ten years from now, whoever introduces the next edition can skip some of the discourse commentary and just get into the novel itself, in all its sincere, self-contained glory.

For all its kooky absurdity and formal inventiveness, Infinite Jest is also very interested in earnest effort and the fearsome work of approaching life head-on. There’s a passage I like that I think slyly signals the sincere nature of Wallace’s project: Gately, in his reflection on AA meetings and the stories people share, reflects that “the thing is it has to be the truth … It can’t be a calculated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic.”

Lora Kelley is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.