The book, which launches the reader into its semi-dystopian world without really explaining its conditions or origins, requires monumental focus to even loosely follow, as it leaps between perspectives and locations, laughing in the face of stylistic continuity. They are all somehow tied to the destiny of the Incandenza family and its youngest son, Hal, a tennis prodigy who, before the novel begins, finds his father’s body after a microwave-based suicide. Set in a North America of what was, in 1996, the near future, the novel follows a breathtaking number of characters. It is the Gen-X Ulysses that even those like me, who consider themselves DFW superfans, are nervous to attempt, many preferring to feed their devotion with his essays and short stories. Last year, having never progressed beyond the book’s first chapter, I decided to mark this occasion with a personal commitment: by midnight on its birthday, I would give up membership to the ordinary world, and join the club of determined readers who have made it to the end of the novel.Īt more than 1,000 pages – with copious footnotes – Infinite Jest is a famously difficult read. T he first of February saw the 20th anniversary of a work considered by many to have changed the rules of fiction: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
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