in defense & criticism of Infinite Jest
Oct. 16th, 2025 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
f0rrestI recently read some pretty harsh criticism of Infinite Jest on a random blog, and I wanted to talk about it. The person, whom I'll call Bob for the sake of anonymity, claims he didn't hate the book, but I would say, from my reading, that he did in fact hate the book. And that's fine. Infinite Jest is easy to hate. The question is, does he hate the book for the right reasons?
The art of evaluating criticism is a tricky slippery slope because criticism is often a highly subjective thing. One person's criticism might be another person’s praise. It often comes down to stylistic, aesthetic preferences. Etc. But some criticism is just flat-out stupid. For example, some people dislike The Catcher in the Rye because Holden Caulfield is “insufferable” or “immature” or whatever, but that's kind of the whole fucking point of the book, right? So, in that case, I would say that that is not valid criticism. If anything, that criticism highlights that the critic themselves did not actually understand the book, which kind of ironically calls into question the critic’s capacity for comprehension. In poorly criticizing a novel, the critic, in a roundabout way, reveals a criticism of themselves because although they think they're making smart criticisms, they're actually revealing themselves to be not as bright as they're pretending to be. This makes criticism a very tricky business indeed and is one of the reasons I tend to veer away from it in general, but I'm making an exception here because, although not my favorite book by any means, Infinite Jest is a book I enjoy quite a lot, and it also irks me when people misunderstand things, which I guess is a personal problem that I'm working through. Now, with all that being said, you may be asking something like, “Well, what is good criticism then?” And the answer to that is, well, I don’t know. It turns out that identifying bad criticism is much easier than identifying good criticism. Bad criticism usually misidentifies personal opinion as gospel, whereas good criticism is often packaged with a disclaimer that subjective opinion is not objective fact.
So, considering all that, the rest of this entry should be taken with a grain of salt. That's my disclaimer.
Bob’s first point of criticism with Infinite Jest is that, despite review blurbs on the back of the novel calling the work "genius" and "laying it on thick," he would not personally use the word "genius" to describe the book. To his credit, I will say that I hate the publishing industry’s obsession with putting quotes of praise all over books. “A virtuoso display of styles and themes.” “The next step in fiction.” “It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on Jeopardy!” Whatever the fuck that means. I’m the type of person who is immediately put off by preemptive praise, as it stirs the old contrarian within me. I hate being sold stuff, so when I get a whiff of a sales pitch, which is what packing books full of quoted praise is, I immediately go on the defensive. My question to Bob, however, is, isn’t “genius” a relatively subjective noun or adjective, depending on the context? Why are we getting hung up over this? People are always calling stuff genius nowadays, it’s basically vacuous praise at this point. Instead of debating which adjectives best describe the book, perhaps we should instead just analyze the contents of the book. Bob clarifies his anti-genius stance with the following criticism, “No, I don’t find a page-long sentence genius.” And, as an opinion, that’s fine. But you have to admit that it takes some level of literary talent to write a sentence that’s a page long while also still having it be intelligible and easy to follow, which Infinite Jest’s page-long sentences often are, which says something about David Foster Wallace’s “genius” here, if we’re choosing to use that word. It’s also important to note that page-long sentences are not just used as literary flourishes in Infinite Jest, they're used as a form of pacing to both control reading speed and add urgency to the text. If a scene is intended to be frantic, with fast-paced action and dialogue, a long sentence sort of simulates this urgency and freneticism in the reader’s mind, forcing the reader to follow along at a whirlwind pace, which mirrors the urgent speed at which the scenes unfold. Wallace has always been loose with grammar, using punctuation not in a strict Oxford sense but more like traffic signals, slow down, go fast, yield, full stop, and so forth. And I personally like this grammatical philosophy. I will admit, however, that it does occasionally feel like Wallace is writing these page-long sentences just to flex, as if he’s taking his hands off the handlebars of the figurative bike of writing, turning to Dad, and going, “Look Dad, no hands.” But I’ll forgive Wallace’s pretentious flourishes here because, in most cases, the run-on sentences and huge paragraphs work really well for the high-speed craziness that is Infinite Jest.
Bob goes on to say that all the reviews gloss over the fact that Infinite Jest is jam-packed with pain, trauma, death, and addiction, as if this is somehow a bad thing. My question is, is life not full of pain, trauma, death, and addiction? Are we forbidden from covering these topics? If so, why? Is it so that we don’t potentially hurt someone’s feelings, make them feel uncomfortable? He goes on to clarify that Infinite Jest uses trauma and suffering to “shock” and “entertain,” as if one of the themes of Infinite Jest is not a criticism of that very thing. It could be argued that David Foster Wallace is walking a fine line here, as using shock-and-trauma entertainment to criticize shock-and-trauma entertainment perhaps puts Infinite Jest uncomfortably close to becoming what it is criticizing. I would not disagree with this more nuanced argument, but that is not the argument Bob is making. However, I do think some of the scenes in Infinite Jest are excessive, and I also think that Wallace was perhaps having a little too much fun writing them. The scene with the addicted mother carrying her dead baby around as if it were alive and the lengthy descriptions of all the associated smells come to mind, also that one scene where Hal and Orin accidentally leave a dog leashed to the back of a car before driving to the store, turning the dog into a bloody “nubbin,” and that one guy who gets impaled with a broom through his ass, and that scene where the homeless drug addict’s head explodes because he shot up Drano or whatever and the alleyway air blower they use for warmth at night blows all his head chunks around, but each of these awful stories led into their own lessons and commentaries on the human condition, which, personally, I found valuable. I never got the impression that David Foster Wallace was adding awful tragedies into Infinite Jest just for shock value. There was always a point. And, again, life is full of pain, trauma, death, and addiction. We shouldn’t veer away from covering these topics, even if they make us uncomfortable. And yes, Infinite Jest did often make me feel uncomfortable, but I leaned into that discomfort, and I like to think that I learned something from it. We can learn a lot about our own humanity by studying these uncomfortable topics in depth, it might even be necessary to truly understand the human condition, and by ignoring the uncomfortable stuff or applying some hyper-PC literary policy that forbids it, we are doing ourselves a disservice, both emotionally and philosophically. After all, life is not all sunshine and rainbows, and sometimes you have to come face to face with that, and if you don't want a novel to force you to come face to face with that, then don't read the novel. Infinite Jest makes it very clear very early on that it's filled with unsettling imagery, so if you choose to continue reading the novel despite all the obvious warnings and then you choose to complain about it, then maybe that says something more about you than the novel? Perhaps it is you who derives entertainment from trauma and suffering, not Infinite Jest. Just a thought.
Bob’s next point of criticism is, “I didn’t think DFW did a great job of capturing different verbal styles of groups of characters nor did I find the novel especially deep.” This is a two-pronged criticism, so I’ll address both separately.
The first point of criticism, about capturing different verbal styles, is one I actually happen to agree with. Ever since I started reading David Foster Wallace, which was about three years ago, I have often found myself thinking, “Do people actually talk like this?” Wallace excels at building characters descriptively, both by their physical descriptions and psychological descriptions, but he seems to have trouble making a character’s dialogue fit their described personality. Strung-out drug addicts are too insightful, too self-aware. Everyday Joe Schmoes are too profound, too intelligent. Teenaged high schoolers are too mature, too philosophical. Every character seems to have an excellent grasp of the English language, often going off on long-winded, very smart tangents, much like the third-person omniscient narrator does, which highlights that Wallace, who is pretty much the narrator in most chapters, has trouble separating himself from his characters. This is especially obvious if you take the time to listen to some of Wallace’s recorded interviews. Every character seems like some version of David Foster Wallace. This is Wallace’s biggest literary shortcoming, in my opinion. He is great with descriptive prose, can write well in almost any style, has an excellent grasp of philosophical concepts and can weave them effortlessly into almost any situation, and he's incredible at evoking emotion, but he’s not very good at writing dialogue, at least believable dialogue. I mean, who actually talks like this? “I'm sitting here with the leg in a whirlpool in the bathroom of a Norwegian deep-tissue therapist's ranch-style house 1100 meters up in the Superstition Mountains. Mesa-Scottsdale in flames far below. The bathroom's redwood-paneled and overlooks a precipice. The sunlight's the color of bronze.” The answer is, no one, no one talks like this.
The second point, about not finding the novel especially deep, Bob clarifies by adding the following statement, “It reminds me of stoners getting high and thinking they are saying the deepest shit in the world when really it’s drivel.” And, I mean, that’s one way of putting it, I guess. I’m reluctant to use the word “deep” to describe anything, as I believe that a thing’s depth is influenced by the quote-unquote “depth” of the reader, meaning it is yet another highly subjective thing amongst the infinitely long list of subjective things. But I would both agree and disagree with Bob's take here, as Infinite Jest treads the line between superficial depth and real depth, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. I do think that, considering the almost nonsensical structure of the novel, it’s unnecessarily hard to follow and, considering that nearly every character is an unreliable narrator of sorts, the novel can come off as being purposely confusing, almost like a David Lynch movie, which was one of Wallace’s favorite directors if I remember correctly. For example, the story of Joelle Van Dyne and why she wears a veil all the time. In one section, Joelle herself says that she wears the veil because she's so beautiful that men become obsessed with her and can't stop staring at her or whatever, and that she views this as a disfigurement, which, OK, that's interesting. But in a different chapter, it's explained that Joelle’s father actually threw acid into her face when she was younger, which permanently warped her face, leaving her disfigured, which is also interesting. And then, in a few later chapters, the so-beautiful-it’s-a-disfigurement thing is reinforced again, so there's no way of really knowing what happened to Joelle. Now, it could be argued that Wallace uses this ambiguity around Joelle’s disfigurement to raise the question of like, could both extreme ugliness and extreme beauty be considered a disfigurement? What is ugliness? What is beauty? Does it even matter, considering Joelle believes herself to be disfigured regardless? And so on. But the fact remains, the book is full of contradictions. People are still arguing on the internet about what actually happens to Hal at the end of the book because Wallace’s prose is so vague and confusing on this detail that it's almost impossible to tell. Did he accidentally ingest the super-powerful drug DMZ, turning him into an incomprehensible mess? If so, how did he ingest it? Some people think that his father’s ghost laced his toothbrush with the drug, which is only vaguely supported by a few throwaway lines in the book. And there's some question as to whether Hal’s father’s ghost was even real to begin with. And if Hal didn't ingest DMZ, why couldn't anyone understand what he was saying? Did he slip into some inward psychosis spurred on by his extreme intellect, making it truly impossible for him to communicate with other people? I guess we will never know. Again, Wallace could have written it this way on purpose, leaving it open-ended to encourage the reader to either come to their own conclusions or to force the reader to put in some extra mental effort to figure it all out. It’s possible. But sometimes it reeks of the same intentional ambiguity that you might get a whiff of off a David Lynch film. Sometimes it feels like Wallace wasn’t sure of the details of his own plot or the points he was trying to make, so he intentionally left things open-ended and vague to sort of trick the reader into thinking something profound was going on when really there just might be nothing profound going on at all. But of course, this sort of intentional ambiguity is almost impossible to prove one way or the other. This is the tricky line this sort of weird fiction walks. But at times it certainly feels like some high-level literary mystification is going on. But while this might be true occasionally, it does not mean that Infinite Jest is completely devoid of quote-unquote “depth.”
There is tremendous prescient depth throughout Infinite Jest. Wallace predicted the sociopolitical entertainment landscape of the modern day in terms of its impacts on human behavior and society at large, and this is especially impressive considering that, since the novel was published in 1996, Wallace only had cable television, VHS, and Compact Discs to base his predictions on. He foresaw the rise of instant at-home entertainment through his idea of the InterLace Entertainment network, and he accurately foresaw its addictive, destructive effects on people and society as a whole, and then he paralleled that theme of entertainment addiction with hardcore drug addiction, and the MacGuffin of the book, the titular film Infinite Jest, which sucks you in and kills you if you watch it, is a potent metaphor for all this stuff, which I think qualifies as “deep.” And the numerous character vignettes about reaching your goals only to find out that you’re still unhappy and unfulfilled and starving for more, like the Clipperton saga and Hal’s father killing himself despite having achieved goal after goal, all provide valuable insight into the nature of personal achievement, making you, the reader, ask yourself, “What’s really important in life? If I publish my dream novel, will that finally make me happy? What is happiness? What am I really striving for here?” Bob later goes on to clarify, “If Wallace had been trying to come up with solutions rather than just shocking with exposition, perhaps I’d find his work more on the brilliant side.” But the questions Infinite Jest poses, like the nature of humanity and the path to contentedness, are deeply philosophical questions without easy answers, and the answers will vary from person to person, so expecting a book to lay out an easy-to-digest solution to these complicated philosophical problems that people have been wrestling with for centuries is frankly naive. And Infinite Jest does in fact provide some hints as to the solutions to the problems of addiction, instant gratification, and existential loneliness that pervade the text. I would encourage Bob to reexamine Mario and Don Gately’s sections more closely, for example, as they pose potential solutions to all of the aforementioned problems, like ditching intellectual irony in favor of unbridled sincerity and, in Don Gately’s case, devoting yourself to something larger than you, even if you don’t fully understand the thing you’re devoting yourself to. So, yes, there are proposed solutions to the hard questions and philosophical problems scattered throughout the novel, David Foster Wallace isn't just going to hold your hand and guide you to them, however. You have to put in some effort.
In my view, if a book makes you ask questions and examine philosophical problems, then that book is doing it's job, and Infinite Jest does that in spades, and it does it quite well, but it’s a work of fiction, not a self-help novel, so you have to put some existential work in. And if you’re not willing to do the work, then maybe you shouldn’t be criticizing the novel to begin with because, frankly, you just don’t get it.
And that's fine. Not every novel is going to click with every person. I get that. But don't pretend like your criticism is anything more than your own subjective opinion, especially when you're not willing to put in the work to understand what you're criticizing, otherwise it's just bad criticism.
The art of evaluating criticism is a tricky slippery slope because criticism is often a highly subjective thing. One person's criticism might be another person’s praise. It often comes down to stylistic, aesthetic preferences. Etc. But some criticism is just flat-out stupid. For example, some people dislike The Catcher in the Rye because Holden Caulfield is “insufferable” or “immature” or whatever, but that's kind of the whole fucking point of the book, right? So, in that case, I would say that that is not valid criticism. If anything, that criticism highlights that the critic themselves did not actually understand the book, which kind of ironically calls into question the critic’s capacity for comprehension. In poorly criticizing a novel, the critic, in a roundabout way, reveals a criticism of themselves because although they think they're making smart criticisms, they're actually revealing themselves to be not as bright as they're pretending to be. This makes criticism a very tricky business indeed and is one of the reasons I tend to veer away from it in general, but I'm making an exception here because, although not my favorite book by any means, Infinite Jest is a book I enjoy quite a lot, and it also irks me when people misunderstand things, which I guess is a personal problem that I'm working through. Now, with all that being said, you may be asking something like, “Well, what is good criticism then?” And the answer to that is, well, I don’t know. It turns out that identifying bad criticism is much easier than identifying good criticism. Bad criticism usually misidentifies personal opinion as gospel, whereas good criticism is often packaged with a disclaimer that subjective opinion is not objective fact.
So, considering all that, the rest of this entry should be taken with a grain of salt. That's my disclaimer.
Bob’s first point of criticism with Infinite Jest is that, despite review blurbs on the back of the novel calling the work "genius" and "laying it on thick," he would not personally use the word "genius" to describe the book. To his credit, I will say that I hate the publishing industry’s obsession with putting quotes of praise all over books. “A virtuoso display of styles and themes.” “The next step in fiction.” “It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on Jeopardy!” Whatever the fuck that means. I’m the type of person who is immediately put off by preemptive praise, as it stirs the old contrarian within me. I hate being sold stuff, so when I get a whiff of a sales pitch, which is what packing books full of quoted praise is, I immediately go on the defensive. My question to Bob, however, is, isn’t “genius” a relatively subjective noun or adjective, depending on the context? Why are we getting hung up over this? People are always calling stuff genius nowadays, it’s basically vacuous praise at this point. Instead of debating which adjectives best describe the book, perhaps we should instead just analyze the contents of the book. Bob clarifies his anti-genius stance with the following criticism, “No, I don’t find a page-long sentence genius.” And, as an opinion, that’s fine. But you have to admit that it takes some level of literary talent to write a sentence that’s a page long while also still having it be intelligible and easy to follow, which Infinite Jest’s page-long sentences often are, which says something about David Foster Wallace’s “genius” here, if we’re choosing to use that word. It’s also important to note that page-long sentences are not just used as literary flourishes in Infinite Jest, they're used as a form of pacing to both control reading speed and add urgency to the text. If a scene is intended to be frantic, with fast-paced action and dialogue, a long sentence sort of simulates this urgency and freneticism in the reader’s mind, forcing the reader to follow along at a whirlwind pace, which mirrors the urgent speed at which the scenes unfold. Wallace has always been loose with grammar, using punctuation not in a strict Oxford sense but more like traffic signals, slow down, go fast, yield, full stop, and so forth. And I personally like this grammatical philosophy. I will admit, however, that it does occasionally feel like Wallace is writing these page-long sentences just to flex, as if he’s taking his hands off the handlebars of the figurative bike of writing, turning to Dad, and going, “Look Dad, no hands.” But I’ll forgive Wallace’s pretentious flourishes here because, in most cases, the run-on sentences and huge paragraphs work really well for the high-speed craziness that is Infinite Jest.
Bob goes on to say that all the reviews gloss over the fact that Infinite Jest is jam-packed with pain, trauma, death, and addiction, as if this is somehow a bad thing. My question is, is life not full of pain, trauma, death, and addiction? Are we forbidden from covering these topics? If so, why? Is it so that we don’t potentially hurt someone’s feelings, make them feel uncomfortable? He goes on to clarify that Infinite Jest uses trauma and suffering to “shock” and “entertain,” as if one of the themes of Infinite Jest is not a criticism of that very thing. It could be argued that David Foster Wallace is walking a fine line here, as using shock-and-trauma entertainment to criticize shock-and-trauma entertainment perhaps puts Infinite Jest uncomfortably close to becoming what it is criticizing. I would not disagree with this more nuanced argument, but that is not the argument Bob is making. However, I do think some of the scenes in Infinite Jest are excessive, and I also think that Wallace was perhaps having a little too much fun writing them. The scene with the addicted mother carrying her dead baby around as if it were alive and the lengthy descriptions of all the associated smells come to mind, also that one scene where Hal and Orin accidentally leave a dog leashed to the back of a car before driving to the store, turning the dog into a bloody “nubbin,” and that one guy who gets impaled with a broom through his ass, and that scene where the homeless drug addict’s head explodes because he shot up Drano or whatever and the alleyway air blower they use for warmth at night blows all his head chunks around, but each of these awful stories led into their own lessons and commentaries on the human condition, which, personally, I found valuable. I never got the impression that David Foster Wallace was adding awful tragedies into Infinite Jest just for shock value. There was always a point. And, again, life is full of pain, trauma, death, and addiction. We shouldn’t veer away from covering these topics, even if they make us uncomfortable. And yes, Infinite Jest did often make me feel uncomfortable, but I leaned into that discomfort, and I like to think that I learned something from it. We can learn a lot about our own humanity by studying these uncomfortable topics in depth, it might even be necessary to truly understand the human condition, and by ignoring the uncomfortable stuff or applying some hyper-PC literary policy that forbids it, we are doing ourselves a disservice, both emotionally and philosophically. After all, life is not all sunshine and rainbows, and sometimes you have to come face to face with that, and if you don't want a novel to force you to come face to face with that, then don't read the novel. Infinite Jest makes it very clear very early on that it's filled with unsettling imagery, so if you choose to continue reading the novel despite all the obvious warnings and then you choose to complain about it, then maybe that says something more about you than the novel? Perhaps it is you who derives entertainment from trauma and suffering, not Infinite Jest. Just a thought.
Bob’s next point of criticism is, “I didn’t think DFW did a great job of capturing different verbal styles of groups of characters nor did I find the novel especially deep.” This is a two-pronged criticism, so I’ll address both separately.
The first point of criticism, about capturing different verbal styles, is one I actually happen to agree with. Ever since I started reading David Foster Wallace, which was about three years ago, I have often found myself thinking, “Do people actually talk like this?” Wallace excels at building characters descriptively, both by their physical descriptions and psychological descriptions, but he seems to have trouble making a character’s dialogue fit their described personality. Strung-out drug addicts are too insightful, too self-aware. Everyday Joe Schmoes are too profound, too intelligent. Teenaged high schoolers are too mature, too philosophical. Every character seems to have an excellent grasp of the English language, often going off on long-winded, very smart tangents, much like the third-person omniscient narrator does, which highlights that Wallace, who is pretty much the narrator in most chapters, has trouble separating himself from his characters. This is especially obvious if you take the time to listen to some of Wallace’s recorded interviews. Every character seems like some version of David Foster Wallace. This is Wallace’s biggest literary shortcoming, in my opinion. He is great with descriptive prose, can write well in almost any style, has an excellent grasp of philosophical concepts and can weave them effortlessly into almost any situation, and he's incredible at evoking emotion, but he’s not very good at writing dialogue, at least believable dialogue. I mean, who actually talks like this? “I'm sitting here with the leg in a whirlpool in the bathroom of a Norwegian deep-tissue therapist's ranch-style house 1100 meters up in the Superstition Mountains. Mesa-Scottsdale in flames far below. The bathroom's redwood-paneled and overlooks a precipice. The sunlight's the color of bronze.” The answer is, no one, no one talks like this.
The second point, about not finding the novel especially deep, Bob clarifies by adding the following statement, “It reminds me of stoners getting high and thinking they are saying the deepest shit in the world when really it’s drivel.” And, I mean, that’s one way of putting it, I guess. I’m reluctant to use the word “deep” to describe anything, as I believe that a thing’s depth is influenced by the quote-unquote “depth” of the reader, meaning it is yet another highly subjective thing amongst the infinitely long list of subjective things. But I would both agree and disagree with Bob's take here, as Infinite Jest treads the line between superficial depth and real depth, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. I do think that, considering the almost nonsensical structure of the novel, it’s unnecessarily hard to follow and, considering that nearly every character is an unreliable narrator of sorts, the novel can come off as being purposely confusing, almost like a David Lynch movie, which was one of Wallace’s favorite directors if I remember correctly. For example, the story of Joelle Van Dyne and why she wears a veil all the time. In one section, Joelle herself says that she wears the veil because she's so beautiful that men become obsessed with her and can't stop staring at her or whatever, and that she views this as a disfigurement, which, OK, that's interesting. But in a different chapter, it's explained that Joelle’s father actually threw acid into her face when she was younger, which permanently warped her face, leaving her disfigured, which is also interesting. And then, in a few later chapters, the so-beautiful-it’s-a-disfigurement thing is reinforced again, so there's no way of really knowing what happened to Joelle. Now, it could be argued that Wallace uses this ambiguity around Joelle’s disfigurement to raise the question of like, could both extreme ugliness and extreme beauty be considered a disfigurement? What is ugliness? What is beauty? Does it even matter, considering Joelle believes herself to be disfigured regardless? And so on. But the fact remains, the book is full of contradictions. People are still arguing on the internet about what actually happens to Hal at the end of the book because Wallace’s prose is so vague and confusing on this detail that it's almost impossible to tell. Did he accidentally ingest the super-powerful drug DMZ, turning him into an incomprehensible mess? If so, how did he ingest it? Some people think that his father’s ghost laced his toothbrush with the drug, which is only vaguely supported by a few throwaway lines in the book. And there's some question as to whether Hal’s father’s ghost was even real to begin with. And if Hal didn't ingest DMZ, why couldn't anyone understand what he was saying? Did he slip into some inward psychosis spurred on by his extreme intellect, making it truly impossible for him to communicate with other people? I guess we will never know. Again, Wallace could have written it this way on purpose, leaving it open-ended to encourage the reader to either come to their own conclusions or to force the reader to put in some extra mental effort to figure it all out. It’s possible. But sometimes it reeks of the same intentional ambiguity that you might get a whiff of off a David Lynch film. Sometimes it feels like Wallace wasn’t sure of the details of his own plot or the points he was trying to make, so he intentionally left things open-ended and vague to sort of trick the reader into thinking something profound was going on when really there just might be nothing profound going on at all. But of course, this sort of intentional ambiguity is almost impossible to prove one way or the other. This is the tricky line this sort of weird fiction walks. But at times it certainly feels like some high-level literary mystification is going on. But while this might be true occasionally, it does not mean that Infinite Jest is completely devoid of quote-unquote “depth.”
There is tremendous prescient depth throughout Infinite Jest. Wallace predicted the sociopolitical entertainment landscape of the modern day in terms of its impacts on human behavior and society at large, and this is especially impressive considering that, since the novel was published in 1996, Wallace only had cable television, VHS, and Compact Discs to base his predictions on. He foresaw the rise of instant at-home entertainment through his idea of the InterLace Entertainment network, and he accurately foresaw its addictive, destructive effects on people and society as a whole, and then he paralleled that theme of entertainment addiction with hardcore drug addiction, and the MacGuffin of the book, the titular film Infinite Jest, which sucks you in and kills you if you watch it, is a potent metaphor for all this stuff, which I think qualifies as “deep.” And the numerous character vignettes about reaching your goals only to find out that you’re still unhappy and unfulfilled and starving for more, like the Clipperton saga and Hal’s father killing himself despite having achieved goal after goal, all provide valuable insight into the nature of personal achievement, making you, the reader, ask yourself, “What’s really important in life? If I publish my dream novel, will that finally make me happy? What is happiness? What am I really striving for here?” Bob later goes on to clarify, “If Wallace had been trying to come up with solutions rather than just shocking with exposition, perhaps I’d find his work more on the brilliant side.” But the questions Infinite Jest poses, like the nature of humanity and the path to contentedness, are deeply philosophical questions without easy answers, and the answers will vary from person to person, so expecting a book to lay out an easy-to-digest solution to these complicated philosophical problems that people have been wrestling with for centuries is frankly naive. And Infinite Jest does in fact provide some hints as to the solutions to the problems of addiction, instant gratification, and existential loneliness that pervade the text. I would encourage Bob to reexamine Mario and Don Gately’s sections more closely, for example, as they pose potential solutions to all of the aforementioned problems, like ditching intellectual irony in favor of unbridled sincerity and, in Don Gately’s case, devoting yourself to something larger than you, even if you don’t fully understand the thing you’re devoting yourself to. So, yes, there are proposed solutions to the hard questions and philosophical problems scattered throughout the novel, David Foster Wallace isn't just going to hold your hand and guide you to them, however. You have to put in some effort.
In my view, if a book makes you ask questions and examine philosophical problems, then that book is doing it's job, and Infinite Jest does that in spades, and it does it quite well, but it’s a work of fiction, not a self-help novel, so you have to put some existential work in. And if you’re not willing to do the work, then maybe you shouldn’t be criticizing the novel to begin with because, frankly, you just don’t get it.
And that's fine. Not every novel is going to click with every person. I get that. But don't pretend like your criticism is anything more than your own subjective opinion, especially when you're not willing to put in the work to understand what you're criticizing, otherwise it's just bad criticism.
