Infinite Jest Summary: David Foster Wallace's Sprawling Novel Explained
What Infinite Jest is about
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, published in 1996, is usually described as an encyclopedic novel. That label covers both its length and its shape. The book runs several major narratives at once and carries hundreds of endnotes, some of which have footnotes of their own. Reading it means moving back and forth through the book rather than straight down the page.
The setting is a near-future version of the Boston area. The United States, Canada and Mexico have been folded into a body called the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. Three main strands run through the novel. A group of Québécois radicals called Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, the Wheelchair Assassins, are planning a violent coup to free Quebec from O.N.A.N. A group of addicts in Boston hit rock bottom and enter a residential programme at the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, where they work through Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. And a few hundred metres up the hill, students train and study at the Enfield Tennis Academy.
What joins these worlds together is a film. It is called Infinite Jest, and characters refer to it as the Entertainment or the samizdat. Anyone who watches it loses interest in everything except watching it again, and eventually dies. The film was the final work of James Incandenza, who founded the tennis academy. He finished it during a period of sobriety that its lead actress, Joelle van Dyne, insisted upon.
From there the plot becomes a hunt. The Québécois separatists want a replicable master copy so they can use the film as a weapon against the United States. A government agency called the Office of Unspecified Services, which has absorbed the functions of the NSA, the DEA, the CIA, the ATF, the Office of Naval Research and the Secret Service, wants to intercept the master copy before it can be spread, or else to produce some kind of anti-entertainment to counter its effects. Joelle, meanwhile, has entered Ennet House for treatment for substance abuse. A member of the Wheelchair Assassins named Rémy Marathe, who may also be a double agent for the Americans, visits Ennet House looking for her and for a lead to the master copy.
The main characters
The Incandenza family sits at the centre of the book. James Incandenza founded the Enfield Tennis Academy and made the fatal film. After his death the academy is run by his widow, Avril Incandenza, and her adopted brother Charles Tavis. Their son Hal is the novel's closest thing to a central consciousness, a gifted student and tennis player struggling to meet very high expectations of academic and athletic success while the family around him falls apart.
Joelle van Dyne connects the film to the recovery house. She starred in the Entertainment, insisted on James Incandenza's sobriety while he made it, and later arrives at Ennet House seeking treatment of her own. Rémy Marathe carries the Quebec strand into Boston, a Wheelchair Assassin whose loyalties are not simple. Around them, the residents and staff of Ennet House and the students of the academy give the novel its population, two institutions full of people being drilled or rebuilt.
The themes
The two big houses of the novel are doing the same work from opposite ends. The tennis academy trains young people to want one thing so completely that nothing else gets in. The recovery house takes people whose wanting has destroyed them and teaches them to live without the substance. Both are about surrender to a programme, and both ask what is left of a person once the programme has them.
The Entertainment makes that question literal. A film so pleasurable that nobody who sees it wants anything else is a blunt image of what addiction does, and it lets Wallace ask uncomfortable things about art itself. James Incandenza made an object that gives perfect satisfaction and kills everyone it touches. The novel is interested in whether freedom means being able to choose your pleasures, or whether it means being able to refuse them. Marathe and the American agents argue over exactly that: a country that cannot say no to its own entertainment may not need an enemy.
Identity runs underneath all of it. Hal is defined by his performance, Joelle by her face and her role in the film, the Ennet House residents by the stories they tell in meetings. Nobody in the book gets to simply be themselves without a system around them supplying the terms.
How it ends
The novel ends without directly resolving several of its central plotlines. This is deliberate rather than accidental, and it is one reason the book has produced so much rereading, annotation and argument. Readers who want a tidy answer about the master copy will not get one on the final page.
Why it still matters
It sold 44,000 hardcover copies in its first year, which is unusual for literary fiction of this size, and has since passed a million copies worldwide. It is widely treated as Wallace's major work. Anniversary editions have carried forewords by Dave Eggers at ten years, Tom Bissell at twenty and Michelle Zauner at thirty, which gives a sense of how each new generation of writers keeps reaching for it. A novel about entertainment that consumes its audience has not grown less relevant since 1996.
