Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace (1996)
First Sentence: “I am seated in an office surrounded by heads and bodies.”
So here we are. While it was very difficult indeed to rank the other nine books on this list, deciding where to put this book on the list was as involuntary as breathing. This is by far the best, the longest, the most difficult, the most frustrating, the most entertaining, the most rewarding book on this list.
The term Infinite Jest is an allusion to Hamlet, as well as the title of a film by auteur Jim Incandenza, that circulates throughout the book causing anyone who’s unlucky enough to watch it, to want to do absolutely nothing else but watch it again and again and again, even if that means starving to death, or going to the bathroom on themselves, or not taking their insulin and going into epileptic shock. Ultimately, this book is about addiction in every form you could possibly imagine: Heroin, alcohol, cannabis, crack, cocaine, Diludiad, Percocet, sex, sports, cleaning, and on and on and on.
With a cast of hundreds, and almost 400 footnotes, coming in at a whopping 3 lbs, Jest focuses mainly on a halfway house in the Boston suburbs, and the adjacent Enfield Tennis Academy. Wallace spent hundreds of hours going to AA meetings, and this book is considered by many to be the most realistic account of drug addiction and the Alcoholics Anonymous program in either fiction or non-fiction.
Wallace created his own world in Infinite Jest. This is not just a big novel with big ideas. It’s not just a grand achievement by a writer with the greatest voice of his generation. This is not something you finish and then say, “Well that was a really great book,” and then move on with your life. This book deserves its own cannon. It cannot be categorized. This book genuinely redefines the boundaries of what a novel can do.
Wallace hung himself in late 2008. Infinite Jest is his second, and last, finished novel.
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