Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is a thousand page novel set in a near future North America in which the United States, Canada, and Mexico have merged into the Organization of North American Nations, calendar years are sponsored by corporations, and a film called the Entertainment is so pleasurable to watch that viewers lose all interest in eating, sleeping, or moving. The novel braids three main settings: the Enfield Tennis Academy in Boston, where the brilliant lexically obsessed teen Hal Incandenza is one of several Incandenza children training to be elite competitors; the nearby Ennet House halfway facility, where former Demerol addict Don Gately works the desk and tries to stay clean; and a Quebecois cell of wheelchair bound terrorists hunting the master copy of the Entertainment. Wallace uses footnotes, sentence long inventories, and digressions on tennis trigonometry, AA testimony, and pharmacology to dramatize a culture in which every form of self soothing eventually consumes the self.
What you might want to know about Infinite Jest
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In a near-future where corporations sponsor calendar years, an elite tennis academy, a recovery house next door, and Quebecois separatists in wheelchairs all chase a film no one can stop watching.
Yes. Infinite Jest is around 1,100 pages with 388 endnotes (some with their own footnotes), a non-linear chronology, and dense prose. It is widely cited as one of the most challenging novels in modern American fiction. Most readers either commit fully or set it aside.
Infinite Jest was written by David Foster Wallace and published in 1996. It is widely considered Wallace's masterwork. He also wrote essay collections including A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster before his death in 2008.
Infinite Jest is 1104 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Infinite Jest takes most readers 17 to 24 hours to finish.
Infinite Jest is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
Infinite Jest is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
