Infinite Jest, novel by David Foster Wallace, published in 1996, that satirically attacks the vacuous predilections of contemporary American culture mercilessly while shamelessly reveling in them.
Where does one begin with a book of over a thousand pages, of which nearly a hundred pages consist of 388 detailed (and wildly funny) footnotes? A plot synopsis is sadly doomed to inadequacy.
Set in the near future, Infinite Jest is the title of a film made by the maverick avant-garde filmmaker James Orin Incandenza that is apparently so funny that the viewer watches and rewatches it, at the expense of everything else in their life, until they ultimately die in a state of uncontrollable hilarity. All manner of sinister individuals, government agencies, radical groups, and others attempt to track down the master copy of this film, and the ensuing chaos incorporates the recovering addicts of Ennet House (a Boston dependency clinic) as well as the nearby Enfield Tennis Academy.
These two locations provide two opposing points of focus for the text. One allows Wallace to explore the centrality of addiction to consumer culture and the place of narcotics within that culture. The other is an extraordinary vision of a hothouse sports school producing children for an industry that will disregard most of them.
Wildly inventive, linguistically original, extravagantly detailed, and playful, Wallace’s text is the one you would take with you to a desert island.