THE recently deceased novelist, essayist, and journalist David Foster Wallace was a genius. And a big, showy one at that. His style, laden with his trademark footnotes, was that of a man whose brain was permanently stuck in overdrive-a mind so bright, an observer so exactingly acute as Wallace seemed to have no other option. He was going to struggle mightily to convey the whole of his experience and insight on any given topic, and lest anything slip through the cracks he would insert it on the bottom of the page where he hoped that there was still room, given his typically voluminous outpouring. They say brevity is the soul of wit, but Wallace’s agile mind was witty enough to rewrite the rules.
Wallace’s two collections of journalism and essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster, remain his most accessible works. But most of his career came in the shadow of his magnum opus, the dystopian doorstop of a novel Infinite Jest. The book describes a future in which the U.S. has turned a huge section of its Northeast into a toxic-waste dump (where herds of feral hamsters roam) and declared that region part of Canada, angering our neighbors to the north to the point that there’s a terrorist group made up entirely of Quebecois assassins in wheelchairs frantically searching the country for an avant-garde film—the Infinite Jest of the title-they plan on using as a weapon. The film is said to be so compelling that all who see it want to do nothing but watch it until they waste away. Even more oddly, most of the book’s characters are either youths at a tennis academy or the occupants of a drug-rehab center.
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