Infinite Jest with William Mottolese

This reading group has reached its capacity. To join the waitlist, please email Sam Lim-Kimberg at [email protected].

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Meeting Dates:
12/15, 1/5, 1/26, 2/16, 3/9, 3/30, 4/20, 5/11, 6/1, 6/22
Participants may attend in person at The Center for Fiction or participate remotely via Zoom.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace has become one of those imposing books, like Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, that is a so-called “must read” that few have actually read from start to finish. Over 1,000 pages (including extensive self-penned endnotes) and set in a nebulous near-future North America, Infinite Jest is at once a satirically pointed examination of the millennial America of instant gratification, self-medication, and family dysfunction and an indefinable narrative adventure of shifting voices and time frames, compelling allusions, multiple plotlines, and encyclopedic knowledge.

While Infinite Jest has some of the dizzying playfulness of Barth, the dark themes of Gaddis, and the conspiratorial paranoia of Pynchon, it shares the microscopic lens and density of Proust and the extensive experimentation, love of language, and humor of Joyce. However, Infinite Jest is an entirely singular and anomalous kind of novel. Often called an exemplar of “new sincerity” in fiction, Infinite Jest is a profoundly human work, defined not as postmodernism but something that pushes beyond postmodernism.

In advance of the first meeting, participants should read to page 95 at the break “YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT,” along with the endnotes. The “Notes and Errata” should not be neglected.

Recommended Reading:
Elegant Complexity by Greg Carlisle