infinite jest movie review

The Alchemist's Retort

A multi-layered postmodern saga of damnation and salvation

Among writers of the younger—which these days means under forty—generation, David Foster Wallace has a reputation as a wild-card savant. A fictioneer and former Harvard philosophy student, Wallace is the author of The Broom of the System , a novel; Girl With Curious Hair , an envelope-stretching book of stories; and, with Mark Costello, a nonfiction work, Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present . He has also done some hard schooling in halfway houses and recovery programs (a fact not irrelevant to the novel under review). His latest offering, Infinite Jest , has been moving toward us like an ocean disturbance, pushing increasingly hyperbolic rumors before it: that the author could not stop writing; that the publisher was begging for cuts of hundreds of pages; that it was, qua novel, a very strange piece of business altogether. Now it’s here and, yes, it is strange, not just in its radically cantilevered plot conception but also in its size (more than a thousand pages, one-tenth of that bulk taking the form of endnotes): this, mind you, in an era when publishers express very real doubts about whether the younger generation—presumably a good part of Wallace’s target audience—reads at all.

What is it, and where has it come from? Let me try the second question first. About four years ago Wallace published a vividly idiosyncratic autobiographical essay in Harper’s . “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes” gave an account of the author’s youthful obsession with tennis and also conjured an intriguing metaphysics, bringing together the grid of the court, the larger grid of the Illinois farm country where Wallace grew up, and the vagaries of the mighty weather systems that move like free will through those precincts of determinism. “Between the ages of twelve and fifteen,” Wallace wrote, “I was a near great junior tennis player. . . . At fourteen I was ranked seventeenth in the United States Tennis Association's Western Section . . .” Later he recalled his intensely rivalrous friendship with one Gil Antitoi, the son of a professor of Québecois history. Details, details—but it is sometimes by way of details and their transformation that we understand a bit more about the alchemist’s retort that is the writer’s imagination. How else to get a purchase on this work? It is as thick with narrative stuff as any novel in recent memory, but it has axial strands involving Enfield, a tennis academy outside Boston; Ennet House, a residence for recovering substance abusers; and a fantastical conspiracy tale featuring Québecois-separatist terrorists and, not insignificantly, a Cambridge storefront owned by the brothers Antitoi.

Get it? I’m not sure “get it” is the point here, really. I could lay out a full half-dozen other major plot elements and the big picture would still not begin to come clear. You see, in this young writer’s vision the big picture, if we can even speak of such a thing, does not have a “clear” to come to: that is part of what the whole, the sum of the parts, is saying about the world, about reality. Wallace is scrabbling along the high-terrain paths earlier explored by Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis . Indeed, not only does he share with both a mordantly black view of modern and late-modern experience, but he also has a penchant for weaving long braids from enticingly antiphonal plots, each of which is differently absorbing, if not for its characterizations or imaginative brio then for the sharp snap of its thought, the obsessiveness of its informational reference (hence the notes), or—and—the incandescence of the writing.

Wallace’s particular conceit in Infinite Jest is that the events described are taking place in the indeterminate future, possibly several decades hence. Some features are familiar, while others have an ominous or spoofy futuristic cast. Wallace is not afraid to commingle various tonal and thematic registers. Against the more credible psychological travails of the central characters he sets past-tense references to the Limbaugh presidency and descriptions of the “Great Concavity,” a large area of New England that has been ceded to Canada and yet is used as a dumping ground (gigantic catapults near Boston send canisters of trash and toxins arcing thither).

But these more outré materials combine to form what is finally a thematic second tier. The foreground of Infinite Jest features three basic plot systems. At the center of one is Hal Incandenza, an adolescent tennis star attending Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA), which his family founded, and which has been administered by his mother and uncle since his father, James, who was also an experimental filmmaker, ended things by putting his head in a specially rigged microwave oven. Hal, who is compulsive and brilliant, shows his damage obliquely: he cannot walk the orthogonal paths of ETA with an unaltered mind. “Hal likes to get high in secret,” we read, “but a bigger secret is that he’s as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high.” An intriguing filtering presence, and a fine departure point for Wallace’s various divagations into Incandenza family lore, Hal does not himself do much besides play tennis and, late in the book, try to stop smoking pot.

Then there is the world of Don Gately. Gately is a former drug abuser and breaking-and-entering artist who made the bad mistake of going after an assistant D.A. who once caused him to do some time. After invading the man’s home, Gately sent him

two high-pixel Polaroid snapshots, one of big Don Gately and one of his associate, each in a Halloween mask denoting a clown’s great good professional cheer, each with his pants down and bent over and each with the enhanced-focus handle of one of the couple’s toothbrushes protruding from his bottom.

The photos came, of course, after husband and wife had had ample time to carry out their hygienic rituals; the A.D.A.’s wife became, alas, unhinged. Now, hiding out at Ennet House, trying to go straight (indeed, finding in himself a reservoir of saintly impulses), Gately lives in daily dread of being found by the vengeful A.D.A. He performs his menial tasks, goes to meetings, interacts with the other Ennet denizens. Again, little happens in the way of conventional plot.

Infinite Jest comes, in time, to seem like some great clattering vehicle that is powered by a rudimentary three-stroke engine, the narrative passing in steady sequence from Enfield to Ennet to a plateau lookout in the Southwest where two Québecois-separatist agents are having a secret rendezvous, trying to determine how their people might get hold of a particular “cartridge,” or film cassette. The film, the eponymous Infinite Jest , was made by James Incandenza and has the terrifying capacity to send anyone who views it into a crazed state of fixation that quickly leads to death. Why or how this should be is never made clear, nor do we expect it to be.

Each of the narrative sections has its own compelling dynamic, often against the odds. Why read countless pages detailing the Byzantine logistics of daily tennis drills? Because, for one thing, Wallace’s writing is edgy, accurate, and darkly witty.

Here is how to don red and gray E.T.A. sweats and squad-jog a weekly 40 km. up and down urban Commonwealth Avenue even though you would rather set your hair on fire than jog in a pack. Jogging is painful and pointless, but you are not in charge. Your brother gets to ride shotgun while a senile German blows BBs at your legs both of them laughing and screaming Schnell .

Though nothing much happens at Enfield, our prolonged exposure to the academy system reveals the terrible repressions that keep everything in its place. This is a game world, a closed system, but the idea of play has been pumped out of it, and the remaining husk is but a slight barrier against the maniacal forces at large in the world. These are conjured for us through countless vignettes: of the awful unraveling of Hal’s father; of the brittle poise and warped lusts of his mother, Avril; of the desperado backgrounds of the Ennet residents, not least the self-immolating habits of the younger Don Gately.

Gately, like his housemates, is at once sick and arrestingly vulnerable—and more human than the competitive automatons being groomed at nearby ETA. When tenderness and conscience announce themselves in the soul of a thug, we cannot but be moved. So, too, we have to smile at the fumbling steps he takes on his way to true self-reconstruction.

He had nothing in the way of a like God-concept, and at that point maybe even less than nothing in terms of interest in the whole thing; he treated prayer like setting an oven-temp according to a box's direction. Thinking of it as talking to the ceiling was somehow preferable to imagining talking to Nothing. And he found it embarrassing to get down on his knees in his underwear, and like the other guys in the room he always pretended his sneakers were like way under the bed and he had to stay down there a while to find them and get them out, when he prayed, but he did it . . . .

Stroke, stroke, stroke—over a distance of hundreds of pages. Readers either drop out (some will) or push on, lured by the interest of the idiosyncratic prose itself, but also by curiosity and some fundamental incredulity. The denizens of these worlds are so far removed from one another—tennis brats, recovering druggies, Québecois separatists—that the author will have to turn magician. Surely the hankies he has tucked into various pockets will cascade forth in a riotous splurge of color. But no. Even though signs of linkage start to proliferate, and even though a fascinating bridge between worlds is created through the trajectory of one Joelle van Dyne (a former girlfriend of Hal’s older brother, and perhaps of his father, too; the star of the film Infinite Jest ; a suicidal cokehead who comes to Ennet and takes a shine to Gately), the plot lines do not come to apocalyptic or even transfiguring intersection. Whatever aesthetics we espouse, we are all closet traditionalists in our expectations—and these must be shelved. Wallace rebuts the prime-time formula. Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis. Think. Wallace has, in interviews, scourged himself, admitting to “devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them” (as noted). But the artistic intent in Infinite Jest overrides such considerations, or at least places them in perspective. Wallace is, clearly, bent on taking the next step in fiction. He is carrying on the Pynchonian celebration of the renegade spirit in a world gone as flat as a circuit board; he is tailoring that richly comic idiom for its new-millennial uses. To say that the novel does not obey traditional norms is to miss the point. Wallace’s narrative structure should be seen instead as a response to an altered cultural sensibility. The book mimes, in its movements as well as in its dense loads of referential data, the distributed systems that are the new paradigm in communications. The book is not about electronic culture, but it has internalized some of the decentering energies that computer technologies have released into our midst. The plot is webbed, branched, rife with linkages. This could be a liability. If Hal were effectively the protagonist (as we first imagine he will be), he would not generate binding energy sufficient to counteract the diffusion. But the emergent figure of Gately—wounded, desperate, but able to find and give love—allows Infinite Jest to work as a postmodern saga of damnation and salvation. The novel is confusing, yes, and maddening in myriad ways. It is also resourceful, hilarious, intelligent, and unique. Those who stay with it will find the whole world lit up as though by black light. Illustration by Mark Todd

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An initially intriguing sci-fi thriller that quickly veers into incoherence, Infinite is as inane as it is inconsequential.

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Infinite Jest at 20: 20 things you need to know

The beloved 1,100-page novel is David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus and one of the most influential books of its time, but did you know he based its structure on a mathematical object called a Sierpinski Gasket and proofread it while watching a film about a St Bernard dog, on a loop?

1 Infinite Jest is set in a near future in which the Gregorian calendar has been supplanted by a sponsorship arrangement. Most of the action of the novel takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment [Depend is a real brand of adult nappies]. Other years are sponsored by: the Whopper, the Tucks Medicated Pad, the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the Perdue Wonderchicken, the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, Glad, Dairy Products from the American Heartland and the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade for Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems for Home, Office or Mobile.

2 The central plot MacGuffin, such as it is, is the search for the missing master copy of a videotape known as “the Entertainment”: this is a film, made by the avant-garde film-maker James Incandenza, so ridiculously entertaining that anyone who sees it will be compelled to watch it over and over again, and having lost all interest in eating, drinking and basic sanitation will in due course expire. Incandenza himself died when he killed himself by putting his head in a microwave oven.

3 The main settings of the novel are a tennis academy – Enfield Tennis Academy – and a halfway house for recovering addicts called the Ennet House Drug And Alcohol Recovery House (“redundancy sic”), which is next door to it. The chief counsellor at the halfway house, and one of the novel’s main protagonists, is Don Gately. Gately is a very big man: “the size of a young dinosaur, with a massive and almost perfectly square head he used to amuse his friends when drunk by letting them open and close elevator doors on”. (Gately was based on a man Wallace met in recovery called Big Craig, who also did the elevator-door thing.)

4 The Acknowledgements page includes the following: “Besides Closed Meetings for alcoholics only, Alcoholics Anonymous in Boston, Massachusetts, also has Open Meetings, where pretty much anybody who’s interested can come and listen, take notes, pester people with questions, etc. A lot of people at these Open Meetings spoke with me and were extremely patient and garrulous and generous and helpful. The best way I can think of to show my appreciations to these men and women is to decline to thank them by name.” Wallace himself, as the note doesn’t mention, was a recovering alcoholic.

5 Wallace was very good at tennis, boasting in later life that he had been “near great”. His game peaked early in high school, however, and his habit of overthinking every shot slowed him down. In his senior year he was ranked 11th in the Middle Illinois Tennis Association. The last tournament he won was the 18-and-under doubles at the Central Illinois Open in 1980.

6 The USA has been incorporated in the novel into ONAN, or the Organisation of North American Nations, consisting of the US, Canada and Mexico. Wallace shares Thomas Pynchon’s enthusiasm for silly acronyms. Joelle Van Dyne, the radio host Madame Psychosis, was the PGOAT (Prettiest Girl of All Time) before she was disfigured by acid and joined the UHID (Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed). We also encounter the USOUS – a government agency called the United States Office of Unspecified Services, and the AFR, or Les Assassins des Fauteils Rollents. The latter are a deadly fellowship of legless French-Canadian “wheelchair assassins”. Moments before suffering a violent death, their victims are said to “hear the squeak”. The AFR are trying to obtain the “Entertainment” in order to use it as a terror weapon.

7 Though there’s no excuse for terrorism, the AFR have cause to be disgruntled. In the novel’s world, the United States – in search of somewhere to put its rubbish – has practised “experialism”. That is, it has forcibly donated a whole scoop of its northern territories – Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and some of upstate New York – to Canada, and flung all its hazardous waste into it. The Great Concavity (Canadians call it the Great Convexity) is now thoroughly irradiated and dismal, overcast by a “drooling and piss-coloured bank of teratogenic […] clouds” held at bay by powerful fans. Across the concavity rampages an enormous, “tornadic” herd of radioactive feral hamsters, descended from two domestic hamsters named Ward and June, set free by a boy from Watertown, New York in the Year of the Whopper.

8 Infinite Jest is structured, Wallace shyly confessed to an interviewer in 1996, to imitate a mathematical object called a Sierpinski Gasket. A Sierpinski what? This is a fractal structure created when you recursively subdivide an equilateral triangle into ever smaller equilateral triangles ad infinitum – so three triangles fit into the main triangle with their vertices at the midpoints of its sides, and in turn they subdivide into three more triangles, and so on. “Its chaos is more on the surface,” he said. “Its bones are its beauty.” So there.

9 The book was very intensely hyped ahead of publication – with the publishers sending out teaser postcards reading “Infinite Pleasure” and “Infinite Writer”. It was already into its sixth printing a month after publication. Wallace himself didn’t like the original cover (which showed a blue sky with clouds). He said it resembled the safety booklet on an American Airlines flight: “The cloud system – it’s almost identical.”

10 Not everyone loved Infinite Jest when it came out, though. Dale Peck (so reliable a sourpuss that a volume of his collected book reviews was entitled Hatchet Jobs ) called it “bloated, boring, gratuitous and – perhaps especially – uncontrolled”. Harold Bloom called the book “just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent […] Stephen King is Cervantes compared with Wallace.” Bloom’s own work is described in Infinite Jest as “stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit”, mind you.

11 Wallace invented a game probably even harder to play in the real world than Quidditch. Eschaton, as played across six tennis courts by his cast of pot-smoking maths-whiz tennis prodigies, simulates a global thermonuclear war. Lobbed tennis balls stand in for ICBMs. Tennis shoes stand in for nuclear submarines. Blast areas and damage are calculated by a statistical computer, and the mean value theorem is evoked to the bafflement of muggle readers. Eschaton can be seen being played in the video for “Calamity Song” by the Oregon-based indie band the Decemberists.

12 If you think Infinite Jest – at 1,100-odd pages – is a long book, be advised that it started longer. Wallace wrote to a friend that “the fucker’s cut by 600 pages from the first version”. He proofread the book, according to DT Max ’s fine biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story , “with loose pages of Infinite Jest spread out in front of him, watching the movie Beethoven over and over again on a TV/VCR combo from Rent-A-Center”. He claimed, variously, to have caught 47,000 and 712,000 typos. Beethoven is a film about a St Bernard dog.

13 Speaking of dogs, among Wallace’s more disgusting personal habits was that he allowed his pet dogs to eat food out of his mouth: “They pretend they’re kissing you,” he said, “but really they’re mining your mouth for food.” Wallace also liked to drink coffee with teabags dunked in it.

14 Wallace was almost always photographed wearing a bandana. He wore it not as a fashion statement, but because he was prone to anxiety attacks and intensely self-conscious about how much he sweated. He told a friend’s child that he wore it to stop his head exploding.

15 Infinite Jest has never been filmed. A number of its key scenes, however, have been recreated in Lego by an 11-year-old . With the help of his English professor father, Sebastian Griffith built models of more than 100 scenes from Wallace’s novel. You can find his work at brickjest.com. It is unlikely to be bettered.

16 The (rather hostile) portrait of Avril Incandenza (AKA “The Moms”) in the novel is based on Wallace’s own mother Sally Foster. Avril is the co-founder of the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts. Sally was a stickler for correct usage, and would complain in supermarkets when she saw “Ten items or less” above checkouts. She minted the neologisms “greebles” (bits of lint) and “howling fantods” (heebie-jeebies), both of which appear in Wallace’s work.

17 The title, as any fule kno, is from Hamlet : “I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.” It wasn’t Wallace’s only engagement with infinity. In 2003 he published a book called Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity . A professional mathematician reviewing it described it as being “laced through and through with blunders of every magnitude”.

18 Infinite Jest has been subject to some pretty detailed attention from fans. There is an enormous searchable Wiki , and on his website Infinite Jest by the Numbers, Ryan Compton has calculated that Wallace used a vocabulary of 20,584 words in the 577,608-word text. The first 35,000 words of the novel, he added, contain 4,923 unique words, “more than most rappers but still less than the Wu-Tang Clan”.

19 Wallace killed himself in 2008, and suicide – along with addiction – is a major presence in the novel. It is usually called “eliminating your own map” or “ felo de se ”.

20 The antic silliness of Infinite Jest masks an intense moral seriousness. Wallace (in an implicit rebuke to the “brat pack” writers of the generation above) repeatedly spoke out against irony: “Postmodern irony and cynicism has become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.” Interviewed shortly after Infinite Jest ’s publication, Wallace said he had “wanted to do something sad”.

David Foster Wallace

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'Infinite Jest' celebrates 20th anniversary

EW looks back on David Foster Wallace's masterpiece two decades after its release.

Christian Holub is a writer covering comics and other geeky pop culture. He's still mad about 'Firefly' getting canceled.

When David Foster Wallace’s magnificent 1,079-page novel landed in bookstores with a resounding thunk in February 1996, the author wasn’t a household name. He’d written one novel and a highly entertaining series of nonfiction pieces—documenting his visits to cruise ships and state fairs and the like—but Infinite Jest was far grander than anything he had done before.

“It’s what you dream of as an editor, to have something so original and immediate come into your hands,” says Michael Pietsch, the Little, Brown editor who helped Wallace shape the book. “It had a big purpose. He was writing about the pursuit of happiness. It seemed to be about America at that moment.”

Pietsch got early galleys into the hands of literary tastemakers and spearheaded a publicity campaign that presented Infinite Jest ‘s length and ambition as a challenge to be undertaken. It worked: The novel sold 44,000 copies in its first year; today, there are more than 800,000 copies in print.

“I think what people love about Infinite Jest is that Dave basically said, ‘Okay, I am going to take on all of America in one book,'” says celebrated Tenth of December author George Saunders. “This young guy, boldly taking on the whole culture, as Dickens and Tolstoy and Austen had done before him—the audacity of that. His approach was not only epic in scope but original in form, and that form was somehow mimetic of the culture he was describing: manic, obsessive, funny, outsized.”

Now, 20 years on, Infinite Jest has become a cultural mainstay. References to it pop up everywhere from music (the Decemberists’ “Calamity Song” video is an adaptation of a scene from the book) to TV ( Parks and Recreation once spent an entire episode name-dropping Infinite Jest characters). But its biggest effect is still felt by other writers.

“I read it and I thought, This is how a book should be,” says Adam Levin, whose massive 2010 debut novel, The Instructions , drew immediate comparisons to Infinite Jest . “It should always be blowing your mind and giving you bursts of pleasure.”

In the novel, the U.S., Mexico, and Canada have merged into the Organization of North American Nations (their symbol: an eagle wearing a sombrero and holding a maple leaf). In order to pay off the government’s budget deficits, even time itself has become privately subsidized, resulting in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, and so on. Wallace focuses on two groups of people: the students at a prestigious tennis academy and some beaten-down recovering addicts who live just down the street. Floating around in the background is a mysterious movie called Infinite Jest , the most addictive piece of entertainment ever created, capable of reducing viewers to catatonic vegetables—which explains why a cell of wheelchair-bound assassins wants to use it as a weapon.

The conspiracy plot is well thought-out (the late computer programmer Aaron Swartz once wrote a blog post explaining all the machinations) but occurs mostly in the background. The more visceral experience of reading Infinite Jest comes from immersion in Wallace’s unique linguistic style. The author blended colloquialisms with impeccable grammar, minute observation with world-weary intelligence. Just as Infinite Jest ‘s tale of people wasting away in front of highly addictive movies predicted the Netflix age, so too did its smart, slangy sentences become de rigueur for Internet writing.

“His writing style is like the most intelligent comment section in the history of the Internet,” says author Tom Bissell, who penned the introduction to the novel’s 20th-anniversary edition.

One reason the Infinite Jest plot is so hard to figure out is that Wallace dedicated most of the novel’s pages to the everyday lives of its characters. The book is constantly shifting voices, from manic-depressives trying to explain their condition for oblivious doctors to athletes trying to figure out a balance between training and drugs. The result is a very empathetic look at how humans deal with pain, as world-shaking events occur subtly in the background. Director James Ponsoldt first read Infinite Jest in college, and says this all-encompassing attitude inspired his approach to filmmaking.

“As I was figuring out the types of stories and films that I wanted to make, I was digesting a lot of Wallace, so it’s hard to not hear his voice,” Ponsoldt says. “He had a democratic appetite for culture. Anytime I feel an itch of snobbery, or that something’s not worth considering as being worthy of a story, I second guess myself. Everything is worth looking at. Everything is worth trying to understand and empathizing and respecting. He seemed to have a deep respect and love for people. That’s something I find as a challenge to all artists: to be so curious in our interests, to look high and low for stories to tell and characters we want to explore.”

Ponsoldt captured the commotion surrounding the publication of Infinite Jest in his 2015 film The End of the Tour , in which Wallace is played by Jason Segel. Segel says reading the novel prepared him for the role: “When you read David Foster Wallace, you’re getting the story from someone right in the thick of it, someone who’s in the trenches with you.” The fact that the author committed suicide at the age of 46 colored his interpretation as well. “Knowing that he didn’t make it is a real reminder of the fragility of the subjects being discussed,” Segel says.

For his part, Bissell finds that Wallace’s death “makes everything really hard and sad. It’s amazing to be alive at the same time as a writer that good who’s producing new material. It must’ve been what it felt like being alive when the Beatles had a new record coming out, you know? And then the Beatles break up or the writer dies and you’re like, ‘That’s it, there’s not gonna be any more of this….’ It makes Infinite Jest stand that much taller and makes it that much more unforgettable, but also throws this really sepulchral, sad, shadowy light over it.”

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Garbage, Genius, or Both?: 3 Ways of Looking at Infinite Jest

On its 22nd birthday, a look back at three very different reviews of david foster wallace's classic.

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“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

“If nothing else, the success of Infinite Jest is proof that the Great American Hype Machine can still work wonders, in terms of sales. The novel has moved some 60,000 copies and racked up a stack of glowing reviews as thick as it is. What makes the book’s success even more noteworthy is that it is, in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous, and—perhaps especially—uncontrolled. I would, in fact, go so far as to say that Infinite Jest is one of the very few novels for which the phrase ‘not worth the paper it’s written on’ has real meaning in at least an ecological sense; but to resort to such hyperbole would be to fall into the rut that characterises many reviews of this novel.

As the preceding paragraph should make clear, I found Infinite Jest immensely unsatisfactory. I resent the five weeks of my life I gave over to it; I resent every endlessly over-elaborated gag in the book, like the ten-page riff on why video telephones are unviable, or the dozen pages on the teenager who won all his tennis games by playing with a pistol held to his head, or the thousands and thousands and thousands of words devoted to pharmaceutical trivia on all sorts of mind-altering drugs; and I resent especially the 96 pages of tinily typed and deliberately pointless endnotes and ‘errata,’ 388 in total, which make the novel a two-bookmark experience.”

– Dale Peck, The London Review of Books , July 18, 1996

“While reading William Gass’s The Tunnel last year at this time, I feared I was witnessing the last of a dying breed, the encyclopedic American novel that began with Gaddis’s Recognitions in 1955, hit its stride in the sixties and seventies ( Giles Goat-Boy , Gravity’s Rainbow , Gaddis again with J R , The Public Burning ), went baroque in the eighties ( Darconville’s Cat , Take Five , Women and Men , You Bright and Risen Angels ), then raged against the dying of the light in the nineties with Powers’s Gold-Bug Variations and Gass’s massive masterpiece. Who was left to write such novels, or to read them at a time when some scorn such books as elitist, testosterone-fueled acts of male imperialism? For those of us who regard these works as our cultural milestones, not as tombstones in patriarchy’s graveyard, David Foster Wallace demonstrates that the encyclopedic novel is still alive and kickin’ it.

As with The Tunnel , sheer style is the first attraction of Infinite Jest . Even in his precocious first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), Wallace was unfurling long, complex sentences, by turns sonorous and satirical, that were a joy to behold. Infinite Jest displays a wider range of styles—from the subliterate monologue of a poverty-stricken abused woman to technical explications of the properties of various pharmaceuticals—but the main narrative style is both casual and complex, slangy and erudite, a kind of slacker mandarin with comically manic specificity of detail. Even if you have trouble following the multiplex narrative at the macro level Wallace offers huge entertainment value at the micro level, flaunting (but in a good way) an amazing command of late-twentieth-century English, with its proliferating technical terms, street slang, and babble of late capitalism. Only Gaddis and Pynchon have this range, and Wallace takes the language places even those two don’t go.

Addiction struck William S. Burroughs at midcentury as an encompassing metaphor for many facets of American life, and at century’s end Wallace finds a similar metaphor in the recovery from addiction. While Burroughs dwelled with sadistic glee on the horrors of addiction, Wallace takes on the horrors of withdrawal; addiction in Burroughs was largely a response to the need to conform in the Eisenhower fifties, while in Wallace addiction is a response to stress, to the need to excel in the Reagan eighties (the novel’s ‘ethical’ setting, if not its historical one). Again like Burroughs—who is named in the text and seems a pretty clear influence—Wallace uses insect imagery to heighten the repugnance of addiction and detoxification. Infinite Jest is a Naked Lunch for the nineties.

But there’s more: tennis as a metaphysical activity; a hundred pages of endnotes, some with their own footnotes; a parody of an annotated filmography; mindbending excursions into game theory; a Workers’ Comp claim worthy of a Roadrunner cartoon; an essay-length explanation of why video-phones are doomed to fail; and some incredibly sad stories of damaged human beings with more problems than you’ll ever have. The novel is so brilliant you need sunglasses to read it, but it has a heart as well as a brain. Infinite Jest is both a tragicomic epic and a profound study of the postmodern condition.”

– Steven Moore, The Review of Contemporary Fiction , March 22, 1996

“ Infinite Jest , the title of David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan new novel, is a kind of inside joke. It refers, plotwise that is, to an object much sought after by terrorists: a movie reputed to be so entertaining, so lethally perfect, that it causes anyone who so much as looks at it to become comatose and, literally, to die of pleasure. ‘Infinite Jest’ the movie is the final opus of an ‘apres-garde’ film maker with a profoundly ironic sense of humor.

As for Infinite Jest the novel, it, too, is the work of an experimental artist, and it, too, is often compulsively entertaining, though hardly in any lethal sense. It won’t kill you, though its sheer length and readability might give you eyestrain and a stiff neck. It also shows off the 33-year-old Mr. Wallace as one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything, someone who can write funny, write sad, write serious, write satiric, a writer who’s equally adept at the Pynchonesque epic and the Nicolson Bakeresque minute, a pushing-the-envelope postmodernist who’s also able to create flesh-and-blood characters and genuinely moving scenes.

Perfect, however, Infinite Jest is not: this 1,079-page novel is a ‘loose baggy monster,’ to use Henry James’s words, a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Mr. Wallace’s mind. It’s Thomas Wolfe without Maxwell Perkins, done in the hallucinogenic style of Terry Gilliam and Ralph Steadman. The book seems to have been written and edited (or not edited) on the principle that bigger is better, more means more important, and this results in a big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, soliloquies, reminiscences and footnotes, uproarious and mind-boggling, but also arbitrary and self-indulgent.

“As the reader plows through Infinite Jest , it becomes clear that the subplots involving Gately, Hal and the Canadian terrorists also provide a flimsy armature on which Mr. Wallace can drape his ever-proliferating observations and musings. Indeed, the whole novel often seems like an excuse for Mr. Wallace to simply show off his remarkable skills as a writer and empty the contents of his restless mind.

“All these characters are tossed out by the word machine that Mr. Wallace has assembled here, their grotesque, willfully bizarre lives somehow rendered palpable, funny and affecting.

At the end, that word machine is simply turned off, leaving the reader—at least the old-fashioned reader who harbors the vaguest expectations of narrative connections and beginnings, middles and ends—suspended in midair and reeling from the random muchness of detail and incident that is Infinite Jest .

Somewhere in the mess, the reader suspects, are the outlines of a splendid novel, but as it stands the book feels like one of those unfinished Michelangelo sculptures: you can see a godly creature trying to fight its way out of the marble, but it’s stuck there, half excavated, unable to break completely free.”

– Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times , February 13, 1996

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How David Foster Wallace Explained Why He Wrote <i>Infinite Jest</i>

How David Foster Wallace Explained Why He Wrote Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace in his hometown of Bloomington, Ill. in 1996.

I n the new film The End of the Tour , out Friday, Jason Segel plays the late author David Foster Wallace, in a look at Wallace’s life shortly after the release of his 1996 tome Infinite Jest . The movie takes place during the promotional tour for the book that firmly established Wallace as what TIME would soon call “Fiction’s New Fab Four.” (The other three were Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody and Donald Antrim.)

“Wallace made a connection with Infinite Jest , his 1,000-page opus about an early 21st century North America splintered by drugs, fanatics and a business ethic so venal that even the months of the year have product names,” TIME’s R.Z. Sheppard commented.

And, Sheppard had concluded in the previous year’s review of Infinite Jest , there was good reason for the attention Wallace was getting. The book was a “marathon send-up on humanism at the end of its tether” and full of “generous intelligence and authentic passion.” Looking back at it now, that send-up is particularly mordant. After all, the book takes place in 2014.

In a sidebar to the review, Wallace told TIME that the choice to set Jest in the then-future was crucial to the book’s reason for being. “In a time of unprecedented comfort and pleasure and ease, there was a real sort of sadness about the country,” Wallace is quoted saying. “I wanted to do something about it, about America and what our children might think of us. That’s one reason for setting the book 18 years ahead.”

Now, for better or worse, we know.

Read the original review of Infinite Jest , here in the TIME Vault: Mad Maximalism

Calvin Coolidge at Georgetown University

In 1924 : “The market for trained intelligence will never be overstocked.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Oglethorpe University

In 1932 : “The country demands bold persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.”

Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution , at the University of Miami

In 1949 : “It has sometimes been my idea that instead of a speaker offering sage advice, it would be a far better idea to place before a graduating audience a fine symphony … or a magnificent ballet, and when this had been completed, to say; ‘Ladies and gentlemen, life can be very lovely or very sad. It probably will be a mixture of both . . . Goodbye, and God go with you . . .”

Kirsten Mishkin, the first Radcliffe woman to deliver the traditional Latin commencement address at Harvard

In 1970 (and this one’s in Latin, so it needs more room):

“Together, let us establish a new society, the foundations of which will be … not fear, but good will; not war between the sexes, but loyal brotherhood and sisterly love,” she concluded, also in Latin.

Beverly Sills at Barnard College in 1981

In 1981 : “If you wonder when you’ll get time to rest, well, you can sleep in your old age if you live that long. You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.”

Coretta Scott King at Pomona College

In 1984 : “When we make politics a crusade, politicians will begin to understand that they must serve all of the people and not just a select few.”

Ann H. Zwinger at Carleton College

In 1984 : “I highly recommend the pursuit of happiness from east to west, bending and stooping, pausing, enjoying, not going anywhere in particular except down a beach or around a pond, always knowing that there is something wonderful just ahead.”

Barbara Walters at Hofstra University

In 1986 : “The hardest thing you will ever have to do is to trust your own gut and find what seems to work for you.”

Tracy Kidder at Sarah Lawrence College

In 1986 : “If you do feel a little worried, don’t worry about being worried. You’re heading out on an adventure, and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.”

Jodie Foster at the University of Pennsylvania

In 2006 : “Your Penn education has given you a two-by-four. You may build a building or hit someone over the head.”

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Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace’s maximalist novel

Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace's maximalist novel

Big - Little

Fast - Slow

Easy - Hard

Clean - Dirty

Original language

Infinite Jest is David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus and is considered by some as a majorly influential work. Before its publication in 1996, the American author had already published The Broom of the System , a novel, and A Girl With Curious Hair , a collection of short stories. In 1996, Infinite Jest was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. In this complicated and challenging novel, Wallace creates a futuristic world where entertainment is the only thing that matters. At the same time, Infinite Jest explores the possibility of being human in such a world. The novel was highly successful, with some 800,000 copies sold worldwide.

A layered structure

The structure of Infinite Jest is layered and complex: readers follow the events of three main storylines. Thanks to his funambulist style, Wallace manages to unite these different story patterns into an intriguing narrative, though the ending is impossible to solve.

The first deals with Hal Incandenza , a promising seventeen-year-old tennis player who lives at the Enfield Tennis Academy (the E.T.A.). Hal’s mother and father founded the institutions in which he studies, while the story of Hal mingles with that of his parents and his brothers, Mario and Orin. This part of the novel mimics the structure of a failed bildungsroman . In fact, Hal never reaches maturity.

The second storyline deals with Donald Gately , an ex-drug-addict who is recovering at the Ennet House , a halfway house located close to the ETA. Gately is haunted by his old life, but he tries to find a new way of living, free from drug abuse. Drug addiction is one of the novel’s central themes, as it appears in the other two storylines too.

Shakespearean themes

The last great motif relates to the film that gives its name to the book. Infinite Jest , a quote from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , becomes a movie written and produced by Hal’s father, James Incandenza. The protagonist of this film is Joelle Van Dyne, the ex-girlfriend of Hal’s brother Orin, although readers do not know exactly what this film represents – they only know that this film is somehow disturbing because everyone who watches it ends up in a catatonic state, finding themselves unable to move and talk.

A futuristic world

The story is set in a futuristic world where everyone wants to be entertained. In this world, there is a new source of anesthetic pleasure: the teleputer . This imaginary machine resembles both a television and a computer, and it represents the ultimate frontier of American entertainment.

The United States, Canada, and Mexico have joined together and created a new nation known as O.N.A.N, whose president is the singer Jonny Gentle . In this imaginary world, every year bears the name of the corporation that sponsors it. The name of this form of sponsorship is Subsidized Time . So there is a new calendar in the novel, going from the Year of the Whooper to the Year of Glad. The central part of the narrative, though, is set in the Year of Dependent Adult Undergarment .

About being human

Despite its length and complicated plot, Infinite Jest reflects Wallace’s idea that literature must talk about what it means to be a human being . The novel’s world is the reader’s universe. In fact, the book explores themes that are at the core of moral reflections: family relationships, revenge, resentment, competition, and politics. Wallace wanted to overcome the self-reflexivity of postmodern writers and create a connection with the reader. One way he did this was by including 150 pages of endnotes, displaying both essential and futile details of the story.

Infinite Jest’s legacy

The academic critic Massimiliano Ercolino writing in 2015 considered Infinite Jest one of the most influential novels of recent years. He classifies it at the same level as other Maximalist Novels – meaning a long novel with a layered structure that exploits sophisticated literary devices – such as Roberto Bolano ‘s 2666 and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow . A.O Scott in The New York Times called it a “zeitgeist-gobbling novel” and the author “the best mind of his generation.”

The famous Yale University Professor Harold Bloom disagreed. He was described in 2017 by Oxford Bibliographies as “probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world” and was the author of the seminal The Western Canon , a survey of major literature in Europe and the Americas since the 14 th Century. In 2011, he said that “Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace,” that Infinite Jest was “awful,” and that Foster-Wallace had no discernible talent. However, although being in many ways inimitable, Wallace’s flawed masterpiece has created a legacy. As professor Andrew Hobereck suggests in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies , other writers, such as Juniot Diaz, Jonathan Franzen, Deb Olin Unferth, and Jennifer Egan, owe much to Wallace’s Infinite Jest .

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How to Read “Infinite Jest”

By Claire Friedman

illustration of woman resting feet on giant book

1. Buy hardcover copy of “Infinite Jest” at brick-and-mortar bookstore. Touch paper and feel connected to hundreds of years of printed language. Flash cashier knowing, learned smile. Commend self for protecting bookstores from onslaught of crass digital commercialism.

2. Walk home and experience heft of text as bag handles dig into palm. Embrace heaviness as evidence of import. Thumb nose at pedestrians who aren’t carrying impressive, heavy books. Feel smug.

3. List book on Goodreads as “current read,” along with “Team of Rivals” and “War and Peace.” Accept accolades for being superior to rest of TV-watching generation. Refer to reading as “yoga for the mind.”

4. Go out for drinks with friends. Talk endlessly about book. Reiterate “yoga for the mind” thing. Accept new role as group sophisticate. Warn friends about dangers of bar limes.

5. Remove book from bag. Prepare to begin journey by watching three episodes of “Westworld.” Feel confused by multiple time lines. Reward self for sitting through hours of perplexing prestige television by watching one episode of “Jersey Shore: Family Vacation.”

6. Take selfie with book “accidentally” in background. Post on social media. Respond to dazzled commenters with “I guess size does matter. ;)”

7. Tuck book into public-radio tote and carry around town. Offer Kindle readers on subway opportunity to smell real paper, like orphans smelling fresh bread.

8. Develop lower-back pain from literal, not figurative, weight of book. Visit chiropractor. Suggest change of waiting-room reading material from People to multiple copies of “Infinite Jest.” Respond to doctor’s request for details about book with generic facts about David Foster Wallace’s use of unconventional narrative structure and endnotes.

9. Brush up on book on Wikipedia to corroborate thin claim of readership. Begin reading Wikipedia entry multiple times, but repeatedly get distracted by need to research use of CBD oil for dog anxiety.

10. Have smartest friends over for intellectual dinner party. Invite guests to take turns saying favorite things about book. Commit to memory for later use. Retreat to bedroom. Open diary. Write, “I am a FRAUD.”

11. Go on beach vacation. Intend to finally make progress on book during cross-country flight. Take too many barbiturates. Cry while watching documentary about “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Use book as coaster for beers on beach.

12. Spend years wondering what inability to finish book says about ability to lead successful, happy life. Yell at book for eating away at confidence. Destroy all relationships.

13. Come home late one night. Stare at self in mirror. Repeat: “You are the book and the book is you. You are nothing if not someone reading ‘Infinite Jest.’ ”

14. Start claiming to be on third read.

15. Become novelist and frequently discuss monumental influence of Wallace on own work.

16. Use proceeds from own writing career to open literary foundation dedicated to hero, Wallace. Skip ribbon-cutting ceremony to dodge questions.

17. On deathbed, position book on bedside table. Ask spouse to bring up devotion to text in eulogy. Insure that Times obituary mentions enduring passion for “Infinite Jest.” Be buried with book.

18. Get to heaven despite lifetime of lies. Find Wallace. Express love for book and subtly inquire what book was really about. Zone out when explanation is long and complicated. ♦

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The End of the Tour

The story of the five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky and acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace, which took place right after the 1996 publication of Wallace's gr... Read all The story of the five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky and acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace, which took place right after the 1996 publication of Wallace's groundbreaking epic novel, 'Infinite Jest.' The story of the five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky and acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace, which took place right after the 1996 publication of Wallace's groundbreaking epic novel, 'Infinite Jest.'

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Donald Margulies
David Lipsky
Jason Segel
Jesse Eisenberg
Anna Chlumsky
108 User reviews
192 Critic reviews
82 Metascore
4 wins & 18 nominations

David Foster Wallace

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Trivia The song heard on the soundtrack when the film ends is "The Big Ship" by Brian Eno , one of David Foster Wallace 's favorite songs. It was also used for the climax of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015) , another film that premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.
Goofs In regards to the scene where Mrs. Gunderson gives Mr. Wallace and Mr. Lipsky a car tour of Minneapolis sites: The Mary Tyler Moore statue on Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis, was not given to the City by TV Land until 2002. Also, it is not legal for cars to drive down Nicollet Mall.

David Foster Wallace : It may be in the old days what was known as a spiritual crisis: feeling as though every axiom in your life turned out to be false... and there was actually nothing. And that you were nothing. And that it's all a delusion and you're so much better than everybody 'cause you can see how this is just a delusion, and you're so much worse because you can't fucking function.

Crazy credits Halfway through the closing credits, there is an extra scene told from the perspective of David Foster Wallace as Lipsky goes to the bathroom to wash out the chewing tobacco. It shows what Wallace did while he was in the bathroom: he speaks privately into the tape recorder.
Connections Featured in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: Jason Segel/Amy Sedaris/Alessia Cara (2015)
Soundtracks Sunlight Bathed The Golden Glow Written by Lawrence and Maurice Deebank Performed by Felt Courtesy of Cherry Red Records

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Runtime 1 hour 46 minutes
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Is There an ‘Infinite Jest’ Movie in the Works?

Predictably, following the tragic news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide over the weekend, rumors are swirling about a movie version of Wallace’s thousand-page epic, Infinite Jest — some purporting that one may have already been in the works. Devin Faraci at Cinematic Happenings Under Development says he’s heard from sources that DFW was collaborating with Sam Jones, the director of Wilco documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart , on an adaptation.

A blog post from two years ago has the Sam Jones rumor and tacks on the name of playwright Keith Bunin as a potential screenwriter and Jon Brion as the score’s composer, which sort of makes the whole thing sound like whole-cloth speculation. But BroadwayWorld.com, in an article from May of this year on Bunin’s recent theater work, says that Bunin was in fact working on an Infinite Jest screenplay. (Muddling things further is the fact that Curtis Armstrong — Booger from Revenge of the Nerds — supposedly sold a never-made screenplay adaptation of the book to HBO .) Could Infinite Jest: The Movie actually happen? Who knows, but we’d probably be first in line to see it.

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Jay Hoffmann

Books, movies, and code

The Infinite Jest Review

A long time ago, I read Infinite Jest and I have what amounts to complicated feelings about. I think I fall firmly into the camp of people in which the book was not transcendental or life-changing, but still impressive to behold in its scope and depth.

As I’ve been looking back through my notes on it, I read through this review from The Atlantic that came out at the time the book was published. With the benefit of decades of hindsight, it is much simpler (in some ways) to read this book these days. Every complicated plot thread or connection or motif has been meticulously explored these days. Which is why it’s so interesting to read Sven Birkerts try and make sense of the novel at its release. He has a really clear grasp on it, and situates it as an important reflection and manifestation of the country at the turn of the century.

But the artistic intent in Infinite Jest overrides such considerations, or at least places them in perspective. Wallace is, clearly, bent on taking the next step in fiction. He is carrying on the Pynchonian celebration of the renegade spirit in a world gone as flat as a circuit board; he is tailoring that richly comic idiom for its new-millennial uses. To say that the novel does not obey traditional norms is to miss the point. Wallace’s narrative structure should be seen instead as a response to an altered cultural sensibility

And it’s a good reminder that Infinite Jest may be important for a lot of different reasons, not the least of which is that it is a perfect expression of the waywardness and uncertainty at the very tip of the 20th century.

Infinite Jest: The Movie

By Mallory Brabrand

An opening shot of the film pans over the novel’s cover. Photo credit: Stan Craig and Charlie Loach.

If you’re a Collegiate upperclassman taking English electives, odds are you’ve seen one of your classmates lugging around a novel thicker than any textbook. And if you’ve ever taken a moment to ask them to sum up the book, they look at you and say, “It’s complicated.” Though I personally have never taken Upper School English teacher Dr. Z. Bart Thornton’s Postmodern Novel course on Infinite Jest , I did recently get the opportunity to watch one of the most intricate student projects I’ve ever seen: Stan Craig (‘23) and Charlie Loach’s (‘23) Honors Project, Infinite Jest: The Movie .

As a certified Infinite Jest expert, Thornton has been teaching and studying the novel for many years. In an article he co-wrote with one of his students, Madeline Nagy (‘14), for the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) magazine Independent Teacher, they summed up the novel:

“David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest unfolds in the near future. The United States has merged with Canada and Mexico; northern New England has become a toxic waste dump palmed off on the Canadians. Quebecois separatists–many of them in wheelchairs–prowl the lower states, performing terrorist acts…. Citizens spend their time fearing global pandemics and watching entertainment cartridges. One of these cartridges—highly sought—produces in its viewer a state of blissful, and fatal, catatonia. Infinite Jest is set largely at a Massachusetts tennis academy founded by a mad genius and at a residence for recovering addicts just down the hill. The novel explores the price we pay for our frantic pursuits. We meet intellectual tennis prodigies and wayward teenagers, professional football players, avant-garde filmmakers, and middle-aged people struggling to find a community that will lead them to the Higher Power that will help them change their lives.”

After watching Craig and Loach’s film multiple times, I can confidently say I had no real understanding whatsoever of the plot of Infinite Jest . So, heeding the advice of Thornton, I looked up various synopses of the book. Through these brief summaries of the thousand-plus-paged book, I learned that the story is anything but linear. It weaves in and out, jumps back and forth through time, consistently creating new narratives and motifs. I recognized many of the plot points in the synopses from scenes in Loach and Craig’s film. For example, both the synopsis and the film include scenes set at the tennis academy and the halfway house.

When I first heard about this video, I thought it was just another ordinary class project. But upon further inspection, Loach and Craig’s production was anything but. From the first time I watched it with my friends, I could tell that an immense amount of time and effort was put into creating the various scenes and characters. The video’s description reads, “We aimed to capture the spirit of the writing while also creating a captivating viewing experience.” F rom the costumes, to the locations, to the music selections, to the opening and closing credits, I think it is fair to say that they succeeded.

A scene in the film shows Loach holding Craig captive as he searches for “The Entertainment.” Photo credit: Stan Craig and Charlie Loach.

Though completely lost the entire 16-minute duration of the film, I was intrigued by many of the shots I witnessed. My favorite scene comes at the very end of the film. Loach, styled in what seems to be a western bandit outfit, demands, in French, that a tied up Craig tell him where the film titled “The Entertainment” is. I pieced together, with help from both the film and the synopses , that “The Entertainment” is a film produced by the founder of the tennis academy that “is so captivating that anyone who watches it either wastes away watching it on repeat or harms themselves for a chance to see it again.” Craig’s character, maintaining that he doesn’t know where the movie is, then dies in a theatrically creative shot, showing Loach killing Craig in a shadow.

Logistically, Craig said that they spent “ a Saturday from 1:00 to 9:30 getting props and filming, with a one-hour break, and spent Sunday from 10:30 to 7:30 editing the movie.” And although Craig said, “The biggest challenge wasn’t really the time,” the pair did face some struggles in their journey to create this film.

For example, Loach says, “sourcing dialogue from the book itself,” was a major challenge, since the novel’s length made “finding a specific moment or passage… a lengthy task.” Also, since the movie is significantly longer than a regular student video project, “ Editing took a lot of hard work, and Stan’s computer was barely up to the task. By the end of the process, the laptop was almost non-functional and extremely slow due to the size of the file. I remember there was one moment when I thought I had accidentally deleted the entire movie,” said Loach.

As y ou might notice watching the film, a third acting aficionado appears: Ryan Hook (‘23). Loach told me that he would “also like to commend Ryan Hook, part-time cameraman, actor, and all-around helper for his labor. He gave pretty much his entire Saturday for a project he would not receive a grade on.”

In a scene from the film, Loach and Craig sit in Thornton’s classroom in the Sharp Academic Commons, where the Postmodern Novel course is taught. Photo credit: Stan Craig and Charlie Loach.

Though the process of creating this film was long and grueling, Craig and Loach made it through to create an incredible short film. Craig says that the two of them “ very much trusted the other’s ideas without question,” in order for the shooting and editing to go smoothly, and that “moments like when we would put in a music clip and it would fit perfectly made the whole experience worth it.”

If you’re wondering whether Thornton’s Postmodern Nove l course is right for you next semester, the two filmmakers describe it as “intellectually challenging” and “rewarding.” And of course, if you’re looking to get a sneak peak into the depths of Infinite Jest or just enjoy a masterfully executed amateur film, watch Loach and Craig’s Infinite Jest: The Movie .

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Mallory Brabrand is in the Class of 2023.

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'The Garfield Movie' offers a new perspective on a familiar feline

by RYAN PAINTER | KUTV

Garfield (voice by Chris Pratt) and John Arbuckle (voice by Nicholas Hoult) in THE GARFIELD MOVIE. (Photo: Sony Pictures)

The Garfield Movie 2.5 out of 5 Stars Director : Mark Dindal Writers: Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, David Reynolds Starring: Chris Pratt, Hannah Waddingham, Samuel L. Jackson Rated: PG for action/peril and mild thematic elements.

Synopsis: Garfield (voiced by Chris Pratt), the world-famous, Monday-hating, lasagna-loving indoor cat, is about to have a wild outdoor adventure! After an unexpected reunion with his long-lost father – scruffy street cat Vic (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) – Garfield and his canine friend Odie are forced from their perfectly pampered life into joining Vic in a hilarious, high-stakes heist.

Review: I can’t argue with the success that Jim Davis has had with his character Garfield. The comic strip has been running since 1976, there have been numerous films, and a couple of animated series. I’ve seen or read more than my share and have done so without complaint. “The Garfield Movie” is the first time that I’ve been asked to put a critical lens on the franchise.

Garfield has only ever really had one plot and it tends to take place on a Monday. Garfield is lounging, imagining eating lasagna. There is an obstacle in Garfield’s way that requires Garfield to figure out how to get lasagna. Garfield eats lasagna. Odie, a brown-eared beagle who is Garfield’s best friend, often gets in the way. He’s cute, energetic, not so smart, and the lighthearted comedy relief. Jon’s role as Garfield’s owner is to simply love the cat for what he is.

Screenwriters Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, and David Reynolds begin the film with a flashback to Garfield as a kitten. A series of events involving a pizza leads to Garfield meeting Jon. Flashforward to Garfield, now grown, ordering lasagna on (presumably) Jon’s smartphone. It is delivered by drone. The modern world is perfectly suited to Garfield’s needs.

And then Garfield is catnapped.

This is a radical departure from what I’m accustomed to seeing from Garfield. Recasting a notoriously fat cat as an action hero could be an interesting choice. Unfortunately, it isn’t nearly as exciting as it must have looked on paper. Not even when the story takes on some emotional weight as it shifts to Garfield searching for his father. Are we witnessing a mid-life crisis?

Despite the introduction of some new character traits (which some will loathe on principle), this version of Garfield doesn’t feel nearly as removed from the classic interpretation that most of us grew up with as you would think. I didn’t feel like I was seeing anything particularly new. That might comfort some. It filled me with the desire to watch “Toy Story.”

I’m also not enamored with the casting of Chris Pratt. I’ve had Pratt fatigue for quite some time now. I do like Hannah Waddingham (except for the song they have her sing over the credits). I don’t think there is a job that Samuel L. Jackson will turn down. He’s fine, doesn’t seem to be phoning it in.

For all the newness, “The Garfield Movie” doesn’t feel particularly fresh. I do think most young people will enjoy it. Adults? Well, there are two needle drops that work well (and are likely to go over the heads of the kids).

All of that said, the children in the audience enjoyed it. I’ve even heard rumors that my niece and nephews thought it was great.

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As the heroes of multiple universes find themselves helpless to stop a wave of destruction destined to wipe out EVERYTHING, they must make a terrible choice: which Earth, if any, will be saved?

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MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ NR (Not Rated)
Package Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.8 x 5.38 x 0.51 inches; 3.52 ounces
Director ‏ : ‎ Jeff Wamester
Media Format ‏ : ‎ Blu-ray
Run time ‏ : ‎ 42 minutes
Release date ‏ : ‎ July 23, 2024
Actors ‏ : ‎ Jensen Ackles, Darren Criss, Corey Stoll, Meg Donnelly
Studio ‏ : ‎ Studio Distribution Services
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0D2KTJWCQ
Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ USA
Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1
#117 in Blu-ray

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The Old-Fashioned Library at the Heart of the A.I. Boom

By Cade Metz Photographs by Christie Hemm Klok

OpenAI may be changing how the world interacts with language. But inside the company’s San Francisco office, there is a very old-fashioned homage to the written word: a library.

Many of the books lining the walls were suggested by the company’s more than 1,200 employees.

On one shelf is “American Prometheus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb.

Three books over is “Endurance,” about the doomed Antarctic journey of Ernest Shackleton.

There are multiple copies of “The Precipice,” a book about the existential risks facing humanity, along with science fiction classics like “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

There are also books about taking mind-altering drugs and empowering women. And what A.I. company’s office library would be complete without Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

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By Cade Metz

Photographs by Christie Hemm Klok

The two-story library has Oriental rugs, shaded lamps dotting its desks and rows of hardbacks lining its walls. It is the architectural centerpiece of the offices of OpenAI, the start-up whose online chatbot, ChatGPT, showed the world that machines can instantly generate their own poetry and prose .

The building, which was once a mayonnaise factory, looks like a typical tech office, with its communal work spaces, well-stocked micro-kitchens and private nap rooms spread across three floors in San Francisco’s Mission District.

But then there is that library, with the ambience of a Victorian Era reading room. Its shelves offer everything from Homer’s “The Iliad” to David Deutsch’s “The Beginning of Infinity,” a favorite of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive.

Books and plants fill the corner shelves of an oak-colored room.

Built at Mr. Altman’s request and stocked with titles suggested by his staff, the OpenAI library is an apt metaphor for the world’s hottest tech company, whose success was fueled by language — lots and lots of language. OpenAI’s chatbot was not built like the average internet app. ChatGPT learned its skills by analyzing huge amounts of text that was written, edited and curated by humans , including encyclopedia articles, news stories, poetry and, yes, books.

The library also represents the paradox at the heart of OpenAI’s technology. Authors and publishers, including The New York Times , are suing OpenAI, claiming the company illegally used their copyrighted content to build its A.I. systems. Many authors worry that the technology will ultimately take away their livelihood.

Many OpenAI employees, on the other hand, believe the company is using human creativity to fuel more human creativity. They believe their use of copyrighted works is “fair use” under the law, because they are transforming these works into something new.

“To say that this is a public debate right now is an understatement,” said Shannon Gaffney, co-founder and managing partner of SkB Architects, the architectural firm that renovated OpenAI’s headquarters and designed its library. “Though things might look like they are going in different directions, the library serves as a constant reminder of human creativity.”

When OpenAI hired Ms. Gaffney’s firm to renovate the building in 2019, Mr. Altman said he wanted a library with an academic aura.

He wanted it to be a reminder of the Green Library, a Romanesque library at Stanford University, where he was a student for two years before dropping out to build a social media app; the Rose Reading Room, a Beaux-Arts study hall on the top floor of the New York Public Library in Midtown Manhattan; and the library-like bar inside the now defunct Nomad Hotel, 15 blocks south of the Rose.

“My dining room and living room at home is inside a library — floor-to-ceiling books all the way around,” Mr. Altman said in an interview. “There is something about sitting in the middle of knowledge on the shelves at vast scale that I find interesting.”

Once the library was built, OpenAI’s head of real estate began acquiring titles, many suggested by the company’s researchers, engineers and other employees.

Natalie Staudacher, who was part of a team that decamped to the library as they were working on an early version of ChatGPT, suggested Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.”

Others, like “American Art of the 20th Century,” seem to acknowledge that OpenAI’s chatbot technology now learns from both text and pictures.

Some, like David Foster Wallace’s encyclopedic postmodern novel “Infinite Jest,” seem like a sly comment on the new world OpenAI is helping to create.

Many titles, like “English Masterpieces, 700-1900” and “Ideas and Images in World Art,” seem like the weighty hardbacks that professional decorators place strategically inside hotel lobbies because they look the part. Still, the library is a reflection of the organization that built it.

On a recent afternoon, two paperbacks sat beside each other at eye-level: “Birds of Lake Merritt” ( a field guide to the birds found in a wildlife refuge in Oakland, Calif. ) and “Fake Birds of Lake Merritt” (a parody written by GPT-3, an early version of the technology that drives ChatGPT ).

Some employees see the library as a quieter place to work. Long Ouyang, an A.I. researcher, keeps a rolling desk against the wall. Others see it as an unusually elegant break room. On weekends, Ryan Greene, another researcher, pumps his digital music through the audio speakers tucked among the hardbacks.

It is, other employees said, a far more inspiring place to work than a cubicle. “This is why so many people choose to work in the library,” Ms. Staudacher said.

Recently, Mr. Greene began feeding lists of his favorite books into ChatGPT and asking for new recommendations. At one point, the chatbot recommended “The Book of Disquiet ,” a posthumously published autobiography from the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. A friend, who knew his tastes well, had recommended that he read the same book.

“Given the trends and patterns in things that have happened in the past, the technology can suggest things for the future,” Mr. Greene said.

Ms. Gaffney, from OpenAI’s architectural firm, argued that this blend of the human and the machine will continue. Then she paused, before adding: “That, at least, is what I hope and feel.”

Cade Metz writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology. More about Cade Metz

Explore Our Coverage of Artificial Intelligence

News and Analysis

News Corp, the Murdoch-owned empire of publications like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, announced that it had agreed to a deal with OpenAI to share its content to train and service A.I. chatbots.

The Silicon Valley company Nvidia was again lifted by sales of its A.I. chips , but it faces growing competition and heightened expectations.

Researchers at the A.I. company Anthropic claim to have found clues about the inner workings of large language models, possibly helping to prevent their misuse and to curb their potential threats.

The Age of A.I.

D’Youville University in Buffalo had an A.I. robot speak at its commencement . Not everyone was happy about it.

A new program, backed by Cornell Tech, M.I.T. and U.C.L.A., helps prepare lower-income, Latina and Black female computing majors for A.I. careers.

Publishers have long worried that A.I.-generated answers on Google would drive readers away from their sites. They’re about to find out if those fears are warranted, our tech columnist writes .

A new category of apps promises to relieve parents of drudgery, with an assist from A.I. But a family’s grunt work is more human, and valuable, than it seems.

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COMMENTS

Infinite Jest
Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by American writer David Foster Wallace. ... (2010), of which the 2015 movie The End of the Tour is an adaptation. Early reviews contributed to Infinite Jest's hype, many of them describing it as a momentous literary event.
Everything About Everything: David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest' at
Theory 2: "Infinite Jest" is a genuinely groundbreaking novel of language. Not even the masters of the high/low rhetorical register go higher more panoramically or lower more exuberantly than ...
Review: Infinite Jest, a Postmodern Saga of Damnation and Salvation
The novel is confusing, yes, and maddening in myriad ways. It is also resourceful, hilarious, intelligent, and unique. Those who stay with it will find the whole world lit up as though by black ...
The End of the Tour (2015)
The End of the Tour (dir. James Ponsoldt) is a very reflective film, highlighting author Wallace on the last stretch of his book tour for his novel Infinite Jest. Our entry point into this intriguing man is David Lipsky, a Rolling Stone reporter hired to do a piece on him in the late 1990s.
Infinite
Rated 2.5/5 Stars • Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 02/17/24 Full Review Elaine H Infinite despite Mark Wahlberg's commendable performance, falls short due to a predictable plot and lackluster ...
News, sport and opinion from the Guardian's US edition
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'Infinite Jest' celebrates 20th anniversary
Floating around in the background is a mysterious movie called Infinite Jest, the most addictive piece of entertainment ever created, capable of reducing viewers to catatonic vegetables—which ...
Garbage, Genius, or Both?: 3 Ways of Looking at Infinite Jest
Infinite Jest is both a tragicomic epic and a profound study of the postmodern condition." -Steven Moore, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, March 22, 1996 * "Infinite Jest, the title of David Foster Wallace's gargantuan new novel, is a kind of inside joke. It refers, plotwise that is, to an object much sought after by terrorists: a ...
The End of the Tour, David Foster Wallace and TIME on Infinite Jest
July 31, 2015 12:00 PM EDT. I n the new film The End of the Tour, out Friday, Jason Segel plays the late author David Foster Wallace, in a look at Wallace's life shortly after the release of his ...
Infinite Jest
In 1996, Infinite Jest was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. In this complicated and challenging novel, Wallace creates a futuristic world where entertainment is the only thing that matters. At the same time, Infinite Jest explores the possibility of being human in such a world. The novel was highly successful, with some 800,000 copies sold ...
Inside The New York Times Book Review: David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite
This week marks the 20th anniversary of David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest.". In The New York Times Book Review, Tom Bissell writes about the novel's : Read today, the book's ...
How to Read "Infinite Jest"
Refer to reading as "yoga for the mind.". 4. Go out for drinks with friends. Talk endlessly about book. Reiterate "yoga for the mind" thing. Accept new role as group sophisticate. Warn ...
'Infinite Jest' at 20
Feb. 5, 2016. When his "Infinite Jest" came out 20 years ago, David Foster Wallace felt some anxiety about how his fully stuffed novel would be received. In an interview on the radio show ...
The End of the Tour (2015)
The End of the Tour: Directed by James Ponsoldt. With Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Segel, Anna Chlumsky, Mamie Gummer. The story of the five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky and acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace, which took place right after the 1996 publication of Wallace's groundbreaking epic novel, 'Infinite Jest.'
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
92,373 ratings11,299 reviews. A gargantuan, mind-altering tragi-comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America. Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come ...
Infinite Jest, the Movie
A movie has come out about a conversation between two writers. The two writers are talking about a very big book by one of the writers. The conversation is lengthy, being carried on over five days. The book is called Infinite Jest. Around 1996, Infinite Jest, written by David Foster Wallace, was published by Little Brown.
Infinite Jest (movie, 2022)
All about Movie: directors and actors, reviews and ratings, trailers, stills, backstage. Based on the bestselling book from David Foster Wallace, mult...
Infinite Jest (novel by David Foster Wallace)
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 ...
Infinite Jest: Wallace, David Foster: 9780316066525: Amazon.com: Books
Infinite Jest is the name of a movie said to be so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all desire to do anything but watch it. People die happily, viewing it in endless repetition. The novel Infinite Jest is the story of this addictive entertainment, and in particular how it affects a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts and a ...
Why Insufferable People Love Infinite Jest
Infinite Jest was a megahit in 1996, but whatever popularity it enjoyed among magazine writers, it still occupied a niche. By 2016, worldwide sales of DFW's book just exceeded one million copies.
Is There an 'Infinite Jest' Movie in the Works?
Predictably, following the tragic news of David Foster Wallace's suicide over the weekend, rumors are swirling about a movie version of Wallace's thousand-page epic, Infinite Jest — some ...
The Infinite Jest Review
Books, movies, and code. October 10, 2023. The Infinite Jest Review. A long time ago, I read Infinite Jest and I have what amounts to complicated feelings about. I think I fall firmly into the camp of people in which the book was not transcendental or life-changing, but still impressive to behold in its scope and depth. ...
Infinite Jest: The Movie
Citizens spend their time fearing global pandemics and watching entertainment cartridges. One of these cartridges—highly sought—produces in its viewer a state of blissful, and fatal, catatonia. Infinite Jest is set largely at a Massachusetts tennis academy founded by a mad genius and at a residence for recovering addicts just down the hill.
'The Garfield Movie' offers a new perspective on a familiar feline
The Garfield Movie 2.5 out of 5 Stars Director: Mark Dindal Writers: Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, David Reynolds Starring: Chris Pratt, Hannah Waddingham, Samuel L. Jackson Rated: PG for action ...
Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths Part Three BD [Blu-ray]
How customer reviews and ratings work Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don't use a simple average.
Inside OpenAI's Library
Authors and publishers, including The New York Times, are suing OpenAI, claiming the company illegally used their copyrighted content to build its A.I. systems. Many authors worry that the ...