Hermione Hoby at The New Yorker:
David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” a book whose notorious bigness comprises both physical size and reputational heft, turns thirty in February. The occasion is a moment to ask how a novel that mourns addiction and venerates humility and patience became a glib cultural punch line—a byword for literary arrogance, a totem of masculine pretentiousness, a red flag if spotted on the shelves of a prospective partner, and reading matter routinely subjected to the word “performative” in its most damning sense. At a thousand and seventy-nine pages, “Infinite Jest” has become a one-liner.
Last year, an article in the Guardian explored the risks of so-called performative reading under the title “Is it OK to read Infinite Jest in public?” For the Guardian writer, the question was a rare refutation of Betteridge’s law, the journalistic adage stating that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered with a no. Here the answer was a nervous and tentative yes. Mostly, though, the piece drew on and perpetuated the archetype of the noxious “Infinite Jest” bro which has solidified in the quick-drying cement of social media. In 2020, the “Jest” bro hit the big screen in Emerald Fennell’s heavy-handed “Promising Young Woman,” in which a D.F.W. fanboy tells Carey Mulligan’s character that she has to read “Consider the Lobster,” one of the author’s essay collections.
more here.
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