Reading Together: The Infinite Summer

What this essay is

For one summer the book that diagnosed watching-alone was read out loud together. Infinite Summer, the internet-wide collective read of June to September 2009, put several thousand first-time readers on the same seventy-five-pages-a-week schedule, gave them four Guides and a comment thread, and produced, in real time, a great deal of what is now standard Infinite Jest talk. The archive holds the event from both ends: the surviving run of the project's own posts, guide essays and guest essays and roundtables, and, later, the fullest scholarly account anyone has written of it, Kathleen Fitzpatrick's study of the read as a working demonstration of the novel's own argument about connection. This essay is about that one summer up close, how the read worked, what happened inside it, and the irony the whole thing turns on. The long thirty-year story of how the book was received, the reviews and the sainthood and the backlash, is told separately (how-ij-was-read); this essay does not retell it. It stays inside the summer.

The shape of the event

Infinite Summer was, before it was anything else, a schedule. The rule was seventy-five pages a week from late June to late September, slow enough that a working adult could keep up and public enough that falling behind was a social fact. Four first-time Guides, Matthew Baldwin, Kevin Guilfoile, Eden Kennedy and Avery Edison, posted their way through the novel a week at a time, none of them an expert, all of them reading it for the first time in front of everyone. That was the design's quiet audacity: the people leading the read were as lost as the people following it, and said so.

The project opened with instructions. Its "how to read" post, assembled by the wallace-l veteran Matt Bucher with Nick Maniatis and Kathleen Fitzpatrick, is a list of practical mercies for the first-timer: read the endnotes, because the bouncing back and forth is "a feature, not a bug"; persevere past the notorious early dialect section to page two hundred before deciding anything; and keep Hamlet in your peripheral vision, since "first two words of Infinite Jest are 'I am'" (infinite-summer-how-to-read-ij). The advice did the work a syllabus does: it existed because the book's difficulty was understood, from the start, as the thing the community was there to metabolize.

The social technology mattered as much as the reading technology. Amanda French's guest essay on how to run an Infinite Jest meetup reads like a transposition of the novel's own recovery-house rules: hold it in a bar, adopt the meeting's discipline that no one can be thrown out, and keep the gathering "just uncomfortable enough" (infinite-summer-guest-essays) that people actually talk. A book about the labor of paying attention to other people was being read by a group that had built itself attention rules cribbed from the book. And the read pulled in the novel's own makers: Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor, contributed an essay on editing the book, sharing marginalia in which Wallace fought particular cuts ("Michael, have mercy") (infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij), and Fitzpatrick, then Wallace's Pomona colleague, contributed one on teaching it. The event even spilled past its own website into satellite read-alongs, among them Scott Esposito's blog series working through the early novella "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" as a run-up to the masterpiece (esposito-westward-my-infinite-summer). The summer was not a website; it was a weather system.

The voices

The lasting artifact of Infinite Summer is not any single reading but the range of them, twenty-one guest essays and nine roundtables of smart first-readers hitting the book's puzzles out loud. A few of those moments have outlived the season.

Eden Kennedy found the book's ending an image from another medium entirely. Gately alone on the beach, she wrote, was like "that long sustained chord that just slowly fades out until you hear the piano bench creak" at the close of the Beatles' "A Day In the Life"; "That's what reading Gately on the Beach felt like." (infinite-summer-guest-essays). Giving the final page to Gately, she added, "made Gately seem like the hero of the whole book" (same source), which is close to where the book's readers have stayed ever since.

Not every essay was a reader's essay. The collection's emotional outlier is John Moe's, which is about his brother's suicide seventeen months before Wallace's own, and about the fury of watching a private grief turned into other people's literary occasion. When someone kills himself, Moe wrote, "everything else they do is a prologue to that act…. Their lives read like a suicide note." (same source). It is the piece that most refuses the summer's warmth, and the summer kept it anyway, which is part of what the summer was.

And some of the readers were making things that would outlast the read. Greg Carlisle's essay recounts writing running numbers into the shadowed circles of a four-dollar remaindered hardcover, the private bookkeeping that became his section-by-section guide to the novel; he closes on the claim that the depth of the book's last sentence is "unparalleled in literature" (same source). The signature Infinite Summer arguments, the ending as puzzle or as principle, the book as a course of treatment for irony, ran through these same threads too, but those are the beats the long reception history gathers up; here they are simply the sound of a large room reading at once. The reassurance the veterans kept repeating to the panicking, "It gets better" (same source), described the whole enterprise.

infinitedetox

One guest post has to be handled with care, because its own author framed it as testimony and a scholar later made it a cautionary case. A pseudonymous participant posting as infinitedetox contributed an essay that reads the act of reading itself as a kind of surrender. Against the Entertainment's passive surrender, the essay sets an active one, the recovery-meeting posture of giving yourself over, "Give It Away To Keep It," and describes a reading of the novel as "active surrender" that, the post says, helped its author quit opiates (infinite-summer-guest-essays). Taken as a reception datum, it shows what the summer did for some people: the book was not analyzed but used.

That post is also the hinge of the summer's second thought about itself, and it belongs, as evidence, to the scholar who took it seriously. Fitzpatrick would quote its opening line, "My name is infinitedetox and I am an addict" (cohen-konstantinou-legacy-of-dfw), and read it not as a triumph but as a warning, a reading developed in the next movement, and kept here where it belongs, as her reading of a post and not a verdict on a person.

Fitzpatrick's study

The definitive account of what Infinite Summer meant was written by someone with an unusual vantage on it. Kathleen Fitzpatrick was not only a critic of Wallace but his actual department colleague at Pomona, close enough to insist on the distinction a former student of Wallace's once drew, that "There was David Foster Wallace, and there was Dave." (memorial-fitzpatrick-requiescat-in-pace). Her teaching had already argued, against the temptation to read the work back through the death, that "the act of imaginative identification with someone outside himself was precisely" what "kept Dave alive" (infinite-summer-fitzpatrick-teaching-ij). Her scholarly chapter on the group read, "Infinite Summer: Reading, Empathy, and the Social Network" (cohen-konstantinou-legacy-of-dfw), turns that conviction on the event itself.

Her argument, presented here as hers, is that Infinite Jest proved Wallace's faith in fiction as a form of connection, and that the 2009 mass read extended that connection from the private circuit between reader and text out among the readers themselves. She called Infinite Summer an "online group reading project that, I argue, instantiates this potential in" the very act of reading together (same source). She records its mechanics with a historian's care, that "Seattle blogger Matthew Baldwin launched Infinite Summer on" the first of June 2009 to force himself through a book he had owned for years and never finished (same source), and the seventy-five-page weekly march that followed. And she grounds the connection in the book's own recovery material: the meeting's counsel to "try to Identify instead of Compare" (same source), with Identify glossed as empathize, she reads as Wallace's own theory of the painful, deliberate opening of the self to another that a public read enacts. Sympathy, in her distinction, projects your own feeling onto someone else; empathy feels for another while conceding that the other stays other, and it is empathy, she argues, that both the novel and the reading of it together court.

What keeps the chapter honest is that its central example is also its central worry. Fitzpatrick makes infinitedetox her cautionary case: she reads that post as a naive over-identification, the reader mistaking a book about addiction for the work of recovery itself, and she credits the correction not to the solitary book but to the shared venue, which turned a private overinvestment into ongoing, answerable engagement. She flags the other risks too, the utopian glow that hangs over any such account, the transference the identification can slide into, and the open question of whether the thing could ever be repeated. But her verdict on the larger anxiety of the era is that there were, in her phrase, encouraging signs that the "Internet do not seem to be driving reading into obsolescence." (same source). The network had not killed the deep read. For one book, on one schedule, it had staged one.

The teleputer that never came

Here is the irony the archive is uniquely placed to state, and it is Fitzpatrick's own. Infinite Jest imagined the future of media as an extension of the television it feared: the teleputer, a one-to-many receiver into which entertainment is pulse-purchased and consumed alone, spectation without community, the very shape of attention the novel treats as lethal. What actually arrived was not that. The Internet that carried Infinite Summer is a many-to-many read-and-write network, and that single structural difference, receivers that could also transmit, is what let a dispersed crowd of strangers become a reading community at all (cohen-konstantinou-legacy-of-dfw). The book's own model of the future had no slot for the thing that saved the book. A novel that could see the addictive one-way screen with terrible clarity could not see the comment thread, and it was the comment thread that pulled thousands of readers through the addictive one-way screen's thousand-page indictment of itself.

Which is why the summer's closing note is a reader taking back an old reflex. Matthew Baldwin, who had spent years as a connoisseur of the ironic eye-roll, confessed at the end that when a friend had once told him a book changed his life, "I didn't roll my eyes, or laugh in a way that wasn't happy. But only because I suppressed the urge." (infinite-summer-guest-essays). By the last roundtable the suppression was gone: "I think I owe that guy a beer. Honestly, I think I owe the entire Internet a beer." (same source). Infinite Jest is a book you read alone, in a private struggle with your own attention, and it turned out to be a book a great many people could only finish together. The summer did the thing the novel kept saying it wanted and could not quite imagine anyone doing: it got a roomful of people to attend to the same difficult thing at the same time, on purpose, and to like each other for it. The rereading culture that followed, the clubs and the chapter-by-chapter shows, all descend from that discovery, that the way through the book about being alone was to not be.

Sources

This essay stays inside the 2009 event and consumes the archive's reception record rather than re-arguing the novel's plot. Its primary materials:

• infinite-summer-guest-essays the surviving run of the project's guest essays, guide posts and roundtables (Kennedy on the ending, Moe on his brother, Carlisle, Amanda French's meetup rules, infinitedetox, Baldwin's recantation); the Wayback-preserved posts are quoted as the note carries them, never from the spam-injected live site.
• infinite-summer-how-to-read-ij the read's instruction sheet (endnotes, perseverance, the Hamlet frame).
• infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij the editor's own guest essay that season; the composition-and-cuts argument itself is weighed elsewhere (the-editing-of-ij).
• infinite-summer-fitzpatrick-teaching-ij Fitzpatrick's July 2009 guest essay on teaching the novel, and the anti-obituarist argument her later study rests on.
• cohen-konstantinou-legacy-of-dfw Fitzpatrick's scholarly chapter "Infinite Summer: Reading, Empathy, and the Social Network," the empathy-among-readers thesis, the Identify-not-Compare reading, the infinitedetox cautionary case, and the one-to-many-teleputer versus many-to-many-network irony.
• memorial-fitzpatrick-requiescat-in-pace the Pomona faculty memorial that establishes Fitzpatrick's colleague vantage and the Dave-versus-David-Foster-Wallace distinction.
• esposito-westward-my-infinite-summer a satellite read-along from the same season (described, not quoted for the novel).
• how-ij-was-read the sibling account that owns the full thirty-year reception arc; this essay owns the 2009 event in depth and does not retell it.