Friday essay: weirdly old-fashioned and wildly uneven — David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest at 30

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TL;DR

A rare dissenting 30th-anniversary reassessment: Julian Murphet argues IJ is a "wildly uneven" book — genuinely great on addiction and recovery at Ennet House, but hobbled by weak plotting (the lethal-film MacGuffin), a narcissistic void at its centre (Hal), and pervasive, structurally-embedded misogyny that he reads as "incel" avant la lettre. He invokes a Coleridgean split — Wallace had "prodigious Fancy" but a "weak and synthetic Imagination" — and folds in the Mary Karr #MeToo disclosures as complicating the legacy. Most anniversary pieces defend; this one prosecutes — a rare, credentialed dissent (Murphet is an academic critic) to set against the Hoby/New Yorker and LARB/Walsh defenses.

Key claims

Overall verdict: a major achievement but fundamentally uneven; "something was not quite right with its writer." The Ennet House / addiction-recovery material is the book's real accomplishment; almost everything scaffolding it is weaker.
Fancy vs. Imagination (the organizing charge): Wallace had enormous inventive "Fancy" but a "weak and synthetic Imagination"; the conspiracy / Québécois-terror plotting reads as "boilerplate bestseller trash."
Structural fragility: the novel's skeleton depends on an implausible MacGuffin (the lethal Entertainment); pull it and the edifice collapses.
Hal as a black hole: centring the book on the paralysingly self-conscious, solipsistic Hal (a stand-in for Wallace's own tennis-prodigy past) drains the narrative rather than energizing it.
Misogyny / "incel" charge: the assumptions about women amount to "a kind of 'incel' misogyny"; the Entertainment's female star embodies an apology-for-existing beauty. On women's stories Murphet quotes Megan Garber's observation that they "get treated as one of Wallace's trademark footnotes might be: decorative, dexterous, whimsical, trivial."
No political vision: like Cormac McCarthy, Wallace offers moral seriousness but "zero political vision," blind to the social movements (feminism, BLM, trans activism) that followed.
Biography folded in: the Mary Karr #MeToo disclosures of predatory behaviour toward young women complicate the legacy.
Comparative dig: laments that IJ has been far more influential than what Murphet judges the superior book of its moment, Pynchon's Mason & Dixon.

Notable passages

"It was, undoubtedly, a major achievement, though it was also clear that something was not quite right with its writer."
"There are few writers with a more prodigious Fancy than David Foster Wallace, who suffered from a weak and synthetic Imagination."
"The centrality of Hal Incandenza is a problem for the novel... this paralysingly self-conscious, troubled, solipsistic, narcissistic character acts as a kind of black hole in the text."
"The uninterrogated assumptions at work here amount to a kind of 'incel' misogyny."
(Murphet quoting Megan Garber:) "women's stories get treated as one of Wallace's trademark footnotes might be: decorative, dexterous, whimsical, trivial."
"I've slogged through Infinite Jest twice (so you don't have to!) and my critical sense that it is not a good book has only been confirmed."

Cross-references

Direct counterpoint to the anniversary-defence cluster: Hoby (New Yorker, "Have We Forgotten How to Read It?", paywalled) and Walsh (LARB, "the Internet, and the Politics of Reading").
The "litbro"/misogyny discourse also runs through LARB/Walsh and the held Debbs video note (debbs-endless-american-ego) — Murphet is the hardest prosecution version.
Mary Karr thread connects to the D.T. Max biography material (dtmax-* notes).