Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

source

TL;DR

Ted Gioia's New Canon appreciation — a breezy, comic case for Infinite Jest as the big book everyone else was too timid to write. Gioia's conceit is that "novelists have scaled back their ambitions", that "big, sprawling books are dead" — "But somebody forgot to tell David Foster Wallace". Wallace "clearly was operating under the old Pynchon-house rules." The essay's substance is two-fold: a structural reading of IJ as "the equivalent of four novels" — a tennis academy novel, a halfway-house addiction novel, a science-fiction tale of a lethal Entertainment, and a political satire of a crooner-President remapping North America — that the author "forces them together with brazen contempt for literary decorum"; and a thematic verdict that beneath the flamboyance "this book is a critique of flashiness and attitude," arguing "for a healthy distrust of irony and intellectualizing." Gioia's line: "Infinite Jest has a heart of gold." The piece is chiefly reception — it reproduces the 1996 poles (Birkerts and Newsday's hype against Kakutani's demur) and canonizes IJ into Gioia's "New Canon" — with a light interpretive spine.

Key claims

The downscaling satire. Gioia's open: "novelists have scaled back their ambitions in recent years"; "big, sprawling books are dead. But somebody forgot to tell David Foster Wallace." "Wallace clearly was operating under the old Pynchon-house rules." Gioia jokes about needing "a 27B-6 form signed by three senior editors" to publish a novel over 650 pages.
The reception snapshot. IJ "found its audience, garnering praise from delighted readers and enthusiastic reviewers": Sven Birkerts in The Atlantic Monthly — "Wallace is, clearly, bent on taking the next step in fiction" — and Newsday — "If you believe the hype, David Foster Wallace is about to be crowned the next heavyweight of American fiction. And the accolade is probably deserved." Against them, "a certain Michiko Kakutani," who "wanted Infinite Jest to be tighter around the waist" and likened it to "an unfinished Michelangelo sculpture weighed down by big chunks of marble that need to be cut away" — but who conceded Wallace was "a writer of virtuosic skills who can seemingly do anything" (Gioia's rendering; Kakutani's printed phrase was "a writer of virtuosic talents").
The four-novels structure. "In truth, Wallace put the equivalent of four novels into Infinite Jest." The four "have seemingly little to do with one another--although the author eventually forces them together with brazen contempt for literary decorum": (1) "the Great Sports Novel, a detailed and brilliant account of life in a very competitive tennis academy"; (2) "an equally detailed and gut-wrenchingly honest novel about recovering addicts in a halfway house"; (3) "a sci-fi tale based on the concept of a mysterious video that is just too entertaining … so much so, that people who start watching it can never stop"; (4) "a political satire about a crooner turned President who re-shapes North American borders in alignment with his own personal obsessions."
The formal daring. Story lines arrive "in the form of the description of a filmed puppet show" (the political sub-plot), "in the footnotes," "in street jargon full of malapropisms," or "in streamlined question-and-answer interludes in which all of the questions have been conveniently omitted." In short, "none of this 1,079 page novel is padding. None of it is "straight narrative" or conventional story-telling."
The anti-irony heart. "Yet this flamboyant novel is also one of the most down-to-earth books you will ever read. At its very core, this book is a critique of flashiness and attitude, and argues for a healthy distrust of irony and intellectualizing. Here is my verdict: Infinite Jest has a heart of gold." Its most vivid viewpoints "are so simple that, at times, they come across as truisms and clichés. But, again and again, our author forces the dead cliché back to life-- which may be one of the most difficult tasks any author can face."

Theories & evidence

Crux: encyclopedic-design
Stance: mentions
Evidence:
- [inference] "Wallace put the equivalent of four novels into Infinite Jest", which "have seemingly little to do with one another--although the author eventually forces them together with brazen contempt for literary decorum." [¶ four novels]
- [inference] The four named: the tennis-academy novel, the halfway-house addiction novel, the lethal-Entertainment sci-fi tale, and the crooner-President political satire. [¶ four novels]
Notes: A popular-criticism structural characterization, not a design argument. The tennis + addiction pair echoes the documented account of the novel's composition (a tennis book and an AA book fused by rewrite), which Gioia extends to four by adding the Entertainment and Gentle/O.N.A.N. strands — but he offers no compositional evidence; this is a description of the reading experience, not a draft-history claim.

THEORY: Beneath its flamboyance Infinite Jest is an anti-irony book — a critique of flashiness that revives dead clichés into earnest truths

Crux: irony-vs-recovery
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [inference] "At its very core, this book is a critique of flashiness and attitude, and argues for a healthy distrust of irony and intellectualizing." [¶ heart of gold]
- [inference] Its plainest viewpoints "come across as truisms and clichés. But, again and again, our author forces the dead cliché back to life-- which may be one of the most difficult tasks any author can face." [¶ heart of gold]
Notes: Gioia's "heart of gold" verdict sets the book's earnest core against its ironic surface — the anti-irony/sincerity reading. The dead-cliché-revived claim is the same move readers make about the hard-won truth of the novel's AA clichés. A reception-tier assertion, no textual argument beyond the verdict.

Themes

Reception and canonization (the downscaling satire, the New-Canon induction, the reproduced 1996 poles of hype vs. Kakutani's demur); the encyclopedic / four-novels structure and its formal daring (puppet-show exposition, footnote plotlines, question-omitted interviews); the lethal Entertainment as one of the four strands; the anti-irony sincere core ("heart of gold", dead clichés revived). Influence texture: the "Pynchon-house rules" framing.

Cross-references

Reproduces the 1996 reception poles the archive holds directly: the Kakutani flagship review (Gioia recaps her Michelangelo-marble critique and her virtuosity concession, both in his own loosened wording) against the Birkerts/Newsday hype; complements Peck's contemporaneous pan as a later, admiring recap of the same reception moment.
A canonization cousin of A. O. Scott's 2008 appreciation and Chad Harbach's n+1 essay: all three induct IJ as the era's necessary big book, Gioia in the breeziest, most crowd-pleasing voice.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the essay (raw uses straight ASCII quotes; hard-wrap newlines rejoined).

"novelists have scaled back their ambitions in recent years."
"big, sprawling books are dead. But somebody forgot to tell David Foster Wallace."
"Wallace clearly was operating under the old Pynchon-house rules."
Birkerts (via Gioia): "Wallace is, clearly, bent on taking the next step in fiction." Newsday (via Gioia): "If you believe the hype, David Foster Wallace is about to be crowned the next heavyweight of American fiction." Kakutani (via Gioia): "a writer of virtuosic skills who can seemingly do anything."
"In truth, Wallace put the equivalent of four novels into Infinite Jest."
"a mysterious video that is just too entertaining"; "a political satire about a crooner turned President who re-shapes North American borders in alignment with his own personal obsessions."
"none of this 1,079 page novel is padding."
"this book is a critique of flashiness and attitude, and argues for a healthy distrust of irony and intellectualizing." … "Infinite Jest has a heart of gold."
"our author forces the dead cliché back to life-- which may be one of the most difficult tasks any author can face."