Is it OK to read Infinite Jest in public? Why the internet hates 'performative reading' (Alaina Demopoulos, The Guardian)

TL;DR

A first-person feature that uses Infinite Jest as the emblem of "performative reading" — the online mockery of people who carry difficult classics in public to signal taste and attention span. Demopoulos surveys the discourse (mocking memes, the "poser art himbo … performative copy of Frankenstein" caption, Hailey Bieber's Vogue-TikTok Nietzsche and Kant), then runs her own experiment: she buys a $9 IJ in Brooklyn and reads it on the subway and in Washington Square Park, braced for humiliation, and finds that essentially nobody cares — the one person who engages is a gen X man who advises her to "cut the book into thirds." The turn is a defense of public reading against the branding-anxiety behind the mockery: the pleasure of "falling into a story and tuning the world out" is worth more than the fear of being caught doing it, and in a "literary crisis" of collapsing attention, the counsel is "Read everywhere, and read often." The value here is documentary: it fixes Infinite Jest's status as the default litbro-adjacent public-reading signifier at mid-2025, one year before the 2026 anniversary wave's "getting past it" reportage.

Key claims

• The object of ridicule is "capital “L” literature." "the books that qualify are capital “L” literature: Faulkner, Nabokov, Franzen. The heavier the better" — not romance or romantasy. IJ, "over just 1,000 pages," is the heaviest and so the emblem: she chose it because "I did not want to be the dude on the subway reading Infinite Jest."
• The signifier is real but the disgust is disproportionate. "It requires a deeply broken brain to be this bothered by a stranger's summer reading list"; the mockery is "a wariness of personal branding", reading treated as "aesthetic curation." She reframes the John Waters tote-bag line ("if you go home with someone and they don't have books, 'don't fuck 'em'") into the contemporary anxiety that "anyone who dares read the newborn-sized Infinite Jest during their lunch break" is "an absolute loser."
• The experiment finds indifference. On the train the woman across from her "had things to worry about other than my reading list"; in Washington Square Park nobody films her — except "a gen X man … exactly the type of guy who might consider David Foster Wallace a modern-day saint," who asks how she's doing and "suggested that I literally cut the book into thirds to make it more manageable. (Apparently this is common knowledge among Wallace support groups…)."
• The payoff is enjoyment, not performance. "One of life's simplest pleasures is falling into a story and tuning the world out. But to get there, you have to stop worrying about what someone's going to think of you."
• The larger stakes: a reading crisis. Students "can't read entire books any more," smartphones "ruined our ability to focus", "AI slop will take over publishing"; against that, "Read everywhere, and read often."
• The coda deflates the whole frame. A friend's story of a man reading IJ in a Portland spa jacuzzi: "It wasn’t a performance, it was promotion."

Theories & evidence

This is a reception essay; it advances no theory about the interior of Infinite Jest. Its single interpretive contribution is about the novel's cultural status, recorded below as a reception sighting for the litbro cluster (which, per the Bissell/Medvetz precedent, stays out of the theory registry).

THEORY: Infinite Jest is the emblematic "performative reading" signifier — the litbro-adjacent, pretension-signaling state of mid-2025 — and the mockery is disproportionate branding-anxiety the book itself outlasts

• Crux: ij-boys-book (reception anchor)
• Stance: mentions
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] IJ chosen as the emblem because it is the thing one avoids being seen reading — "the dude on the subway reading Infinite Jest"; "the newborn-sized Infinite Jest during their lunch break an absolute loser".
  • [secondary] the gen X "David Foster Wallace a modern-day saint" reader and the "Wallace support groups" cut-into-thirds folklore — IJ as a fandom with its own in-group rituals.
  • [secondary] the experiment's finding of indifference, and the enjoyment turn, as the essay's rebuttal to the signifier's power.
• Notes: Reception-side only; no IJ-internal engagement. Value is the dateline: this fixes the litbro/pretension-signifier state at mid-2025, the baseline the 2026 anniversary pieces (Kelley's "ready to be normal about Infinite Jest") report the culture moving past. Stays OUT of the theory registry per the Bissell/Medvetz reception-scaffolding precedent; anchors ij-boys-book. The Waters "don't fuck 'em" line here is the general books-at-home version (John Waters), distinct from the IJ-specific "don't fuck him" joke Sarah McNally airs in the Kelley essay — two different jokes, same discourse.

Sighting in passing (no block)

• book-as-entertainment: NOT argued. Demopoulos does not claim IJ enacts its own critique of entertainment; the attention-crisis framing (smartphones, AI slop, students who can't finish books) is reception/culture context, not a design claim about the novel.

Themes

Reception and cultural signaling (IJ as the heaviest "performative" book); public reading and personal-branding anxiety; the attention/literacy crisis (smartphones, AI, the difficulty of finishing long books); the private pleasure of deep reading recovered against social self-consciousness.

Cross-references

• krug-wapo-dfw-fateful-correspondent — the WaPo column that cites this piece by name ("Alaina Demopoulos asked in the Guardian last year"); this note is the primary behind that pointer.
• kelley-whats-so-funny-about-ij — the 2026 anniversary reportage of the litbro frame fading; Demopoulos is the mid-2025 baseline it moves past. Both carry a "don't fuck 'em/him" joke, from different sources (Waters here; McNally there).
• conversation-murphet-ij-at-30-uneven — the 2026 wave's prosecution pole; Demopoulos sits on the affectionate, deflating side of the same signifier debate.
• medvetz-transcendence-fast-slow — the consecration/backlash cycle frame this street-level instance illustrates.

Notable passages

• "I did not want to be the dude on the subway reading Infinite Jest."
• "One of life’s simplest pleasures is falling into a story and tuning the world out."
• "Read everywhere, and read often."
• "It wasn’t a performance, it was promotion."