ANY LIST I MAKE of important books can only be a list of books that have been important to me. I long ago came to accept, if not quite to relish, the fact that I'm hopelessly out of step with the culture at large, which leaves me unequipped to make more general claims about importance. So this has been an unapologetically personal exercise. One consequence of that: my list is composed entirely of novels. The novel's decline in importance relative to the memoir and the personal essay may be one of the major literary trends of the past thirty years, but it remains the most important form for me. I am a novelist, and the books that give me the most pleasure, that provoke in me the most thought, that most move me, the books that have been the most important to me, are novels.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996)
I can't say that this is my favorite novel—I would put a few nineteenth and early twentieth-century classics ahead of it—but no book has been more personally influential. Set in a near-future of “subsidized” time (The Year of the Whopper, The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, etc.), Infinite Jest has dozens of intersecting plotlines that unfold over nearly a thousand pages of text and another hundred of endnotes, but it mostly concerns Hal Incandenza, a preternaturally intelligent student at his late father's tennis academy just outside of Boston, and various occupants of a drug rehabilitation center down the hill from the school. I read it for the first time when I was in college, a year after its 1996 publication, and I was most struck by how funny and inventive it was. We kept a copy on hand in our dorm room, and we'd pass the time flipping through it and reading one-liners. Wallace's combination of overeducated braininess and sophomoric humor perfectly suited our sensibilities. The book was my gateway to many of the forbidding monuments of modernist and postmodernist fiction, but it was incredibly inviting. It was clearly intended to be—and it was—so much fun to read.
But there was something else. Wallace was the first writer I encountered who depicted certain features of modern life that even then I felt acutely without being able to name. Chief among these was that all of our culture's endless entertainment could not cover up the essential loneliness of living in a world that treats you first and foremost as a consumer, that does not invite nor even allow you to orient your life toward anything greater than your own gratification.
Read Full Article »