From Wallace Bros to Bernie Bros and Back Again

Beginning with Hermione Hoby’s New Yorker essay a little over two weeks ago and continuing with a diverse series of articles, podcasts, social media discussions, Instagram stories and public events, the tone of the thirtieth-anniversary commemorations for Infinite Jest has been refreshingly constructive. Many have followed Hoby’s lead in using the anniversary as an occasion to refocus attention on the literary achievement of the novel, while treading lightly across the various controversies that have shadowed its reception in the intervening decades. This is all to the good. It’s been fun to watch many of the book’s early evangelists re-emerge across various platforms to promote its virtues to a new generation of readers. And I hope nothing I write here will distract people from returning to the thing itself—the thing that really matters—whether again or for the first time.