IJ aside, I would only add that he was a very good essayist. I will never forget his piece about going on a cruise, or the one about Federer, and others as well. Liking that side of him should be 100% not controversial (I think).
Strange coincidence that you write this now -- this whole topic has been bouncing around my head for a couple of weeks now. I read Infinite Jest at the end of last year (at the urging of my very literary female friend, who proclaimed it one of the best books she had ever read). For the record, I thought it was fantastic, but that isn't really the point. Up to a few months ago I had somehow missed all the performative internet DFW hatred, but I stumbled across it as soon as I finished reading, and dipped my toe into the online book world to see what other people thought of it. It was a strange surprise. As you say, almost none of the discussion even mentions whether the book is good or bad, or whether anyone enjoyed it.
It's a really strange feature of online communities -- that so much discourse revolves around throwing negative affect at individual pieces of culture in a way totally unconnected from the actual thing itself. It felt a little like being offered a new food, enjoying it, and immediately being inundated by hoards of people saying "You like that food? Ugh, you're one of THOSE people, I bet you cut in line and play loud music until 2am".
There's nothing particularly masculine or 'bro'-ish about the book. It's a dense post-modern book about addiction and depression and tennis. Why it has become associated with these particular negative things completely escapes me. My literary friend was baffled too... she isn't very online, and when I spoke to her about it she struggled to even understand the dynamic at play.
To borrow a term familiar to this blog, dunking on Infinite Jesters has always been about displacement.
It's fun to forget that our literary culture's impact on the world peaked around your parents' childhood and has been steadily declining ever since, and it's fun to forget that casting down David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, and all the other white maximalist lit-bros of the 90s and 2000s did not create a glorious opportunity for young minority writers, but only increased the amount of neurons in the average American brain free for Internet memes and TV shows. It's fun to forget that the United States can only financially support five literary novelists under 45, and that you are not Ocean Vuong, Sally Rooney, Hanna Yanigahara, Ottessa Moshfegh, or Ben Lerner; that there is only room for one poet, and you are not Amanda Gorman, who is half your age; that the most popular American short story of the 21st century was thought by 80% of its readers to be a #MeToo memoir. It's fun to forget that you have dedicated your artistic life to finding a seat on a sinking ship, and that you have dedicated your career to selling tickets for that same ship to people younger and cooler than you. It is fun to forget that the literary publishing world is driven by mercurial politics, tenuous bubbles, and TikTok trends that are completely uninterested in you, and to forget that you didn't even have the ingenuity to think like Wendy Ortiz and claw your way into publicity by accusing a white lady of stealing your memories. It's fun to forget that it's no longer 2005, when your biggest concerns were judging the lit-bros you date by their bookshelves and maybe one day writing the biggest breakout novel of 2011.
Thank god we can at least signal to each other how much we get it by dunking on DFW and his dweeby fans.
If instead of Twitter, you do a Google search, you'll find almost exclusively positive stuff written about Infinite Jest. The novel remains relevant because it's a great work of art that has an extremely dedicated fan base, nearly a quarter century after it was published. These critics on Twitter are responding to the fact that the book remains beloved to a degree that is unheard of in contemporary fiction, and because the book doesn't speak to them, this makes makes them feel crazy. I'm sure we can all relate to the phenomenon of not being able to understand the appeal of a widely appreciated(relatively so, in the case of literary fiction) cultural artifact. It can be disorienting, and it invites irrational responses, like the assumption that the purported fans of a work of art are actually just faking it. Those of us who love the book aren't overrating it, it truly means more to us than most art could ever aspire to. To put it mildly, it's not for everyone, but it's difficult for art to be universally appealing at the same time that it's *deeply* meaningful to individual appreciators
His essays are brilliant. Not once do you address them in this piece.
I read that he wore the bandanas because he perspired and was always drenched in sweat.
Quizzing people on the particulars of Infinite Jest strikes me as you perpetuating the very thing you write about here. Obnoxious.
He was an addict who explored addiction and the cultural significance of our common language and religion of “recovery.” I’ve heard from people who got clean and sober after reading Infinite Jest, they saw themselves in his description of the addict.
He aspired to greatness, and fell. He also sustained a mental equilibrium for twenty years by taking an MAOI and when he went off of it and was put on other drugs, he sank into suicidal terror and was never able to regain that balance. Having been steadied and saved by an MAOI, I understand.
The casual manner in which you discuss Wallace, and dismiss him and his life and death in this swaggering and gossipy essay, especially as someone who has suffered from and writes about the repercussions of your own mental illness, is sad.
David Foster Wallace hate is one of those situations where I need to remind myself that there are 7.5 billion people alive who have never used twitter. Why do we grant it so much influence?
Loved this post though. Have you ever written about your favourite novels? I'd be very interested.
In 1997 or so I was dating a waiter who worked at a nice restaurant, and would often come to uh, wait for him to finish, at the bar. After closing the place, had many nice conversations with Jen, the hostess, bookish chat over glasses of wine, very enjoyable. (Also about more personal mental health issues, the both of us.) She was reading Infinite Jest at the time, a book I had read a great deal about but not a mountain I wanted to climb at the time, and talked about it. Of course its length and girth was a topic, as I gather it still is. Trying to think if we gossiped about DFW himself, but I don't remember. After the breakup with the bf, I lost touch with Jen.
Forward to 2018, two decades later and I'm living two towns over, there's a knock at the door, and it's Jen; she's running for local office and collecting signatures door to door. She doesn't recognize me; I'd become bearded and bespectacled and was wearing a cap even indoors, it was an icy winter day. I listened to her pitch, gladly signed , and only then said, "Hi, I know you!" "Oh, from (her politics, local TV)?" And it took a minute or two, and she was wide eyed- "OH, Philip's boyfriend!". We had a nice little chat of the sort that happens when it's been over 20 years and we were just friendly acquaintances. Said our goodbyes, I watched her march off across the lawn, then I had a memory flash and yelled, "HAVE YOU FINISHED INFINITE JEST YET??"
"I’m not saying that people shouldn’t feel free to critique annoying or sexist tendencies they seen in their communities. What I am saying is that once these ideas take on a life of their own, identifying them becomes less about actually responding to what’s going on in your world and more about aligning yourself with a particular social culture."
This happens ALL THE TIME within online progressivism. Progressives take a single instance or a few examples of shittiness within X, essentialize it into a progressives vs. X narrative, and thereby force everyone to align themselves with either progressives or X.
The really problematic part is that, once the progressives vs. X narrative is established, X-ish people (naturally) align themselves with X and against progressives. Thus, progressives end up creating, or at least nourishing, the monster that they're fighting.
Case in point: Gamergate.
Of course there's sexism within gamer culture. There's sexism within almost all subcultures, because society is sexist. And yes, the harassment of Quinn and Sarkeesian was horrible. But, at the outset, it was really no different from the abuse and bullying that hundreds of lower-profile women experience on the internet all the time, from all corners of the political spectrum.
Then liberals and progressives latched onto GG and basically worked hand-in-hand with the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos to construct a feminists vs. nerds media narrative. Suddenly, hundreds of otherwise apolitical or only mildly anti-SJW gamers, anime fans, and fedora-wearers learned that they were supposed to be at war with feminists, and threw in their lot with GG. At the height of the GG controversy, the progressive and mainstream liberal reaction to GG was probably a bigger pipeline to the then-nascent alt-right than people like Joe Rogan have ever been.
It's hard to describe the wave of resentment reading this made me feel. I have scarcely read a word of DFW, have no dog in this fight, and the esteem of his literary output is a matter of almost total indifference. Yet I still became furious in spite of this. I think I should just say that book publishing and the current literary milieu which surrounds it is getting exactly what it deserves. I was an English major once upon a time, almost in a different life at this point. I think the big mistake was thinking there was any way to please that crowd. There isn't, they have no interest in being appeased. I guess it's good to be reminded sometimes that they hate people like me, that it was absolutely the right decision to walk away. My main regret now is that I wasted so many years I'll never get back chasing their whims. To hell with them.
I’d enjoy a version of DFW appreciation that acknowledges that Infinite Jest is a heavy lift to really enjoy (such a heavy lift that I’ve never finished it), but focuses on his essays (notably uneven in their quality), which are the most memorable stuff he produced, IMO.
Big Red Son and Up, Simba are fun, insightful reads on human behavior, and Shipping Out is both the best description of a cruise anyone has written and an avalanche of self-conscious cynicism. He has a rare uniqueness as an observer is hardly ever discussed.
I am far from an Elon Musk fan (I own zero cryptocurrency and do not drive a Tesla), but the idea that a guy who made a lot of money making electric cars cool is the most evil man on the planet seems really histrionic.
I'm curious to hear why Freddie thinks IJ is ultimately a failure. I won't ever read it again either, and would only recommend it to people who like dense postmodernism, but I was deeply taken by the stories it told of addiction and consumerism and their intertwining.
I mean, I don't have to love a book in order to consider it a success at whatever it was trying to accomplish.
I think the point about the irrationality of hating on toxic IJ litbros when they are so vastly outnumbered by toxic sportbros is a good one, and analogs seem to pop up everywhere these days; see also the extent to which the left (broadly defined) spent the Trump administration yelling at itself. Familiarity breeds contempt, maybe? We tend to write off/dismiss people who aren't in our circle, but if we perceive that someone _is_ in our circle, and is "doing" our circle incorrectly, that's a major offense?
snobbery in the literary world is not new; it's a thing. Some people make it a point to be thought of as refined. For many writers (i am one) it is highly irritating that the manhattan literary world defines what literature is and is not. There is a huge amount of great work out there that never shows up on the literary radar simply because the gatekeepers do not consider it literary. I suspect that the DFW hatred thing has to do more with this conflict in the writing and reading world than anything else. He is just the current literary male writer that people are picking on as the representative of the literary world and its petrification.
David Foster Wallace Won
IJ aside, I would only add that he was a very good essayist. I will never forget his piece about going on a cruise, or the one about Federer, and others as well. Liking that side of him should be 100% not controversial (I think).
Strange coincidence that you write this now -- this whole topic has been bouncing around my head for a couple of weeks now. I read Infinite Jest at the end of last year (at the urging of my very literary female friend, who proclaimed it one of the best books she had ever read). For the record, I thought it was fantastic, but that isn't really the point. Up to a few months ago I had somehow missed all the performative internet DFW hatred, but I stumbled across it as soon as I finished reading, and dipped my toe into the online book world to see what other people thought of it. It was a strange surprise. As you say, almost none of the discussion even mentions whether the book is good or bad, or whether anyone enjoyed it.
It's a really strange feature of online communities -- that so much discourse revolves around throwing negative affect at individual pieces of culture in a way totally unconnected from the actual thing itself. It felt a little like being offered a new food, enjoying it, and immediately being inundated by hoards of people saying "You like that food? Ugh, you're one of THOSE people, I bet you cut in line and play loud music until 2am".
There's nothing particularly masculine or 'bro'-ish about the book. It's a dense post-modern book about addiction and depression and tennis. Why it has become associated with these particular negative things completely escapes me. My literary friend was baffled too... she isn't very online, and when I spoke to her about it she struggled to even understand the dynamic at play.
To borrow a term familiar to this blog, dunking on Infinite Jesters has always been about displacement.
It's fun to forget that our literary culture's impact on the world peaked around your parents' childhood and has been steadily declining ever since, and it's fun to forget that casting down David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, and all the other white maximalist lit-bros of the 90s and 2000s did not create a glorious opportunity for young minority writers, but only increased the amount of neurons in the average American brain free for Internet memes and TV shows. It's fun to forget that the United States can only financially support five literary novelists under 45, and that you are not Ocean Vuong, Sally Rooney, Hanna Yanigahara, Ottessa Moshfegh, or Ben Lerner; that there is only room for one poet, and you are not Amanda Gorman, who is half your age; that the most popular American short story of the 21st century was thought by 80% of its readers to be a #MeToo memoir. It's fun to forget that you have dedicated your artistic life to finding a seat on a sinking ship, and that you have dedicated your career to selling tickets for that same ship to people younger and cooler than you. It is fun to forget that the literary publishing world is driven by mercurial politics, tenuous bubbles, and TikTok trends that are completely uninterested in you, and to forget that you didn't even have the ingenuity to think like Wendy Ortiz and claw your way into publicity by accusing a white lady of stealing your memories. It's fun to forget that it's no longer 2005, when your biggest concerns were judging the lit-bros you date by their bookshelves and maybe one day writing the biggest breakout novel of 2011.
Thank god we can at least signal to each other how much we get it by dunking on DFW and his dweeby fans.
If instead of Twitter, you do a Google search, you'll find almost exclusively positive stuff written about Infinite Jest. The novel remains relevant because it's a great work of art that has an extremely dedicated fan base, nearly a quarter century after it was published. These critics on Twitter are responding to the fact that the book remains beloved to a degree that is unheard of in contemporary fiction, and because the book doesn't speak to them, this makes makes them feel crazy. I'm sure we can all relate to the phenomenon of not being able to understand the appeal of a widely appreciated(relatively so, in the case of literary fiction) cultural artifact. It can be disorienting, and it invites irrational responses, like the assumption that the purported fans of a work of art are actually just faking it. Those of us who love the book aren't overrating it, it truly means more to us than most art could ever aspire to. To put it mildly, it's not for everyone, but it's difficult for art to be universally appealing at the same time that it's *deeply* meaningful to individual appreciators
His essays are brilliant. Not once do you address them in this piece.
I read that he wore the bandanas because he perspired and was always drenched in sweat.
Quizzing people on the particulars of Infinite Jest strikes me as you perpetuating the very thing you write about here. Obnoxious.
He was an addict who explored addiction and the cultural significance of our common language and religion of “recovery.” I’ve heard from people who got clean and sober after reading Infinite Jest, they saw themselves in his description of the addict.
He aspired to greatness, and fell. He also sustained a mental equilibrium for twenty years by taking an MAOI and when he went off of it and was put on other drugs, he sank into suicidal terror and was never able to regain that balance. Having been steadied and saved by an MAOI, I understand.
The casual manner in which you discuss Wallace, and dismiss him and his life and death in this swaggering and gossipy essay, especially as someone who has suffered from and writes about the repercussions of your own mental illness, is sad.
David Foster Wallace hate is one of those situations where I need to remind myself that there are 7.5 billion people alive who have never used twitter. Why do we grant it so much influence?
Loved this post though. Have you ever written about your favourite novels? I'd be very interested.
In 1997 or so I was dating a waiter who worked at a nice restaurant, and would often come to uh, wait for him to finish, at the bar. After closing the place, had many nice conversations with Jen, the hostess, bookish chat over glasses of wine, very enjoyable. (Also about more personal mental health issues, the both of us.) She was reading Infinite Jest at the time, a book I had read a great deal about but not a mountain I wanted to climb at the time, and talked about it. Of course its length and girth was a topic, as I gather it still is. Trying to think if we gossiped about DFW himself, but I don't remember. After the breakup with the bf, I lost touch with Jen.
Forward to 2018, two decades later and I'm living two towns over, there's a knock at the door, and it's Jen; she's running for local office and collecting signatures door to door. She doesn't recognize me; I'd become bearded and bespectacled and was wearing a cap even indoors, it was an icy winter day. I listened to her pitch, gladly signed , and only then said, "Hi, I know you!" "Oh, from (her politics, local TV)?" And it took a minute or two, and she was wide eyed- "OH, Philip's boyfriend!". We had a nice little chat of the sort that happens when it's been over 20 years and we were just friendly acquaintances. Said our goodbyes, I watched her march off across the lawn, then I had a memory flash and yelled, "HAVE YOU FINISHED INFINITE JEST YET??"
"What?"
"Never mind."
"I’m not saying that people shouldn’t feel free to critique annoying or sexist tendencies they seen in their communities. What I am saying is that once these ideas take on a life of their own, identifying them becomes less about actually responding to what’s going on in your world and more about aligning yourself with a particular social culture."
This happens ALL THE TIME within online progressivism. Progressives take a single instance or a few examples of shittiness within X, essentialize it into a progressives vs. X narrative, and thereby force everyone to align themselves with either progressives or X.
The really problematic part is that, once the progressives vs. X narrative is established, X-ish people (naturally) align themselves with X and against progressives. Thus, progressives end up creating, or at least nourishing, the monster that they're fighting.
Case in point: Gamergate.
Of course there's sexism within gamer culture. There's sexism within almost all subcultures, because society is sexist. And yes, the harassment of Quinn and Sarkeesian was horrible. But, at the outset, it was really no different from the abuse and bullying that hundreds of lower-profile women experience on the internet all the time, from all corners of the political spectrum.
Then liberals and progressives latched onto GG and basically worked hand-in-hand with the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos to construct a feminists vs. nerds media narrative. Suddenly, hundreds of otherwise apolitical or only mildly anti-SJW gamers, anime fans, and fedora-wearers learned that they were supposed to be at war with feminists, and threw in their lot with GG. At the height of the GG controversy, the progressive and mainstream liberal reaction to GG was probably a bigger pipeline to the then-nascent alt-right than people like Joe Rogan have ever been.
It's hard to describe the wave of resentment reading this made me feel. I have scarcely read a word of DFW, have no dog in this fight, and the esteem of his literary output is a matter of almost total indifference. Yet I still became furious in spite of this. I think I should just say that book publishing and the current literary milieu which surrounds it is getting exactly what it deserves. I was an English major once upon a time, almost in a different life at this point. I think the big mistake was thinking there was any way to please that crowd. There isn't, they have no interest in being appeased. I guess it's good to be reminded sometimes that they hate people like me, that it was absolutely the right decision to walk away. My main regret now is that I wasted so many years I'll never get back chasing their whims. To hell with them.
I’d enjoy a version of DFW appreciation that acknowledges that Infinite Jest is a heavy lift to really enjoy (such a heavy lift that I’ve never finished it), but focuses on his essays (notably uneven in their quality), which are the most memorable stuff he produced, IMO.
Big Red Son and Up, Simba are fun, insightful reads on human behavior, and Shipping Out is both the best description of a cruise anyone has written and an avalanche of self-conscious cynicism. He has a rare uniqueness as an observer is hardly ever discussed.
I am far from an Elon Musk fan (I own zero cryptocurrency and do not drive a Tesla), but the idea that a guy who made a lot of money making electric cars cool is the most evil man on the planet seems really histrionic.
I'm curious to hear why Freddie thinks IJ is ultimately a failure. I won't ever read it again either, and would only recommend it to people who like dense postmodernism, but I was deeply taken by the stories it told of addiction and consumerism and their intertwining.
I mean, I don't have to love a book in order to consider it a success at whatever it was trying to accomplish.
Never read Infinite Jest... but all the hate towards it makes me want to read it lol
I think the point about the irrationality of hating on toxic IJ litbros when they are so vastly outnumbered by toxic sportbros is a good one, and analogs seem to pop up everywhere these days; see also the extent to which the left (broadly defined) spent the Trump administration yelling at itself. Familiarity breeds contempt, maybe? We tend to write off/dismiss people who aren't in our circle, but if we perceive that someone _is_ in our circle, and is "doing" our circle incorrectly, that's a major offense?
Roughly 80% of publishing is female, so if sexism exists in that industry, wouldn't it be expense of male authors?
snobbery in the literary world is not new; it's a thing. Some people make it a point to be thought of as refined. For many writers (i am one) it is highly irritating that the manhattan literary world defines what literature is and is not. There is a huge amount of great work out there that never shows up on the literary radar simply because the gatekeepers do not consider it literary. I suspect that the DFW hatred thing has to do more with this conflict in the writing and reading world than anything else. He is just the current literary male writer that people are picking on as the representative of the literary world and its petrification.