Wealthy eras usually repair to realism, at least for a while. This was true too of the 1990s. The well-wrought short story—“no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past,” as Wallace wrote in “Fictional Futures”—returned to the fore, if indeed it had ever been anywhere else. Lyrical realist novels like Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, and Richard Ford’s Independence Day dominated awards lists. Cormac McCarthy became the best-known literary author of the decade, but it wasn’t the intense McCarthy Wallace loved of Blood Meridian and Suttree but the more romantic one of All the Pretty Horses, the story of a young cowboy who crosses into Mexico to look for love and a friend’s stolen horse.
No time of calm is without its undertone of introspection and angst; affluence has its victims too. Wallace was by no means the only one nor the only one trying to give them voice. Certainly anyone as attuned to television as Wallace was could witness the damaged and the distressed telling their stories all day long.17 And something similar was going on in writing by non-Anglo American writers, many of whom were presenting a vivid world of stories drawn from their own histories. But these were not authors to whom Wallace has a strong response; his remained the world of the 1970s novel, predominantly male, Caucasian, and highly erudite.18 There a sense of anxiety was more muted, though not absent. Rick Moody was writing Purple America, a novel that deploys shifting consciousnesses to define a damaged and polluted America, and William Vollmann was pursuing the reportorial inquiry into the darker side of American life he had begun with The Rainbow Stories, an investigation similar to one that Denis Johnson was conducting in books like Jesus’ Son. These were a few of the authors who shared or even anticipated Infinite Jest’s sense that the focus on consumption and pleasure in modern American life would end badly. None of them, though, combined such a stance — the anti-hedonistic strain in American fiction — with the promise of redemption that lies at the center of Infinite Jest.
Indeed, earnest storytelling seemed to nearly everyone but Wallace antithetical to proving oneself worthy of taking on questions of societal unease; Don Gately is a character one can’t imagine any of the others creating. Literature — especially from the sorts of writers Wallace felt in conversation with — was about delving, extracting, and then layering a complicating layer of language on observed life; there was nothing evangelical about it. The literary gesture existed almost as an inverse to the narrative of recovery meetings, where as Wallace wrote in Infinite Jest, “an ironist…is a witch in church.…Same with sly disingenuous manipulative pseudo-sincerity.” In Infinite Jest, Wallace was proposing to wash Pynchonian excess in the chilling waters of DeLillo’s prose and then heat it up again in Dostoevsky’s redemptive fire. “Look man,” Wallace told Larry McCaffery in the Review of Contemporary Fiction interview,
we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.
Infinite Jest then didn’t just diagnose a malaise. It proposed a treatment, answering a need that Wallace saw perhaps better than any other writer of his time. The book is at once a meditation on the pain of adolescence, the pleasures of intoxication, the perils of addiction, the price of isolation, and the precariousness of sanity. (Wallace never forgot David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and the skein that separates unremarkable from abnormal in America.) It spoke of the imminence of collapse and the possibility that one can emerge stronger from that collapse. It offered faith apart from religion. Its multiple voices jibed with an America that no longer spoke as one, an America in which, as in James Incandenza’s films, “you could bloody well hear every single performer’s voice, no matter how far out on the…narrative periphery they were.” It captured a new generation of young people — especially young ones, especially male — who in the midst of plenty felt misunderstood or ignored, who with each decade had less and less idea how to make their rich inner selves visible, who understood what Hal meant when he objected:
I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. Let’s talk about anything.
But the book also had the range to get beyond the much-trafficked literary realm of the misunderstood young. It captured another America, the millions felled by the “input too intense to bear” that Wallace had signaled in “Westward,” the Don Gatelys of the world, charismatic and full of fallow potential, people “damaged or askew,” calling out to the reader from inside their broken lives, as they call out to Hal’s sensitive brother Mario as he visits Ennet House:
Mario likes the place: it’s crowded and noisy and none of the furniture has protective plastic wrap…. The inside of it smells like an ashtray, but Mario’s felt good both times in Ennet’s House because it’s very real; people are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you could tell they were worried inside.
There was no need to decide which Infinite Jest you were reading, since, after all, these two main strands both emanated so clearly from the same concern: how to live meaningfully in the present. There is a generosity to the world created by this 1,079-page novel. A great intelligence hangs above it and seems not entirely uninterested in our survival. It watches from the walkway about the courts at the Enfield Academy and lurks in the communal rooms at Ennet House, explains the rise of O.N.A.N. and the fall of network advertising, the composition of tennis rackets, the Boston street names of controlled substances, and the history of videophony. Infinite Jest, for all its putative difficulty, cares about the reader, and if it denies him or her a conventional ending, it doesn’t do so out of malice; it does it out of concern, to provide a deeper palliative than realistic storytelling can, because, just as in Ennet House, you have to work to get better. The book is redemptive, as modern novels rarely are (there is a reason Wallace had to reach back to Dostoevsky for a model). Gately abides, taking on, almost in a Christlike way, the sins of his flock, and Christ implies a God. Wallace never forgets his pledge, as he told McCaffery, that “all the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers.”