6/19/2023 0 Comments Infinite jest yearsThe very phrase “post-DFW landscape” points out the final reason the novel’s staying power is amusing: no one really anticipated such a 1,079 page (post)postmodern epic of addiction, entertainment, wheelchair-bound terrorists, and tennis finding an initial audience in the first place, much less surviving and thriving two decades beyond its birth. Now a bevy of new publications are surging into the market to help navigate the post-DFW cultural landscape. Max’s biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story and last year’s The End of the Tour. Infinite Jest celebrated its twentieth anniversary this past week, cresting a wave of David Foster Wallace-focused attention set in motion by D.T. The wonder of it is how it nevertheless confronts the predicaments of existence in the Twitter age with such eerie and yet comforting prescience. It’s funny thinking about the sheer number of people who count reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest the first time as a hinge-point in their lives with the same sort of breathless awe others would fall into when remembering September 11th or Kurt Cobain’s death: funny, in part, because most (appreciators and detractors alike) admit to having no idea how to construe its plot primarily, though, because it’s so unmistakably a product of the mid-1990s.
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