A novel act of rebellion

'Infinite Jest' grappled with decade's malaise

- ZAK BLACK

The 1990s was the decade when history ended. At least that was Francis Fukuyama’s provocative thesis in “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992), in which he interpreted recent events in the Soviet Union and China as a sign of liberalism’s world-historical triumph over communism.

Yet the cultural mood — captured by albums like Nirvana’s “Nevermind” (1991) and Leonard Cohen’s “The Future” (1992) — was angsty, gloomy, an unstable mix of ennui and rage. The fall of communism seemed to have made capitalism even more vapid and voracious. When, in 1997, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, starred in a Pizza Hut commercial, it seemed less like history had reached its rational conclusion and more like it had sat down at random and begun devouring itself.

“Infinite Jest” (1996), David Foster Wallace’s 1,000-page magnum opus, is above all an attempt to grapple with this malaise and its implications for human happiness. The novel takes place in the near future, when the Gregorian calendar has run its course and been replaced by “subsidized time,” with each year hosted by a new corporate sponsor: Year of the Whopper, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken. As a result of its uncontrollable consumerism, the “U.S. of A.” has begun a policy of “experialism,” off-loading a handful of northern states onto Canada to be used as a country-sized dump called the Great Concavity. (A year after “Infinite Jest,” Don DeLillo’s “Underworld” would also take up the theme of “waste management.”)