LONG STORY

"Infinite Jest" turns thirty. Have we forgotten how to read it?

- HERMIONE HOBY

A few stanzas from the end of Chaucer's long poem “Troilus and Criseyde,” the author interrupts his story to indulge in a bit of reception anxiety. “Go, litel book,” he bids the manuscript that’s soon to be out of his hands. “That thou be understonde I god beseche!” Had Chaucer stuck around to witness the ensuing six hundred-plus years of literary discourse—and the past few decades in particular—he might have concluded that, when it comes to being understonde, the litel books aren't the ones you have to worry about. It’s the big ones that'll get you.

David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” a book whose notorious bigness comprises both physical size and reputational heft, turns thirty in February. The occasion is a moment to ask how a novel that mourns addiction and venerates humility and patience became a glib cultural punch line—a byword for literary arrogance, a totem of masculine pretentiousness, a red flag if spotted on the shelves of a prospective partner, and reading matter routinely subjected to the word “per formative” in its most damning sense. At a thousand and seventy-nine pages, “Infinite Jest” has become a one-liner.

Last year, an article in the Guardian explored the risks of so-called performative reading under the title “Is it OK to read Infinite Jest in public?” For the