Where to start with David Foster Wallace

The catalog gives us only Infinite Jest — there is no other Wallace here yet — so the path is a strategy for reading it, slowly, with the footnotes, and against the cult.

Who this is for

You have heard Infinite Jest called one of the great novels of late-twentieth-century America, you have heard the cult of Wallace and the exhaustion at the cult of Wallace, and you want a strategy for reading the long book honestly without either the worship or the dismissal.

What this path saves you from

Reading Infinite Jest as a difficulty to be conquered or as a club to be joined, and missing that the novel is a deeply sad book about addiction, depression, and what entertainment does to attention. Or reading it through the cult of Wallace and missing the writing itself.

The reading path

  1. A Supposedly Fun Thing Ill Never Do Again (coming soon) — The cruise-ship essay, the state-fair essay, the David Lynch piece. The textbook gentlest Wallace — meet his sentences and his attention before the long novel asks for three months.
  2. Infinite Jest (coming soon) — Two bookmarks — one for the main text, one for the endnotes. Read the endnotes as you go; some are short jokes, some are whole short stories, all are part of the form. Three months is a reasonable pace. The novel does not finish in any conventional sense; that is the form, not the failure. Read it for the sad parts; the sad parts are the heart.

Why this order

Wallace wrote Infinite Jest as a serious argument about what entertainment, addiction, and depression do to American attention, and reading it as a stylistic feat rather than as a moral document is reading it for the second thing first.

Held back, and why

  1. Supposedly Fun Thing — The textbook gentlest Wallace — the cruise-ship essay, the state-fair essay, the David Lynch piece. Not in this catalog yet, but the natural first door when it arrives.
  2. Brief Interviews — The short story collection between Infinite Jest and the late work. Not in this catalog yet.
  3. Consider The Lobster — The second essay collection. Often paired with A Supposedly Fun Thing as the canonical entry. Not in this catalog yet.
  4. The Pale King — The unfinished posthumous novel. Save it; it is the deep-end book the rest of the corpus was pointing toward.

Open this path on Writi →