So why has Infinite Jest, supposedly such an influential novel, become a paper weight, a talking point, a bench-mark of high- and low-brow intellectuality? Why has no one (or, more accurately, why does everyone think that no one) has actually read the thing?
Jonathan Russell Clark has something to say: a little slap on the wrist and “stop it” when reaching for what David Foster Wallace means without talking about his work. He was a person who wrote a very long book that, frustratingly, no one seems to have read (we have, we swear), yet everyone has an opinion on a man now in the spotlight for tragedy and becoming less and less human as we watch movies about him and reduce him to archetype.
