Four days ago, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest turned twenty; if you had been reading a page a day since it came out, by now you could have read it over 6.5 times. Despite its age and length, the novel still enjoys massive cultural relevance. Tom Bissell has a Sierpinski-triangle-shaped appraisal of Jest’s legacy:
“It wasn’t until I was writing letters to my girlfriend, and describing to her my fellow Peace Corps volunteers and host-family members and long walks home through old Soviet collectivized farmland in what I would categorize as yellow-belt Wallaceian prose, that I realized how completely the book had rewired me.”
