N.B.: This post runs a little long in honor of the novel Infinite Jest, which runs 1,079 pages.

It’s the birthday of David Foster Wallace, born in 1962 and best known for his brilliant novel, Infinite Jest (1996). Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation (Zadie Smith, for example, and perhaps Wallace’s friend Jonathan Franzen), Wallace was tormented as well as gifted and killed himself on September 12, 2008.

Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, and raised in Champagne-Urbana, Illinois, where his father was a professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne. His mother was an English professor at a community college there, and Wallace and his younger sister Amy grew up in an atmosphere steeped in language study and play. Wallace became competitive in junior tennis, ranking 17th in the USTA’s Western Section at age 14, and would later write about tennis a great deal. (His most famous tennis piece is his essay “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” published in 2006 in a Time’s sports magazine.) He began struggling with anxiety in high school and interrupted his sophomore year at Amherst to return home; he started taking antidepressants and later referred to this time as “kind of a midlife crisis at twenty.” He returned to Amherst, where he studied English and philosophy, and wrote much of his first novel there, “The Broom of the System.” The novel was published in 1987, the same year he finished an MFA at the University of Arizona.

But Wallace continued to struggle with mental illness. He went to grad school at Harvard in philosophy, thinking it might be a safer choice mentally than writing fiction, but ended up in psychiatric care again, and upon his release entered a halfway house and began to address his addictions (alcohol, pot). He later drew very heavily upon this experience in Infinite Jest, which he began working on steadily in the early 90s.

So, Infinite Jest: Wallace was a maximalist, and the novel is maximally full of details, thoughts, technical information, and endnotes, all of which together create a bizarre, dark, and sometimes extremely funny world. The novel is set in the near future: the U.S. has forced annexation of Mexico and Canada and calls the newly unified body the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. (ha ha. Get it?), and now uses southeast Canada as its hazardous waste dump; the president is a former Vegas entertainer ominously named Johnny Gentle. Corporations are allowed to bid on the rights to name each year, so instead of saying 2008, for example, characters have to refer to the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment or the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken. The culture is addicted to entertainment in various forms: competitive tennis, drugs, technology (Wallace predicted smart phones), drugs, and more drugs. At the heart of the novel is a film called Infinite Jest which is so compelling that anyone viewing it loses all desire to do anything but watch, becoming a vegetable; an angry Quebecoise separatist group composed of wheelchair-bound terrorists is trying to get their hands on a copy for use as a weapon. Various characters in the novel have various connections to the film (whether they know it or not), including Hal Incandenza, a brilliant adolescent tennis player and budding druggie.

The novel would be unbearable, I think, if it were merely cleverly rendered cultural criticism—I mean, the final 100 pages are endnotes which often can’t be skipped without losing something from the narrative, like one 10 page endnote composed entirely of a seminal dialogue between two main characters about their father’s suicide—but in fact it has genuine heart and some moments of hope and deep redemption found at mind-blowing rock bottom (Wallace’s AA characters have back stories like you wouldn’t believe). The character Don Gately, a ginormous blockheaded recovering Demerol addict and counselor at Ennet Recovery House, is tender-hearted, real, and one of my favorite characters in contemporary fiction.

Fun fact: the character of Joelle Van Dyne (also known as Madame Psychosis), who ends up in recovery at Ennet House, is based on Wallace’s one-time lover, author Mary Carr.

Back to real life: after Infinite Jest, Wallace struggled vastly with his next novel, which was about boredom. In 2007, Wallace went off the antidepressant he’d been on for 20 years, Nardil, and was never able to find effective treatment via drugs or electroconvulsive therapy again. Though he was by then married to artist Karen Green, with whom he seemed to have had a strong, mutually loving relationship, he succumbed to his demons and hanged himself in the garage where he worked, his unfinished manuscript arranged nearby where Green could find it. It was published posthumously in 2011 as The Pale King and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. No award was given that year.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it: read (or reread) Wallace’s famous commencement speech to Kenyon College (2005). Wallace calls his listeners to choose carefully what they worship. He says, “There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.” (Here’s a link. The speech is also available as a book called This Is Water.)

Have a good Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.