Infinite Jest

Most dangerous books in this catalogue harm you if you open them. This one harms you if it works.

James Incandenza’s last film is called Infinite Jest, like the novel, and almost nobody in the novel calls it that. They call it the Entertainment, or the samizdat, because a title would make it sound like a work of art and it is closer to a device. People who start it do not stop. They soil themselves. They die facing the screen. The first casualty we watch — we do not watch the film; we watch the watching — is a man who only wanted to unwind after work.

That is the whole thesis, built as an object. Wallace is not subtle about it and does not need to be. An entertainment culture whose logical end-state is a cartridge you cannot look away from is not a metaphor for the novel you are holding. It is a dare. The book is long, footnoted, and structurally un-cartridgelike on purpose. If you finish it, you did the opposite of what the Entertainment requires.

The Navidson Record, on another shelf, is a film that may not exist, embedded in a book that will not sit still. Incandenza’s film exists inside its world with a completeness that is worse: there are victims, there is a filmography, there are agencies. What there is not is a screening. Wallace describes the effects and withholds the footage, which is the only responsible thing a novelist can do with a weapon that is a movie.

On the readability rating. Described from every angle except the one that would be watching it. The complete filmography of Incandenza is in the notes. The Entertainment itself remains, correctly, unseeable.