In a near-future North America organized around corporate-sponsored calendar years and a hazardous new form of subsidized entertainment, the novel braids together the students of an elite Boston-area junior tennis academy, the recovering addicts and staff of a halfway house down the hill from it, and a cell of wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists hunting a film cartridge so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all will to do anything else. Told through a sprawling, digressive structure and hundreds of endnotes, it moves between comedy, addiction and recovery, competitive tennis, family inheritance, and geopolitical farce. At its center is the fractured Incandenza family, whose dead patriarch made the lethal film, and the novel's abiding questions about entertainment, escape, and what makes life worth living.
Books mentioned in Infinite Jest (11)
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Ghostly light- and monster-shadow phenomenon particular to certain mountains; e.g. q.v. Part I of Goethe's Faust, the Walpurgisnacht six-toed danceathon on the Harz-Bröcken, in which there's described a classic 'Bröckengespenstphänom.'”
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell: “held marathon multireadings of e.g. Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language,' and whose Avril-chaired Tactical Phalanx (MGM's) was then (unsuccessfully, it turned out) court-fighting the new Gentle administration's Title-II/G-public-funded-library-phaseout...”
Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov: “Two or three upperclassmen in Levy-Richardson-O'Byrne-Chawaf's Disciplinary Lit. were slumped over Goncharov's Oblomov, looking very unhappy indeed.”
Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott: “A good quarter of the bus was yellow-highlighting copies of E. A. Abbott's inescapable-at-E.T.A. book Flatland for either Flottman or Chawaf or Thorp.”
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman: “He was down there reading Leaves of Grass. He was going through a Whitman period, part of grieving for Himself, he said.”
Principles of Psychology by William James: “he chanced to read it in a huge large-print edition he'd found behind a bookshelf along the north wall of the Ennet living room of something called The Principles of Psychology with The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, by William James (obviously)...”
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys: “she referred to her own program as 'Madame's Downer-Lit Hour' and read depressing book after depressing book—Good Morning, Midnight and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Giovanni's Room and Under the Volcano, plus a truly ghastly Bret Ellis period during Lent—in a monotone, really slowly, night after night.”
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: “read depressing book after depressing book—Good Morning, Midnight and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Giovanni's Room and Under the Volcano, plus a truly ghastly Bret Ellis period during Lent...”
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin: “read depressing book after depressing book—Good Morning, Midnight and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Giovanni's Room and Under the Volcano, plus a truly ghastly Bret Ellis period during Lent...”
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry: “read depressing book after depressing book—Good Morning, Midnight and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Giovanni's Room and Under the Volcano, plus a truly ghastly Bret Ellis period during Lent...”