‘Infinite Jest,’ the Internet, and the Politics of Reading

Melanie Walsh on what the internet has made of Infinite Jest in its first thirty years: the Infinite Summer read-along, BookTok, the litbro caricature and its feminist critics, and a 4chan literature board that voted it the best book of all time in 2014 (and… again in 2015). She reads the fight over who the book belongs to as a proxy for anxieties about attention, masculinity and reading. Walsh is frank about Wallace’s abuse of Mary Karr, and likes the novel anyway. (My fourth Infinite Jest link this year. I’ve read the book twice, and I’m tempted to go again.)