◆ ◆ ◆

By Leslie Jamison

“Infinite Jest” has become cultural shorthand for “Hard Book People Have Strong Feelings About.”

Image Leslie Jamison Credit Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

There are silly ways of mistaking inaccessibility for brilliance. It can become some literary version of always wanting the lover who doesn’t want you; the flip side of Groucho Marx’s truism about not wanting to be part of any club that would have you for a member. You worship the one that wouldn’t have you instead.

But there are also legitimate relation­ships between difficulty and brilliance: difficulty as the transcription of complexity, difficulty as byproduct of innovation rather than object of pursuit. I don’t love David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” because it’s difficult, for example; I love it for the complicated visions of intimacy and self-­destruction that constitute its multi­chambered beating heart. I’m not committed to its virtuosic obstacle course, I’m committed to its unrelenting attention to nuance and extremity. Its threads could not exist in a simplified state; no life support could sustain their paraphrased form.

I didn’t always feel this way about “Infinite Jest” — which has become cultural shorthand for “Hard Book People Have Strong Feelings About.” For a long time, I flinched at its mention — because I hadn’t just not read it, which would have been its own kind of shame, I’d done something much worse: I’d read about 200 pages and then put it aside. I’d failed by failing to be compelled. I took it to be my failure, and not the book’s — its inaccessibility was simply a test I hadn’t passed: its length and convolution, its multiplicity of plotlines and structural density. It was full of a thousand allusions scurrying past me like the pack of feral hamsters that was supposedly part of the plot itself.

The book’s brilliance took on an unholy sheen — beyond questioning or pondering — simply because I’d proved myself inadequate to it. I feared my tastes were pedestrian at core; I was drawn to comfort foods and page turners. (I always preferred sharp orange cheddar to “interesting” blue cheeses; I’d pick raw cookie dough from a plastic tube over artisanal sorbet in a heartbeat.)

Then, a few years later, I read “Infinite Jest” again. I read it with a different kind of desire — because someone had told me its portrait of recovery was incredibly powerful, and I needed a powerful portrait of recovery — and I read it with a different kind of ritual and intentionality: I gave myself a month. I assigned myself 50 pages a day. These were commitment devices that would have once filled me with shame. If I was reading 50 pages a day because I’d decided to, that meant I was failing to have the kind of unforced experience I’d come to fetishize as “authentic” absorption: as if the book would exert a kind of gravitational force to which I’d be utterly enthralled.

But in reading those 50 pages a day, I found that any binary I might draw between absorption and intentionality was far more porous than I’d imagined: I moved constantly between rapture and effort; often these modes were entangled and simultaneous. That month of commitment ended up mattering not because I was always immersed but because I often wasn’t, and kept reading anyway — because I was perpetually recommitting myself to the novel, and because that recommitment was an act with great wingspan and grit. I was invited into a different understanding of what authentic literary absorption might look like: neither struggle nor bliss but a strange weave of the two; not completely “losing myself” in a book but feeling myself more deeply in the act of reckoning with it — becoming aware of my own attention, becoming an agent in its application.