But maybe I wasn’t exactly the ideal reader for Infinite Jest then. Maybe I never was. I became peculiarly fixated on my loathing for the loathsome character Orin Incandenza, the anti–Sydney Carton and a serial seducer of young mothers whom I wanted to drag out onto the balustrade and slap across the face with an evening glove; the females in the novel seemed archetypes rather than successfully credible characters; I was confounded by the narrative’s chronology; I was unnerved by its lack of warmth; I had no interest in drugs; I hated tennis. At the same time, I loved the stagecraft and the theatricality, and the language was so audaciously charged with life—even as the world it depicted was dead: a thing. A book at total cross-purposes with itself: a maximalist work with nothing to celebrate.

Yet at the same time, there was something godlike about it.

I had a hard time squaring the whole together. Did the beautiful and elating parts outweigh the exasperating ones? If you happened to have a conversation in those weeks with someone who was also scrambling to read a review copy of Infinite Jest, this was the overarching question. Come to think of it, this was also much like the experience of knowing David Wallace himself—joy and delight, countered by exceptional frustration and disillusionment.