Finding a Way In: On Michelle Zauner and the Cultural History of Infinite Jest’s Forewords

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Traveling the publicity circuit in 2025 for For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), the fourth album from her dreamy-indie-pop act Japanese Breakfast, Michelle Zauner talked often about Infinite Jest. As she explained to The Fader, she approached it first with anthropological curiosity: “I started the year in 2023 with Infinite Jest because I … was inspired by things that would typically classify as falling under the ‘incel canon’ umbrella. I guess I just wanted to understand this group of people, and why exactly they gravitate to certain types of art.” 

Zauner praises Infinite Jest—“it’s an extraordinary novel”—but her reference to the “incel canon” became showcase evidence for the indignant online few who claimed she was undeserving when Back Bay Books announced she’d write the foreword to the 30^th anniversary edition. There were invocations of woke. Why, one Twitterer wondered, “choose the trendy memoir grifter?”

Read generously, the backlash reveals a concern about the market’s influence on literature. But all forewords are, in part, efforts to sell, rather than illuminate, copies; marketing and editorial departments commingled long ago. Hard to say why, except for unpleasant identity-grounded reasons, Zauner would be a marketing choice and the writers of the previous editions’ forewords, Dave Eggers and Tom Bissell, were not.

Most basically, a foreword is meant to offer a way in: here’s a little packed ball of introductory powder to get you started on the snowman of your reading. A foreword assembles context, slots its novel into the matrix of history. But a foreword also reveals something about how novels at a particular time and place were read, sold, discussed, and categorized. 

So it’s true that Zauner’s foreword is rooted in our time—just not the way some readers think. Set serially like a Zallinger March of Readerly Progress, the three forewords of Infinite Jest form a historical narrative. They reveal how some ways of talking about novels have surged and faded: assigning novels to demographic readerships, stressing novels’ empathetic and ethically salutary qualities, evaluating novels through authorial categories like genius and personal conduct. They exhibit the grooves and textures worn into readers by structures of feeling, cultural zeitgeists, manias and contradictions. 

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Infinite Jest was published in 1996. It was a success. All three decennial-anniversary editions include forewords: Eggers in 2006, Bissell in 2016, and now Zauner. Invigorated by the novel’s reception, plus the wider popularity of his stories and essays and especially his Kenyon commencement address, Wallace’s image as literary genius and moral-spiritual sage grew outsized, a process accelerated by the tragedy of, and lurid hagiography following, his suicide in 2008. Eventually his image became attached culturally to one sort of imagined reader: the litbro. Nerdy and lunkish, cynically liberal and swaggeringly misogynistic, dilettantish and so narrowly obsessed he needs desperately to touch grass—it’s the specter of the litbro who, Molly Fischer writes, “drives some women to treat ‘loves DFW’ as synonymous with ‘is one of those motherfuckers.’” 

Eggers’s foreword tries to exhibit Infinite Jest as a work of unprecedented genius that is also “approachable, effortless even,” which is bound up with Wallace himself as both transcendent phenom and everyday guy. To Eggers, Infinite Jest is so accomplished it “bears little resemblance to anything before it, and comparisons to anything since are desperate and hollow. It appeared in 1996, sui generis, very different from virtually anything before it.” Redundancy sic, and furthermore this isn’t true. Infinite Jest does resemble things that came before it, such as novels by Pynchon, DeLillo, Gaddis, Reed, Woolf, Joyce. And subsequent novels did bear comparison. In his New Republic tantrum, James Wood includes Wallace alongside Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith as younger examples of so-called “hysterical realism,” and in a stopped-clock way Wood was right to glimpse a twisting line from their work back through Pynchon and DeLillo.  

But Eggers believes Infinite Jest refuses literary history, explodes categories. What makes this possible is Wallace’s own genius, and what makes Wallace’s genius possible is, in a familiar romantic-author way, psychological unwellness: 

This book is like a spaceship with no recognizable components, no rivets or bolts, no entry points, no way to take it apart … Page by page, line by line, it is probably the strangest, most distinctive, and most involved work of fiction by an American in the last twenty years … a work of complete obsession, of a stretching of the mind of a young writer to the point of, we assume, near madness.

Eggers’s claim makes sense only as a symptom of his historical moment. To say that Infinite Jest transcends history, a novel of parthenogenetic irruption, participates in the late-90s-early-00s disavowal of historical thinking, the triumphant neoliberalism convinced that history was over. In such a world, the new arrives not through the historical architectonics of power and politics but the spontaneous generations of significant individuals: Jobs, Gates, Wallace. Hence the stress Eggers places on Wallace’s obsessiveness, the psychological overspill glorified soppily amongst the tech-maverick set. Pathological obsession holds appeal as an antidote for 90s-00s ennui, both of which, pathological obsession and ennui alike, Infinite Jest characterizes as terminal diseases of fin de millenaire American subjectivity. Eggers describes Wallace’s novel, in other words, as a product of the things the novel worries most about.

Eggers makes reading Infinite Jest into a kind of ethico-spiritual imperative, which again smacks of bootstrappy big-tech culture. Because the novel “demands your full attention,” it “can’t be read at a crowded café, or with a child on one’s lap.” To read it you must isolate yourself, monklike—and you cannot possess many domestic responsibilities, which tend to be asymmetrically gendered. Eggers believes reading Infinite Jest constitutes something momentous you must be ready for but which necessarily exceeds your readiness. He recounts “a large, baseball cap-wearing English major” asking him, “Is it our duty to read Infinite Jest? … The answer is: Maybe. Sort of. Probably, in some way.” Reading the novel becomes a rite of passage—and a male one, despite Eggers’s ballcap-wearing supplicant remaining syntactically ungendered. On the other side lies virtue itself, Infinite Jest as bro-trendy self-help Stoicism: “When you exit these pages after that month of reading, you are a better person. It’s insane, but also hard to deny. Your brain is stronger because it’s been given a monthlong workout, and more importantly, your heart is sturdier.”

At the same time, Eggers assures us that Wallace is “a normal person.” Plenty of details date Eggers’s introduction—he compares Infinite Jest to the music of Sufjan Stevens—but especially striking is that Eggers’s demonstrations of Wallace’s normal-guyness anticipate the image of the Midwestern white-man Obama voter, the dudes who turned the heartland blue (according to biographer D.T. Max, Wallace considered offering speechwriting services to Obama):

Dave Wallace—and he is commonly known as such—keeps big sloppy dogs and has never dressed them in taffeta or made them wear raincoats … He was once a nationally ranked tennis player, and he cares about good government. He is from the Midwest—east-central Illinois, to be specific, which is an intensely normal part of the country (not far, in fact, from a city, no joke, named Normal).

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Eggers wants to make Infinite Jest accessible; Bissell’s keyword is relevant. Since the novel’s “intellectually slapstick vision of corporatism … embeds it” in the nineties, Bissell wonders how it “still feels so transcendently, electrically alive?”

His answer is the internet. Bissell is a writer of the internet—he wrote The Disaster Artist and a sharp essay on Grand Theft Auto—and in his opinion Infinite Jest is “the first great internet novel.” The funny thing is that comparing a novel to the internet feels historical, the kind of thing people did in 2016, because although the lunar cracks were already long and slithery, the internet hung then for a final moment in the imagination as something big and round: a boundless digital commons, a hyperlinked encyclopedia, the Information Superhighway. These days the internet is not merely fractured into algorithmical microclimates but basically dead, at least against the whirling cosmopolitanism once envisioned.

Given this vastness, Bissell, like Eggers, imagines Infinite Jest as a challenge you must rise to meet. So concerned with the insidious effects of high-quality entertainment, Infinite Jest denies “readers the core pleasures of mainstream” fiction, such as “a graspable central narrative line.” As a result, “the book bears being read, and reread, with Talmudic focus and devotion. For many Wallace readers this is asking too much. For many Wallace fans this is asking too much.” But in what sense might a novel ask too much from us? Is reading a novel, even a novel as big as a Bible, ever really like reading a religious text? 

That “twenty years have gone by and we still do not agree what this novel means,” Bissell surmises, “despite saying (seemingly) everything about everything, is yet another perfect analogy for the Internet. Both are too big. Both contain too much.” But I don’t think bigness is what prevents readers or internet surfers from agreeing about what those things mean. Plus, I’m not sure a novel can say everything about everything. If sheer mass or exhaustive detail were the real evaluative criteria, the finest American novel would be Michael Mandiburg’s 106-volume printed edition of Wikipedia. The greatest work of characterization would be James Incandenza’s film Every Inch of Disney Leith, described in Infinite Jest like so: “Miniaturized, endoscopic, and microinvasive cameras traverse entire exterior and interior of one of Incandenza’s technical crew.”

It makes historical sense that Bissell belabors Infinite Jest and the internet surpassing individual understanding. In 2016, Trumpism’s mitotic multiplication on the augur plates of online feeds and forums induced bewilderment; its bitter energized politics seemed illegible to the liberal establishment, just as the humid corners of the social internet where vicious ways of thought can proof like wet dough appeared incomprehensible to anyone on the outside. Worrying that Infinite Jest and the internet both extend beyond the apprehension of a single person is to reiterate the scalar panics that accumulated in the years preceding Bissell’s foreword. Trumpism, but also the financial collapse and the failure to seize upon its opportunity, which reiterated that the levers of power exist incomprehensibly beyond individual people. If Eggers presents us with Wallace as end-of-history Obama voter, Bissell presents us with an Infinite Jest of post-Obama crash and confusion. 

Hence Bissell’s metaphor for what Wallace’s death did to the dynamism of contemporary fiction: “It has been seven years since Wallace left us, and no one is refilling the coffers of the David Foster Wallace Federal Sentence Reserve.” A fear of institutional, infrastructural collapse; style and virtuosity as the commodity store that backs the circulation of literary culture. The concern is that the vaults might be empty and we’ll never understand why and how, that systems both financial and literary might suddenly buckle, overtapped. 

Amidst these crises, Bissell believes, Infinite Jest offers a familiar method of response: relating, empathizing. The vividness of Infinite Jest’s minor characters suggests that Wallace “makes an almost metaphysical commitment to see reality through their eyes,” that “he had to somehow psychically become his characters … which I cannot imagine was without its subtle traumas.” But why must we appeal to empathic inhabitation to demonstrate the seriousness of a novel? Positing that Wallace “psychically” became his characters is entangled with images of empathic-authorial relatability present elsewhere: the explosion of memoir, Instagram poetry, the tying of debut novels’ publication to confessional essays in papers of record. In a time of necropolitical despair, when a bleary fatalism about the valuelessness of all things, including human life, exists not only as a vibe but an organizing principle of American politics, what emerges is a desperate reiteration of the ostensibly fundamental presence of other human beings and the possibility of connecting with them. It becomes pretty easy to want writing honestly tied to a real person—less a mediation of experience than a transmission vector of life itself, a fiber-optic cable of cardiac pulse.  

The experience of reading a novel is, in part, personal. This was true for me: the refusal to collapse religion into either reactionary unsophistication or a gospel of affirmative consumer feelings made Wallace’s work important when I was cracking my shell of childhood evangelicalism with a bookish eggtooth. This wasn’t relatability: it was coming to see the world in a new way. 

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Writing in 2015 about Wallace’s reputation, Jonathan Russell Clark bemoans how Wallace’s shadow dims the light of the writing: “the more we talk about Wallace without talking about his work … more we aid in this false image of him as bro-lord.” Such broish images led Zauner to Infinite Jest: “At the age of thirty-four, smoking outside a party in Brooklyn,” she explains in her foreword, her “casual interest in those works one might attribute to the ‘litbro’ canon,” novels of “courageous, nearly lurid stylistic panache,” interested in “centering … male loneliness” and “practically flamboyant darkness,” meant she ought to read Wallace. (Rhetorically sharp to call it the “litbro” rather than the “incel” canon this time.) But Wallace, it turned out, was unlike the other members of that canon—or, more accurately, his work was. 

Zauner recognizes that her foreword is meant to disentangle Infinite Jest from that litbro canon. “I’m sure Little, Brown was aware of the slight incongruity of their selection,” Zauner writes, “and perhaps hoped I might assist in assuaging the unfair, outsize connotations of what it means to be a David Foster Wallace reader, which, at its worst, has come to signify misogyny, and at its best, someone who’s just slightly annoying.” That is, the goal of selecting someone outside “what you might consider Infinite Jest’s target demographic” is to release a certain shame in being, or being associated with, the “sect of pedantic, misunderstood young men for whom … Infinite Jest has become a rite of passage, much like Little Women or Pride and Prejudice might function for aspiring literary young women.”

To do so, Zauner, who unlike Eggers and Bissell did not know Wallace personally, says little about the man himself. When she does mention Wallace—she likes his interview with Charlie Rose—she finds revelations about the novel, not its author. There’s no mention of Wallace’s violence towards Mary Karr, discussed widely elsewhere, from Max’s biography to union-buster Amy Hungerford’s essay “On Not Reading DFW.” Some forewords tussle admirably with the grotesqueries of authors’ opinions and behavior, like Hilton Als’s foreword to the centennial edition of Flannery O’Connor’s stories. But Zauner senses an exhaustion with talking so much about Wallace rather than his work, and her foreword understands that space exists for and between conversations about work and author, about aesthetic experience and biographical aversion. There’s little of the investment in identity that animates her memoir Crying in H Mart, which I read because I read any memoir about growing up Korean in Oregon amidst what she calls a “complicated desire for whiteness” (I’ve found two so far; the other is Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know). Zauner’s interest engendered first by the gendering of Infinite Jest and its readers, her foreword moves towards the important thing shared by Zauner and Bissell and Eggers and everyone else who opens the novel: reading it. 

All reading can be lonely, but reading a novel about failed slobbering attempts to slip the bonds of human subjectivity and technocapitalist life is especially lonely. Zauner feels “compelled to leave you with . . . the impression the book left on me when I emerged from those weeks of dedicated reading”: a necessarily incomplete report from readerly privacy, rendered in the terms of personal “impression.” Reading Infinite Jest in 2026 means reading a novel about being alone while being alone. And not only being alone in the psycho-spiritual way that terrifies Infinite Jest, an especially American being-alone traceable back at least to the midcentury suburbs, where the novel in a sense begins, with tall terrified ten-year-old Jim Incandenza washed away by the dipsomanic rhetoric of his shattered father in a webbed garage, but a political, global loneliness, too, of being at best abandoned and at worst hunted by the state, which has refused its obligations to welfare and lateral wellbeing. The loneliness of our fantodic memories of the months spent alone during a pandemic that same state was incapable of really addressing. The loneliness of anticipating a no-future future of climate catastrophe, of failing to imagine how forms of bonding and collectivity and mutual action could ever make the world anew.

But loneliness leads to a kind of hope: mourning. The final clause of Infinite Jest reads, “and the tide was way out.” Those last two words to many readers suggest a murky optimism, a way out of being trapped in your own body and mind, literally for Hal at the novel’s beginning and allegorically for basically everyone. Zauner’s way out is the possibility of weak collectivity emerging from the solitariness of reading. After finishing the novel, she found

the sensation of grief … I had lived with Hal, Joelle, Orin, Stice, Pemulis, and meaty, square-head, heart‑of‑gold Don Gately … suddenly without them, I felt hollow. And just as with real grief, I found myself wanting to be surrounded by fellow mourners, to seek them out and convene in our collective memory, people whom I realized were defined by a set of attributes wholly different than those I had assumed, people who had committed an act of defiance and tenacity, curiosity and rigor, and after it all, were sad to see its end.

This sociality of readers—limited, politically ambiguous—feels contemporary in its desire for collectivity despite the attenuated, depleted forms seemingly available. Here, Zauner returns finally to the litbros. They, too, she implies, could help constitute this community of mourners and become other than what we (and they) think they are. 

That is, reading Infinite Jest speaks to the desire to become a different kind of person, which is utopian and shameful. The novel is full of people reaching desperately for transfiguration, and Zauner pins hopes on this shameful desire. It’s fitting she likens Infinite Jest to Pride and Prejudice, another novel whose readership lugs a (gendered) shame of wanting to be different. In Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style, D.A. Miller describes Austen’s transformative effect on many gay men, “rapt, admiring readers,” who “resolved to speak Austen Style.” But eventually “this experience of reading Jane Austen found itself contradicted—felt itself disabled—by the quite different experience of being read reading her,” a “public and compulsory” hurling into the “mutual alienation of ‘girls’ and ‘boys.’” It’s not unrelated to the shame felt when a family member swerves an anodyne conversation into a series of homophobic proclamations, which lenses shame like light through a multifaceted jewel: because you aren’t out to much of your family, because maybe you have a responsibility to be, because imagine the possibilities of a life wherein you were. This kinetic shame of desiring sincerely to be transformed—to see the world transformed!—and believing you might find the beginnings of transformation in reading, leads me to disagree with Zauner’s concern for the novel’s future. “Ten years from now,” she glooms, “Infinite Jest may exist as an artifact of an era when humans still wrote.” But I suspect that in ten years, the fortieth-anniversary edition will have a (human-written) foreword that tries to come to terms with the novel’s relation to a new time—and that, in doing so, the foreword itself will become a historical object, a residue of its world. No feral hamsters in 2036, I bet, no return from streaming to mail-order entertainment, no wheeled Francophone assassins. But plenty of addiction, despair. Miles and miles of knots, and knots of knots, in the minds of the tortuously anxious. Vast tracts of loneliness. The daily work to freely choose the enabling confinements of obligation, dependency, devotion. Political struggle. Readers of all sorts, looking for a way in.