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Julian Murphet, Jury Professor of English and Language and Literature, Adelaide University Thirty years ago, living in Cambridge, England, I wandered into Heffers Bookshop and picked up a monstrous new novel on the display table. It had a title out of Hamlet, a Simpsons-sky dustjacket, hundreds of endnotes, and ran to almost 1,100 pages. Infinite Jest occupied much of that cold February and March, and to this day I remember finishing it with a sensation of frustrated exhaustion. It seemed then (as it does now) a wildly uneven book held together by something new in American fiction of the postmodern age: a white-hot purity of moral purpose that made it seem weirdly old-fashioned, despite all the bells and whistles of its cumbersome near-future satire about a nation amusing itself to death. It was, undoubtedly, a major achievement, though it was also clear that something was not quite right with its writer, David Foster Wallace. Aesthetic misjudgements had led to so many wincing misfires, lapses of taste and tedious longueurs that it all seemed indicative of a deeper subjective disequilibrium. In that sense, the book was “true” in a way the author’s journalism (to which one turned with curiosity) was not. In those snappy features, written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Première and other glossy magazines, the ardent moral vision is worn as a winning professional mask. It speaks in a voice mixed of pedantry, whimsy and stern judgement. Smart, alert, observant, mordantly funny, the Wallace of the non-fiction also came across as a bit of an asshole. And an asshole, it turned out, he was. But more of that later. Literature of exhaustion Twelve years later in 2008, Wallace was dead at age 46. That suicide has subsequently woven something of a halo over the bandanaed-average-Joe-nice-rural-Midwest-boy image cultivated by the author while alive. Posthumous books, […]