Wallace shares Thomas Pynchon’s enthusiasm for silly acronyms.

The last tournament he won was the 18-and-under doubles at the Central Illinois Open in 1980.Ħ The USA has been incorporated in the novel into ONAN, or the Organisation of North American Nations, consisting of the US, Canada and Mexico. In his senior year he was ranked 11th in the Middle Illinois Tennis Association. His game peaked early in high school, however, and his habit of overthinking every shot slowed him down. The best way I can think of to show my appreciations to these men and women is to decline to thank them by name.” Wallace himself, as the note doesn’t mention, was a recovering alcoholic.ĥ Wallace was very good at tennis, boasting in later life that he had been “near great”. A lot of people at these Open Meetings spoke with me and were extremely patient and garrulous and generous and helpful.

(Gately was based on a man Wallace met in recovery called Big Craig, who also did the elevator-door thing.)Ĥ The Acknowledgements page includes the following: “Besides Closed Meetings for alcoholics only, Alcoholics Anonymous in Boston, Massachusetts, also has Open Meetings, where pretty much anybody who’s interested can come and listen, take notes, pester people with questions, etc. Gately is a very big man: “the size of a young dinosaur, with a massive and almost perfectly square head he used to amuse his friends when drunk by letting them open and close elevator doors on”. The chief counsellor at the halfway house, and one of the novel’s main protagonists, is Don Gately.

Incandenza himself died when he killed himself by putting his head in a microwave oven.ģ The main settings of the novel are a tennis academy – Enfield Tennis Academy – and a halfway house for recovering addicts called the Ennet House Drug And Alcohol Recovery House (“redundancy sic”), which is next door to it. Other years are sponsored by: the Whopper, the Tucks Medicated Pad, the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the Perdue Wonderchicken, the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, Glad, Dairy Products from the American Heartland and the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade for Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems for Home, Office or Mobile.Ģ The central plot MacGuffin, such as it is, is the search for the missing master copy of a videotape known as “the Entertainment”: this is a film, made by the avant-garde film-maker James Incandenza, so ridiculously entertaining that anyone who sees it will be compelled to watch it over and over again, and having lost all interest in eating, drinking and basic sanitation will in due course expire. Most of the action of the novel takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. 1 Infinite Jest is set in a near future in which the Gregorian calendar has been supplanted by a sponsorship arrangement.

Infinite jest book