“That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that. That AA and NA and CA’s ‘God’ does not apparently require you to believe in Him/Her/It before He/She/It will help you.” – Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” – Confessions, St. Augustine
I was 17 when I first tried to read Infinite Jest, really far too young to have been legally permitted to. Nobody asked for my ID at the Barnes & Noble where I happened upon a paperback copy and smugly handed the cashier a $20 bill in exchange for it, hoping they would be impressed by my selection. Someone really should have, though. What business does a teenager have reading a 1,000-plus-page novel about the existential anguish inherent to American life? What about David Foster Wallace’s sprawling exploration of addiction, dysfunction, and the pursuit of meaning in a hyper-mediated near future society could I have possibly found resonant? I was a high school senior, still insulated from the harsh realities of adult life, the tyranny of meaninglessness and postmodern malaise lying in wait for me out there. What about this enormous book that dissected these themes with such precision could have spoken to my sheltered worldview?
But something about it compelled me all the same. I remember being drawn in by the back cover[1], which heralded the novel as a “gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the pursuit of happiness in America; set in an addicts’ halfway house and a tennis academy and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives.”
I had just read William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury—another tome about another endearingly screwed-up family—at the behest of a boy on whom I was nursing a massive (unrequited) crush and was eager to read something similar. But mostly, I think, what compelled me was what reading a book as big and complicated as Infinite Jest might signal to others about me.
I was, to put it mildly, a pretentious teenager (but would have preferred being called precocious), prone to both grandstanding and self-deprecation in near-equal measure. Still waiting for nearly all of the markers of adolescence to arrive (namely a boyfriend), I clung to academic success and a slightly-above-average reading speed as proof of the worth I couldn’t find elsewhere. Coming across Infinite Jest felt like some kind of godsend, a straight shot to self-actualization, but I was ultimately less interested in reading it than in being able to say that I’d read it, in branding myself as the kind of person who could read it.
Which is probably what made that first attempt a failure. I got around 50 pages in and understood almost none of them, so I put the book down and didn’t pick it back up for several months. My senior spring came and went, and college decision letters, final exams, and a lack of a date to prom consumed my attention instead. But over those months, I sought out Wallace’s other work and fell in love with it, stunned by its piercing diagnosis of life in the postindustrial west, its refusal to cede to the nihilism that was then tempting me, and—maybe most especially—the way it orientated the reader steadily, insistently toward unbridled sincerity, full-hearted empathy, and the power of human connection. I quickly became obsessed.
I found an audio recording of Wallace’s 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, now called his “This is Water” speech, downloaded it onto my iPod, and listened to it every day for a month. I filled my journal with my favorite carefully transposed lines.[2] My first-ever purchase with my first-ever debit card was a copy of Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, journalist David Lipsky’s recounting of the five-day road trip he took with Wallace in the midst of his mid-90s Infinite Jest book tour. Before a cruise around the British Isles, a high school graduation gift from my very generous and well-traveled grandparents, I printed out a copy of “Shipping Out” (better known as “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”), Wallace’s 1996 essay for Harper’s Magazine on the “nearly lethal comforts of a luxury cruise” to bring with me. I sneered at the apparent excesses of the cruise ship I found myself on and recounted them in paraphrased lines from the essay in the emails I wrote back home to a friend, trying to pass them off as original insights and not borrowed ideas from a very famous piece of writing published before I learned how to read.
Somehow, I ended up finishing Infinite Jest that same summer, but that was more the result of boredom over the long, empty months in between leaving high school and starting college than it was the stroke of genius I was counting on the book to deliver me. I retained little of what I read, focused more on finishing the novel than on making any real sense of it. Unfortunately, that did not stop my college freshman self from citing Infinite Jest as my favorite book to anyone who asked.
My college years were turbulent at first, little more than tolerable by the end. I struggled adjusting to life away from home and having to reconstruct my flimsy sense of self now that I was no longer a very good student at a pretty good public high school but a decidedly average one at a very good private college. A silver lining of those years, at least, is how they catapulted me out of my adolescent pretentiousness. Eventually, embarrassed by the ways I’d tried to make a book I barely understood a cornerstone of my personality, I attempted every so often to read Infinite Jest again—“for real this time”—hoping that my foray into the Real World would translate to a better understanding of what the hell it was actually about. But I never managed to make it very far, always seeming to drop out somewhere before the halfway mark.
Then at 28, I got sober from the decade-long alcohol addiction that very nearly killed me, and in the midst of another long, uncertain summer (this one following my graduation from seminary) found myself reaching for the book again. Something finally stuck. I was amazed by how readable it was—for all the ways it’s been mythologized as a slog, all the ways my teenage self mythologized it as proof of her supposedly superior intellect, it proved to be far more approachable (and fun!) than I remembered. Maybe I could chalk it up to the emotional maturity I’d developed since that first attempt, or my improved reading comprehension, or the superstitious magic that ensures the n-th time will be the charm. But I think the real agent of change was a renewed faith in God, coupled with my sobriety from alcohol, itself a work of grace by that God.
Infinite Jest isn’t explicitly a work of theology, but it contains themes that—if you ask me—have so much theological resonance as to make a read that ignores them one done in bad faith. I once posited this mid-date to a man who may very well be the most pretentious person I’ve ever been out with, and he literally laughed in my face.[3] It was, obviously, an incredibly rude reaction, but I guess I get it, at least on some level; Infinite Jest would make for a very weird church book club read. And still, the ways that Wallace’s characters continually try and fail to transcend their own human limitations, the ways they seek redemption in alcohol/drugs/sex/tennis/football/filmmaking/intellectualism/the Quebec separatist movement/etc., the ways they find relief only through a confession of their brokenness (which turns out to be humanity’s shared brokenness) resonated so profoundly with the theology I’d just spent the last two years studying. Not to mention the wholly unexpected turn my life had taken since 2020, when God led me to quit the newspaper job I hated, give up my journalistic aspirations and apply to seminary, and then, two months later, quit drinking for what I hope and pray turns out to be for good.
One of my favorite passages Infinite Jest is a series of run-on sentences about Don Gately’s first few months in a Boston halfway house, which requires him and all other residents to attend regular AA meetings. It’s the very last place Don ever wanted to be but also the very first one that grants him a sense of belonging and refuge as a newly sober person. The passage is very long—sorry!—but worth reading in full. Pick a fight with David Foster Wallace’s ghost if you’re mad about it, not me (emphasis mine):
The process is the neat reverse of what brought you down and In here: Substances start out being so magically great, so much the interior jigsaw's missing piece, that at the start you just know, deep in your gut, that they'll never let you down; you just know it. But they do. And then this goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharine grins and hideous coffee is so lame you just know there's no way it could ever possibly work except for the utterest morons … and then Gately seems to find out AA turns out to be the very loyal friend he thought he'd had and then lost, when you Came In, and so you Hang In and stay sober and straight, and out of sheer hand-burned-on-hot-stove terror you heed the improbable-sounding warnings not to stop pounding out the nightly meetings even after the Substance-cravings have left and you feel like you've got a grip on the thing at last and can now go it alone, you still don't try to go it alone, you heed the improbable warnings because by now you have no faith in your own sense of what's really improbable and what isn't, since AA seems, improbably enough, to be working, and with no faith in your own senses you're confused, flummoxed, and when people with AA time strongly advise you to keep coming you nod robotically and keep coming, and you sweep floors and scrub out ashtrays and fill stained steel urns with hideous coffee, and you keep getting ritually down on your big knees every morning and night asking for help from a sky that still seems a burnished shield against all who would ask aid of it--how can you pray to a `God' you believe only morons believe in, still?--but the old guys say it doesn't yet matter what you believe or don't believe, Just Do It they say, and like a shock-trained organism without any kind of independent human will you do exactly like you're told, you keep coming and coming, nightly, and now you take pains not to get booted out of the squalid halfway house you'd at first tried so hard to get discharged from, you Hang In and Hang In, meeting after meeting, warm day after cold day . . . ; and not only does the urge to get high stay more or less away, but more general life-quality-type things--just as improbably promised, at first, when you'd Come In--things seem to get progressively somehow better, inside, for a while, then worse, then even better, then for a while worse in a way that's still somehow better, realer, you feel weirdly unblinded, which is good, even though a lot of the things you now see about yourself and how you've lived are horrible to have to see--and by this time the whole thing is so improbable and unparsable that you're so flummoxed you're convinced you're maybe brain-damaged, still, at this point, from all the years of Substances, and you figure you'd better Hang In in this Boston AA where older guys who seem to be less damaged--or at least less flummoxed by their damage--will tell you in terse simple imperative clauses exactly what to do, and where and when to do it (though never How or Why); and at this point you've started to have an almost classic sort of Blind Faith in the older guys, a Blind Faith in them born not of zealotry or even belief but just of a chilled conviction that you have no faith whatsoever left in yourself; and now if the older guys say Jump you ask them to hold their hand at the desired height, and now they've got you, and you're free.
So much of my life has been spent fruitlessly searching for the missing piece of my own interior jigsaw. I’ve looked for it in academic success, in writerly accolades, in attention from men, in alcohol, all to no avail. It’s not so much that giving up drinking and becoming a pastor has handed me that missing piece to secure squarely in place as much as it’s forced me to realize that the sense that there is some sort of missing piece to begin with is the result of my sinfulness, my isolation from God and neighbor, my misguided attempts to justify myself; that even my best efforts to engineer the circumstances of my life will ultimately fail; that whatever I count on to save me, if not the boundless grace of God, will let me down—and maybe substances especially.
My Christian upbringing led me to suspect this, but I didn’t want to believe it. From ages 14 to 18, I was pretty sure that only morons believed in God, and if there was one thing I was desperate not to be seen as, it was a moron. Still, even then, I could sense the crookedness of my own heart, but I didn’t know how to straighten it. It would take a million failed attempts before I, like Don Gately, would be brought to my knees[4] and forced to admit that I could do nothing to straighten it. I was not, and am not, in control of my life, and the very things I was turning to as a means of maintaining some semblance of control, transcending the uncertainty/pain/suffering/loneliness I felt enslaved to (one might call these things idols) were the very things enslaving me.
Another one of my favorite Infinite Jest excerpts comes somewhere around page 200. It’s a list of the “many new exotic facts” one will learn if “by virtue of charity or circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House.” Whenever someone in my life tells me that they have taken up the novel themselves (I am nothing if not annoyingly evangelistic about the things I love), I tell them to keep reading until this part, which is one of the funniest, most incisive, most insightful bits of writing I’ve ever come across. Some of the best ones (again, long, but sorry not sorry):
That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, rather early on. That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that. That AA and NA and CA’s ‘God’ does not apparently require you to believe in Him/Her/It before He/She/It will help you ….
That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack …. That the cliché ‘I don’t know who I am’ unfortunately turns out to be more than a cliché….
That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating buzz. That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused. That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward. That it is permissible to want. That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse.
That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels. That God—unless you’re Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both—speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God. That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there’s a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it’s interested in re you.
Several years ago, on what was maybe our third or fourth date, a now ex-boyfriend asked me why I was a Christian. He did so kindly, and I don’t doubt that his curiosity was sincere, but I was pretty sure the question was prompted by surprise at my admission that I went to church nearly every Sunday, and I was very worried he would think me weird for it. Because I am ever allergic to sincerity and feel a bizarre need to encase an earnest expression of sentiment in a layer of irony first, I demurred with an attempted joke: “I guess the power of Christ compels me,” I said. He did not laugh.[5]
Despite my attempt to dodge sincerity, there has proven to be some kernel of truth within that dumb joke. When it comes down to it, I don’t feel like my faith is a choice that I have arrived at, especially because it is the exact opposite of a choice I have tried to make at various points in my life. Instead, it’s as if some power beyond myself is moving me toward Jesus over and over and over again; as if, like C.S. Lewis wrote of his conversion to Christianity from atheism, I have been “dragged kicking and screaming into the kingdom of God.”
It's probably no surprise to say that being a pastor was never my dream job. Even six months into full-time ministry—the only job I’ve ever had that I’ve really, truly loved!—Christianity can feel like a burden that has been thrust upon me. Here I am carrying this yoke that I did not ask for and sometimes do not want. And all the same, I can’t imagine my life without it, given how profoundly it has shaped me, my relationships, and my view of the world and attempts to move within it. I am grateful for it at the same time I wish I could shirk it off—and doubly grateful that all my attempts at shirking have failed. When I think about this gift of faith and the paths it is leading me down, I am forced to concede that contrary to the late capitalist American mythos, I am neither the master of my fate nor the captain of my soul. Jesus is.
At the heart of Christian witness is the confession that Jesus is Lord, a claim that strikes me as countercultural now as it was 2,000 years ago. In the 1st century, to say that Jesus was Lord was also to say that Caesar was not. In the 21st, maybe to say that Jesus is Lord means that I am not. There is a savior, and it blessedly is not me. Individualism, achievement, and consumerism—as Wallace rightly observed—have been made the de facto religion of the United States. We’re told that our salvation can only come from ourselves or from the things that we buy, that we’re bound to no law outside of ourselves, an ethos that I think will inevitably lead us to the kind of nihilism I tried turning to as a teenager—that nothing really matters, and so we might as well subject ourselves to the abyss of meaninglessness.
But God spares us from the abyss. The Gospel tells us that there is a Messiah, and it is Jesus, the Son of God and Lord of all; that the world will be saved not by our own doing but by God’s, and that the saving grace of that God is already active in our lives and the life of the world, coming to us not as a merit but as a mercy.
I am midway through my first year in my first call as a pastor, currently serving seven small and wonderful churches in rural Illinois.[6] I live in the parsonage next door to one of those churches in a small town about 25 minutes north of Bloomington-Normal, where David Foster Wallace lived while finishing Infinite Jest and teaching at Illinois State University. I sometimes worship at St. Matthew’s Episcopal in Bloomington because aside from Holy Week none of my churches are accustomed to gathering outside of Sunday mornings (maybe eventually). Wallace went there weekly for AA meetings during his years at Illinois State, a connection that oddly comforted me when I learned of it. Last summer, I finished Infinite Jest on the train back to Minnesota after the weekend I spent in Illinois prior to my congregation’s vote to call me. I cried tears of joy for the way my life was unfolding and said a short prayer to thank God for the grace that has always been active in my life, even when I couldn’t—or didn’t want to—see it. As it turns out, the God of AA/NA/CA is the God of the cosmos and requires nothing from us in order to help us, and that is very, very good news.
[1] The front cover, with its giant neon letters against a non-descript blue sky with clouds, suggests nothing about the book’s contents and is, in my opinion, bad and boring. David Foster Wallace reportedly hated it too and complained that it looked too much like the safety booklet on an American Airlines flight.
[2] Still my favorite 14 years later: “The so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”
[3] This same person also insisted that “This Must Be The Place” (which is, for the record, my absolute favorite song and objectively one of the great love songs of all time) was by THE Talking Heads and not Talking Heads, as I had (correctly) called them. There was no subsequent date.
[4] I mean this quite literally—I spent the day after what is currently (and I hope will continue to be) my last-ever drinking binge kneeling in front of the toilet to projectile vomit every few hours.
[5] I still think he should have.
[6] Another reminder for me that it is God who has ultimate control of my life—a year ago, I was trying very hard to ensure that I got called to a church in Chicago or some other “cool” city, but God apparently had other plans.