Listen, it’s not like the criticism is coming from left field. Most importantly, people need to stop rehashing the same tired arguments, especially when there is such a rich trove of other ways to poke fun at men. “ Big Red Son,” his essay on the porn industry, and “ A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which he wrote about his experience on a cruise ship, are endlessly entertaining and nuanced pieces of first-person journalism.

But if you read his essay writing and journalism, you’ll know that it’s also insightful and drily hilarious. Yes, he makes copious use of long-winded footnotes, and yes, his writing is dense and his vocabulary sophisticated. It’s at the point where the book has practically become a metonym for pretension and sexism.īut to make David Foster Wallace the poster boy of white male pretension is unfair. The trope of the Infinite Jest guy has been written about in Reductress, The Toast, and The Cut.

But for some reason, maybe just the simple fact of its enormous physical heft, Infinite Jest is the one novel that crops up in this conversation every time without fail. Hemingway and Bukowski get flak for their perceived machismo, and Lolita is in trouble for its subject material (despite the should-be-obvious fact that writing about a pedophile is not akin to endorsing pedophilia, and its gorgeous prose deserves the praise it receives). There are several other books and authors that routinely get roped into the “books guys brag about reading” discourse.

Infinite jest novel