Infinite Jest, for all its putative difficulty, cares about the reader, and if it denies him or her a conventional ending, it doesn’t do so out of malice; it does it out of concern, to provide a deeper palliative than realistic storytelling can.
D. T. Max, in Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, explaining the vital difference between David Foster Wallace and TFiOS’s Peter Van Houten. It’s true that IJ was the biggest and most obvious model for An Imperial Affliction, but IJ’s famed ambiguity doesn’t violate the unwritten contract between reader and writer because the book is redemptive and full in all the ways that An Imperial Affliction (by all accounts, at least) isn’t.

491 Notes/ Hide

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