Why Cormac McCarthy Stopped Reading New Novels: ‘Infinite Jest’ Was to Blame
21st March 2026
I hate to pass along such news, but it’s the 30th anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the preeminent MFA novel, which in the heady days of the Clinton surplus passed through the aforementioned burning hoops of the publishing-industrial complex with flying colors. In fact, it introduced many of the colors as it leapt and gamboled. Three decades of nimbus have grown round its obsolescence, and yet its publishers insist on goading us every 10 years with a freshly introduced reissue of the dead horse. This time, the publishers have tapped singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, an introductress who has gone into the belly of the beast cognizant of her “own innate and internalized misogyny,” an obligatory non-sequitur that lets the reader know they’re in the good, coercible hands of someone in way over their head.
I must confess to having attempted to read INFINITE JEST on multiple occasions without success. I am persauded that the title references the scam that Wallace managed to perpetrate on his agent, his publisher, and the Usual Literary Suspects.