The beloved 1,100-page novel is David Foster Wallace’s magnus opus and one of the most influential books of its time, but did you know he based its structure on a mathematical object called a Sierpinski Gasket and proofread it while watching a film about a St Bernard dog, on a loop?
1 Infinite Jest is set in a near future in which the Gregorian calendar has been supplanted by a sponsorship arrangement. Most of the action of the novel takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment [Depend is a real brand of adult nappies]. 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.
2 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. Incandenza himself died when he killed himself by putting his head in a microwave oven.
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