There was a roughly 20 year stretch there–from, I’ll say, 1996 to 2016–wherein David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan door-stopper Infinite Jest wasn’t just a national best-seller, but a sort of totemic signifier, a shorthand for a certain class of over-educated “hipster” so-called. You didn’t just read Infinite Jest, you showed it off; you proved your literary bona fides by regularly referencing it, quoting it, dog-earing it and/or featuring it prominently on your bookshelf, even if you never actually finished it yourself.

It was about a dozen years ago (back when I myself was an over-educated 20-something wannabe-hipster with a Masters degree and an insecure need to prove to myself that I could handle the “big” books) when I finally tackled Infinite Jest. The novel, I quickly learned, was an extended meditation on America’s addiction to entertainment–whether in the form of recreational drugs, or sports, film, power, etc.–and how this addiction is caused by and causing our crippling inability to connect and communicate with each other, both metaphorically, and (in the case of at least one character in the first chapter) literally.

The narrative takes place in the “near” future; it’s difficult to pinpoint in the year, because in Wallace’s slightly-dystopic milieu, the traditional Gregorian calendar has been supplanted by corporate “subsidized” years, e.g. the Year of the Whopper, the Year of Glad, the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment, the (my personal favorite) Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile, and etc.

Clearly there’s a fair amount of dry humor here, meant more for parody than to be taken as prophetic (for crying out loud, the United States in the novel has annexed both Canada and Mexico into the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N.–I mean, the sin of Onan is an apropos metaphor for entertainment’s self-pleasing waste and loneliness I suppose, but as a parody acronym it’s a little on the nose); nevertheless, from the perspective of the 2020s, when even 2007 is now receding into the increasingly distant past, it’s still tempting to critique Wallace’s frankly-shaky futurism.

For example, we as a nation currently doing the opposite of trying to annex Mexico (the “build the wall” rhetoric that poisoned the 2016 election cycle is perhaps one reason among many why Infinite Jest‘s pop-cultural presence has lessened in recent years). Balkanization, not New World Order, has been the overall trajectory of the 21st century.

Moreover, Wallace doesn’t seem to have anticipated the internet age at all, even though he published in 1996; home-internet may have still been brand-new then, but trust me, it was already firmly established as a cultural force. Yet no one in his novel’s near-future is seen surfing the internet or playing on home-computers (which would have even fit in comfortably his theme of the alienating influence of entertainment); “video-phones” are mentioned and even Bell-style land-lines, but not cell phones; and he fails to anticipate not only DVDs, but also streaming, opting instead to show everyone watching films “entertainment cartridges,” as though we’d all be viewing movies on the same format as Super Nintendo.

Again, these are just quibbles, since the thrust of the novel is clearly a fun-house-mirrors distortion of our ostensible present, not Hard Sci-Fi (this is not the successor novel to, say, Orwell’s 1984, which remains as frighteningly prescient as ever, despite its near-future now being nearly 40 full years into the past). Nevertheless, Wallace surprisingly nails at least a couple things just right. For example, in one early chapter on the failure of the “video-phone” market bubble in the near future, the narrator mentions off-hand how some over-eager investors lost their employees’ pensions funds after investing them with Freddie Mac during this Tech Bubble.

Let me repeat that for emphasis: Employee pensions. Invested in Freddie Mac. Lost in a market bubble. I mean, wow, of all the things for Wallace to absolutely nail about the late-2000s…slow clap, slow clap.

He also, incidentally, portrays an incompetent entertainer being disastrously elected President of the United States amidst an on-going pollution and public health crisis. Do with that information what you will.

And for that matter, though the rest of Wallace’s sci-fi is distractingly off, his central premise is nevertheless still reasonably incisive: for the “infinite jest” in question isn’t just an allusion to Act V scene i of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” but refers to a video-cartridge on the loose, of an experimental movie that is so entertaining, any one who watches it loses all desire to do anything else, including eat, drink, sleep, even live. Some radical Quebecois separatists spend the novel trying to track down the master copy, so as to deploy it as a weapon of mass-destruction to destroy the American people. I mentioned this Macguffin to a roommate while he was playing video-games, and he deadpanned, “Well, that’s not realistic at all.” Indeed. In America, for all of our much vaunted freedom of faith and fearsome religious fundamentalists, Infinite Jest makes the surprisingly-compelling case that entertainment may in fact be our unacknowledged state religion after all.

So much of the novel has faded from my memory–and from our larger pop-cultural discourse–in the years since I first tackled it. I primarily remember it hazily–many parts were forgettable, many tongue-in-cheek, many straight up cringe (let’s just say his ebonics patois has not aged well–and that his descriptions of drug addiction very much feel written by the sort of sheltered Christian MFA kid who didn’t understand what genuine drug addiction felt like at all). Whenever he’s writing what he doesn’t know, it shows.

But whenever he writes what he does know, if very much shows, too; and the parts describing clinical depression, for example, feel all too real–and given the tragic arc of his own life, all too prescient as well. His Christian upbringing also shifts from a liability to an asset when he starts addressing religious question directly–and the one line from that massive novel that has stuck with me over the years is spoken by a radical Quebecois separatist in a wheelchair to an undercover FBI agent in drag: “All other of our you say free choices follow from this: what is our temple.”

And you know what? That is (as the kids say these days) facts–and what;s more, what our Temple is isn’t always obvious. I knew some summer sales-reps out of BYU, by way of contrast, who would claim that their Temple was the literal LDS Temple, wherein they performed vicarious baptisms for the dead, and endowment ceremonies of great import, and where they laid symbolic hold of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Yet in their everyday word and deed, it wasn’t a cliché to note that money was their Temple, the center of their lives, and that all other ethical and moral considerations were subordinated to it. They were more than willing to lie, and cheat, and steal to make a sale, and amass as much wealth as they could in as short an amount of time as they could. They kept not the Law of Consecration, nor sought after the establishment of Zion, no matter how many sessions they did at a physical Temple, nor how faithfully they attended Church each Sunday.

But it is far too easy to point out the hypocrisies of others; it is far harder to call out in ourselves. It’s a point that Wallace later made much more succinctly in his famed 2005 Kenyon College commencement address (in case you understandably wanted to skip Infinite Jest entirely and just get the Cliffnotes gist of it), known popularly as “This Is Water”:

“…Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. […]

“Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. […] Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.”

Spencer W. Kimball, not-coincidentally, once made a similar point in his 1976 Bicentennial address, “The False Gods We Worship,” wherein he splashed cold water on the proceedings by condemning the three biggest forms of wickedness he saw afflicting both America and the Church:

1) our pollution of the planet (“I have the feeling that the good earth can hardly bear our presence upon it”);

2) our materialism (“But I am afraid that many of us have been surfeited with…wealth and have begun to worship them as false gods”);

and 3) our militarism (“We are a warlike people, easily distracted from our assignment of preparing for the coming of the Lord. When enemies rise up, we commit vast resources to the fabrication of gods of stone and steel—ships, planes, missiles, fortifications—and depend on them for protection and deliverance. When threatened, we become antienemy instead of pro-kingdom of God; we train a man in the art of war and call him a patriot, thus, in the manner of Satan’s counterfeit of true patriotism, perverting the Savior’s teaching: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you’ (Matt. 5:44)”.

Yet President Kimball does not insinuate that the vast majority of us ever consciously worship materialism and militarism; like Wallace, he indicates that “they’re unconscious. They are default settings.” They are our temples, unthinkingly, no matter our protestations to the contrary.

So I suppose, if nothing else, the value of this novel, now that its pop-cultural moment has receded, is in how it has kept me questioning over the years: what indeed is my temple? What is the center of my devotion, beyond the church I attend on Sunday? For that matter, what is your Temple? These are not rhetorical questions.