In interviews, Wallace was explicit that art must have a higher purpose than mere entertainment: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a . . . human being.” And here, really, is the enigma of David Foster Wallace’s work generally and “Infinite Jest” specifically: an endlessly, compulsively entertaining book that stingily withholds from readers the core pleasures of mainstream novelistic entertainment, among them a graspable central narrative line, identifiable movement through time and any resolution of its quadrumvirate plotlines. “Infinite Jest,” in other words, can be exceedingly frustrating. To fully understand what Wallace was up to, the book bears being read, and reread, with Talmudic focus and devotion. For many Wallace readers this is asking too much. For many Wallace fans this is asking too much. And thus the Wallace factions have formed — the Nonfictionites versus the Jestians versus the Short Storyists — even though every faction recognizes the centrality of “Infinite Jest” to his body of work. That 20 years have gone by and we still do not agree what this novel means, or what exactly it was trying to say, despite saying (seemingly) everything about everything, is yet another perfect analogy for the Internet. Both are too big. Both contain too much. Both welcome you in. Both push you away.

Image David Foster Wallace Credit... Marion Ettlinger/Corbis Outline

Theory 2: “Infinite Jest” is a genuinely groundbreaking novel of language. Not even the masters of the high/low rhetorical register go higher more panoramically or lower more exuberantly than Wallace — not Joyce, not Bellow, not Amis. Aphonia, erumpent, Eliotical, Nuckslaughter, phalluctomy! Made-up words, hot-wired words, words found only in the footnotes of medical dictionaries, words usable only within the context of classical rhetoric, home-chemistry words, mathematician words, philosopher words — Wallace spelunked the O.E.D. and fearlessly neologized, nouning verbs, verbing nouns, creating less a novel of language than a brand-new lexicographic reality. But nerdlinger word-mongering or “stunt-pilotry” (to use another Wallace phrase) can be an empty practice indeed. You need sentences to display-case the words, and here, too, “Infinite Jest” surpasses almost every novel written in the last century, maintaining a consistent and mind-boggling descriptive mastery, as when he portrays a sunset as “swollen and perfectly round, and large, radiating knives of light. . . . It hung and trembled slightly like a viscous drop about to fall.” (No one is better than Wallace when it comes to skies and weather, which is traceable to his having grown up in central Illinois, a land of flat tornado-haunted vastidity.) As John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote after Wallace’s death, “Here’s a thing that is hard to imagine: being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished.” It has been eight years since Wallace left us, and no one is refilling the coffers of the David Foster Wallace Federal Sentence Reserve. No one is writing anything that resembles this: “The second shift’s 1600h. siren down at Sunstrand Power & Light is creepily muffled by the no-sound of falling snow.” Or this: “But he was a gifted burglar, when he burgled — though the size of a young dinosaur, with a massive and almost perfectly square head he used to amuse his friends when drunk by letting them open and close elevator doors on.” We return to Wallace sentences now like medieval monks to Scripture, tremblingly aware of their finite preciousness. While I have never been able to get a handle on Wallace’s notion of spirituality, I think it is a mistake to view him as anything other than a religious writer. His religion, like many, was a religion of language. Whereas most religions deify only certain words, Wallace exalted all of them.

Theory 3: “Infinite Jest” is a peerlessly gripping novel of character. Even very fine novelists struggle with character, because creating characters that are not just prismatic snap-off versions of oneself happens to be supremely difficult. In “How Fiction Works,” the literary critic James Wood, whose respectful but ultimately cool view of Wallace’s work is as baffling as Conrad’s rejection of Melville and Nabokov’s dismissal of Bellow, addresses E. M. Forster’s famous distinction between “flat” and “round” characters: “If I try to distinguish between major and minor characters — round and flat characters — and claim that these differ in terms of subtlety, depth, time allowed on the page, I must concede that many so-called flat characters seem more alive to me, and more interesting as human studies, however short-lived, than the round characters they are supposedly subservient to.” Anyone reading or rereading “Infinite Jest” will notice an interesting pertinence: Throughout the book, Wallace’s flat, minor, one-note characters walk as tall as anyone, peacocks of diverse idiosyncrasy. Wallace doesn’t simply set a scene and novelize his characters into facile life; rather, he makes an almost metaphysical commitment to see reality through their eyes. A fine example of this occurs early in “Infinite Jest,” during its “Where was the woman who said she’d come” interlude, which concerns the paranoid weed addict Ken Erdedy, whose terror of being considered a too eager drug buyer has engendered an unwelcome situation: He is unsure whether or not he actually managed to make an appointment with a woman able to access 200 grams of “unusually good” marijuana, which he very much wants to spend the weekend smoking. For 11 pages, Erdedy does nothing but sweat and anticipate this woman’s increasingly conjectural arrival with his desired 200 grams. I suspect no one who has struggled with substance addiction can read this passage without squirming, gasping or weeping. I know of nothing else in the entirety of literature that so convincingly inhabits a drug-smashed consciousness while remaining a model of empathetic clarity. The literary craftsman’s term for what Wallace is doing within the Erdedy interlude is free indirect style, but while reading Wallace you get the feeling that bloodless matters of craftsmanship rather bored him. Instead, he had to somehow psychically become his characters, which is surely why he wrote so often, and so well, in a microscopically close third person. In this very specific sense, Wallace may be the closest thing to a method actor in American literature, which I cannot imagine was without its subtle traumas. And Erdedy is merely one of the novel’s hundreds of differently damaged walk-on characters! Sometimes I wonder: What did it cost Wallace to create him?

Theory 4: “Infinite Jest” is unquestionably the novel of its generation. As a member (barely) of the generation Wallace was part of, and as a writer whose closest friends are writers (most of whom are Wallace fans), and as someone who first read “Infinite Jest” at perhaps the perfect age (22, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan), my testimony on this point may well be riddled with partisanship. So allow me to drop the mask of the introducer to show the homely face of a fan, and much later a friend, of David Wallace.