Wallace’s two-sided attitude toward mass culture makes him determined, as Lipsky puts it, “not to enjoy the process of being celebritified.” He’s concerned about the effects of fame on his work. “To have written a book about how seductive image is, and how very many ways there are to get seduced off any kind of meaningful path, because of the way the culture is now. But what if, you know, what if I become this grotesque parody of just what the book is about? And of course, this stuff drives me nuts.”

Lipsky’s aware that he’s an avatar of the star-making pop culture about which Wallace is so ambivalent. He’s ambivalent too, sincere in his regard for Wallace, yet also a compliant chip in the mass media’s vacuous, reductionist, gossip-mongering, nonliterary, anti-literary machine. A novelist himself, he loves literature yet appears to believe that a writer’s dominant response to a great book can be only envy. Self-conscious about his contradictions, suspicious of his subject while wanting his approval, Lipsky is a character nearly worthy of Wallace’s fiction. While the author is in the shower, Lipsky surreptitiously phones Rolling Stone from the guest room. His notes, unfortunately, are too sketchy to provide real drama, but the conversation centers on how to chase down rumors that Wallace once had an alcohol or drug problem. Lipsky and his colleagues discuss how to pump Wallace’s former editor, Gerry Howard, who “would be more than forthcoming with a little bit of massaging to give you whatever you needed. Bury it in other questions. . . . For example, ‘How was editing him; what do you think of his success; hey, what about the dope?’ ”

Lipsky returns to drugs time and again, perhaps unavoidably since so much of “Infinite Jest” is about addiction. Wallace denies ever having been a heroin addict, but he does cop to a frightening amount of occasional drug use: acid, cocaine and black tar heroin, plus heavy drinking and marijuana consumption. He emphatically disconnects his drug use from any sort of glamour or creative imperative. “I wasn’t an interesting or Falstaffian or larger-than-life type of addictive figure,” he says.

Some of the most accomplished, emotional and hair-raising passages in “Infinite Jest,” and in American fiction of the past 20 years, are set in a Boston-area halfway house for recovering addicts. Wallace insists that his close familiarity with halfway houses, as well as with 12-step programs, is the product of journalistic research. In the course of writing “Infinite Jest,” he dropped in on several local facilities, finding himself warmly welcomed by their residents: “Nobody is as gregarious as somebody who has recently stopped using drugs.” He tells Lipsky, “I did what you’re doing now,” and then, annoyed with the line of questioning, adds, “except over a much longer period of time and much more subtly.”

In a New Yorker article about Wallace after his death, D. T. Max asserted that Wallace did suffer an addiction and did spend time in a halfway house, though Max doesn’t specify Wallace’s dependency. What is certain is that, living in the closing years of the American century, struggling with his own impulses and appetites, Wallace developed a vision of a society whose pursuit of pleasure was shutting itself off from true feeling and experience. In “Infinite Jest,” he tells Lipsky, “drugs are kind of a metaphor for the sort of addictive continuum that I think has to do with how we as a culture relate to things that are alive.”

A striking feature of Lipsky’s book is the delicate dance between the earnest celebrity reporter and the savvy celebrity-­shy subject, each aware that their encounter serves an exterior purpose, yet each also sensitive to the possibility of a real human connection, even friendship. “It’s kind of intense,” Wallace observes. But on the last leg of the journey, after the two seem to have become close, Lipsky ventures that there’s something false in Wallace’s persona. The reporter suggests that Wallace believes he’s really smarter than other people, and that his amiability is a species of condescension. Disappointed, Wallace shoots back: “You’re a tough room.” Lipsky is hurt in turn after they reach the house, when Wallace tells someone calling on the phone that he’s still with “this guy.” Lipsky wishes that he would have referred to him at least as the “Rolling Stone reporter.” Then, four pages later, Wallace says, shyly, “It’ll be very interesting before you leave, I really would like, if we could trade address data.” Yet the writers never meet again, nor even correspond to commiserate about the killed article.

The life of David Foster Wallace and the writing that came out of it deserve vigorous scholarship, to which Lipsky’s book makes a useful contribution. Readers will soon have further opportunities to get inside Wallace’s creative mind. Max is preparing a comprehensive biography of the writer. Wallace’s unfinished last novel, “The Pale King,” is to be published in April of next year. Meanwhile, those who were put off by the heft, complexities and gruesomeness of “Infinite Jest,” not to mention the endnotes, should at least give it another shot.