Extract

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.

A tennis prodigy sits in an admissions office, unable to speak for himself while three deans discuss his future, and somewhere in the same fractured chronology a halfway house of recovering addicts watches the calendar inch toward a year sponsored by adult diapers. David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel sprawls across a thousand pages, footnotes spawning sub-footnotes, its plot involving a lethally entertaining film cartridge, Qubcois separatists, and the machinery of addiction. The maximalism is the point: Wallace wanted to capture the American sensorium at full volume, the way entertainment replaces connection, the way loneliness hides inside abundance. Beneath the pyrotechnics lies a heartbroken book about the desire to feel something real.