Writing Lesson From David Foster Wallace: How Meaning and Personality Are More Important Than Description When Creating A Setting

A Study of One of the Most Beautiful and Memorable Passages From Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace wrote his first novel as a senior honors project when he was a student at Amherst College. That novel, The Broom of the System, was picked up by a major publisher, got strong reviews, and quickly made him a darling among the literary set.

He wrote a second book, a postmodern collection of stories titled Girl With Curious Hair. It was not a commercial success. As quickly as he skyrocketed to critical success, he slipped back into obscurity.

Already struggling with depression during his years of critical acclaim, during his years of commercial disappointment he slipped into addiction too. Heavy marijuana use graduated to alcohol abuse. But in his own recounting of these years, alcohol and marijuana were secondary to his biggest problem. “Television was my real addiction,” Wallace famously said to journalist David Lipsky, in a conversation that would become central to the plot of the Wallace biopic movie: The End of the Tour.

We so rarely talk about television addiction as a thing, but of course it is. Television addiction, social media addiction, video game addiction…we are more acutely aware of screen addiction now than we were when DFW was struggling with it in the late 80s. In The End of the Tour, when you watch the dramatization of DFW confessing that TV was a real problem for him, you get the sense that he knows it as a terrible truth but is also embarrassed about it.

DFW’s masterpiece, Infinite Jest, is a novel about many things, but front and center throughout the book is the idea of addiction.

Once you know that legitimate, problem addiction to television was a real demon for DFW, so much more of Infinite Jest starts to click. The idea of a film so perfectly made that people will watch it to the exclusion of anything else, a film that’s so addictive there are government agents talking about its potential as a weapon…

Addiction, and the havoc it wreaks on the body and mind, was something Wallace knew well.

In 1988, Wallace, living in a state he would later describe as “drinking alone every day in front of the television,” attempted suicide.

In 1989, aware that he needed to make a change in his surroundings, Wallace enrolled at Harvard to get a graduate degree in philosophy. If graduate school in philosophy sounds like exactly the wrong course for a depressive who is struggling with loneliness and addiction, well…you’re right. Wallace only lasted a few weeks before he was in big trouble with alcohol and depression. Aware that he was in danger, he checked himself in to the psychiatric hospital at Harvard, and spent four hard weeks detoxing and getting sober.

Then, wisely putting his studies and his writing career on hold, Wallace moved into a halfway house for recovering addicts in Boston. That house in real life is called the Granada House, and in a fictionalized version Wallace created in Infinite Jest, it’s called Ennet House.

Ennet House is, arguably, the most important location in Infinite Jest, so when it comes time to introduce it in the reader’s mind, Wallace takes his time, allowing himself multiple pages to introduce the setting.

But he doesn’t use a straight-forward description of the building or its inhabitants.

Instead, to build the setting of Ennet House, Wallace gives the reader a moving and beautiful list of the things one learns while living there.

Here’s how it begins:

“If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield, MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out that once MA’s Department of Social Services has taken a mother’s children away for any period of time, they can always take them away again, D.S.S., like at will, empowered by nothing more than a certain signature-stamped form. I.e. once deemed Unfit — no matter why or when, or what’s transpired in the meantime — there’s nothing a mother can do.”

The description of “exotic new facts” that one learns when moving into a halfway house in Boston is some of the most poignant and gutwrenching writing I’ve ever read.

Here are some excerpts:

“That over 60% of all persons arrested for drug and alcohol-related offenses report being sexually abused as children, with two-thirds of the remaining 40% reporting that they cannot remember their childhoods in sufficient detail to report one way or the other on abuse.”

“That some people really do look like rodents.”

“That some drug-addicted prostitutes have a harder time giving up prostitution than they have giving up drugs, with their explanation involving the two habits’ very different directions of currency-flow.”

“That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do.”

At the time Wallace checked into Granada House, he was a once promising but now failing writer, one who had not written anything worth submitting to anyone in more than a year.

What a strange twist of fate that life would take him to this halfway house where his simple observations of life around him would become the centerpiece of the most critically acclaimed novel of his generation.

Here are more of the “exotic new facts” he used to describe the setting of Ennet House:

“That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him.”

“That loneliness is not a function of solitude.”

“That it is possible to get so angry you really do see everything red.”

“That some people really do steal — will steal things that are yours.”

And then, on page 203, an “exotic new fact” of such stunning poignancy that it has leapt out of the novel and now exists on its own, arguably the most famous passage from Infinite Jest:

“That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack.”

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

This section of Infinite Jest, pages 200–206, is a section I will be returning to for the rest of my life. It’s that powerful.

On its own as a piece of writing, the description of Ennet House is a stunning display of masterful writing.

But it’s not until you’ve read the whole book that you realize how Wallace’s patient and powerful depiction of setting in the early part of the novel allows him to leverage that setting to great effect later in the story.

Ennet House is a location of marvelous human drama. Of growth, kindness, struggle, and tragedy. All of it sings out in the reader’s mind because Wallace made Ennet House a real place in the reader’s mind, a place that has depth and meaning.

In taking more than 6 pages to create the setting for this locale, and doing so not by describing all the minute and forgettable details, but instead focusing on the more salient aspects of meaning and experience, Wallace makes Ennet House into a living, breathing thing. Ennet House is a place where people that you know, live. It is a place where events of significance happen and those events inform and instruct your own experience. The events in Ennet House have meaning because you’ve already derived meaning and even a bit of wisdom from the place, and that’s before anything’s even happened there.

With his success at creating such a vibrant locale in Ennet House, Wallace shows us that, when creating a setting, a writer can’t just be satisfied with visual descriptions of place. Even more important to the reader than how a place looks is what the place means.

Through the wisdom Wallace gives us when he introduces Ennet House, the setting becomes a place with personality and meaning. It becomes a place you go to grow, struggle, and learn.

Spencer Baum is the author of 7 novels.