David Foster Wallace on Infinite Jest, America and God

At the risk of DFW-overload, here's an interesting bit from the same interview, speaking in 1996 about the then-brand new Infinite Jest:

"The only thing that I knew for sure, I wanted to do something that wasn't just high comedy, I wanted to do something that was very, very much about America. And the things that ended up for me being most distinctively American right now, around the millennium, had to do with both entertainment and about some kind of weird addictive, um... wanting to give yourself away to something. That I ended up thinking was kind of a distorted religious impulse. And a lot of the AA stuff in the book was mostly an excuse, was to try to have - it's very hard to talk about people's relationship with any kind of God, in any book later than like Dostoyevsky. I mean the culture, it's all wrong for it now. You know? No, no. Plausibly realistic characters don't sit around talking about this stuff. You know?

So... I don't know. But the minute I start talking about it, it just, it sounds number one: very vague. Two: really reductive. And the whole thing to me was so complicated, that you know it took sixteen hundred pages of sort of weird oblique stuff to even start to talk about it. And I feel stupid, talking about it.

Interviewer: Why?

Extemporaneously. I feel stupid talking about it this way. Because it's like, because I don't have a diagnosis. I don't have a system of prescriptions. I don't have four things that I think are wrong. I don't have four different... opinions about it. It seems to me that it's more of a feeling, a sort of texture of feeling.

You know, why are we - and by 'we' I mean people like you and me: mostly white, upper middle class or upper class, obscenely well educated, doing really interesting jobs, sitting in really expensive chairs, watching the best, you know, watching the most sophisticated electronic equipment money can buy - why do we feel so empty and unhappy?"