Once upon a time, the smartest, most attractive boy in my literary theory class said that Infinite Jest was his favorite novel. To prove that I was a fellow academic (and also other-worldly beautiful), I read it too. Imagine my surprise discovering that the novel was just over 1,000 pages, and largely considered one of the most challenging works of postmodern literature of this century as a result of its dense, non-linear style.
I bought Infinite Jest from a second-hand bookstore — chock-full of chicken-scratch annotations. The novel was dense, the margins were full, and the inside cover read, “Please return to Mark”, with a phone number listed beneath. I struggled for some six-odd months, oscillating between reading Wallace’s body text and footnotes, alongside Mark’s annotations. Until I reached a line which Mark underlined and starred, but failed to annotate with his own inner-workings in the margins:
Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
I thought it strange that a reader such as Mark — who clearly had plenty to say in the margins — had left such an integral quote (or at least, integral to me) without interpretation.
So often I hear it: “David Foster Wallace is bro-lit”, or bro literature. That is to say that David Foster Wallace is often dismissed because of his male protagonists, intellectual density, and canonization among self-serious male readers; finishing a work of his feels like an academic pat on the back.
I reject this narrative. Despite its alleged male appeal, David Foster Wallace’s work persistently centers on vulnerability, longing, dependency, and the desperate desire for connection — experiences culturally coded as feminine. The label of Wallace as simple as literature consumed by the insufferable literature bro says more about literary gatekeeping, performance, and class signaling than anything about the dynamic core of his fiction.
When a work near and dear to my heart is denoted with the dreaded “bro-lit” label, I feel a cold and all-encompassing chill run down my spine, but I understand the perspective. Bro-lit, as a stereotypical subcategory, is a work of literature that centers male protagonists, features aspects of hyper-intellectualism, and often utilizes difficult, postmodern techniques. Subsequently, this perfect storm of characteristics leads to canon worship among academic men. It certainly doesn’t help that when someone finishes Infinite Jest, they get to proclaim, I survived 1,000 pages!
In this, reading Wallace becomes a cultural performance. I think back to my first interaction with a work of Wallace, when the smartest (and hottest) boy in my literature theory class said Infinite Jest was his favorite book. I think how I only started to read the absolute mind-screw of a novel in an academically-fueled flirtation. Or, at the very least, to experience the gratification of being able to read and comprehend the same work as the most intelligent boy in the class section.
But then, I read Infinite Jest and Wallace’s greater body of work, and have since concluded that just because the culture around Wallace is masculinized, it does not mean the text is, or ought to be, as well.
This brings me back to Mark’s, underlined but unannotated, quote: Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it. This line matters because it’s a display of attachment, not detachment. It centers around the inability to release love when it leaves, the inability to accept change. It is anything but dense and analyticalor snide and ironic: it’s raw and real.
The quote itself was not ironic, but Mark’s lack of witty annotation certainly was. It seemed the man who loved the book before me had commentary for everything except vulnerability. This seems to touch on something more universal: the discomfort with emotional nakedness — both textually and culturally. Maybe Wallace is bro literature because so many male readers intellectualize Wallace, yet resist the raw portrayals of the desire for connection.
Vulnerability is a central theme of Infinite Jest — an adjective certainly not aligned with the dominant discourse surrounding masculinity, or what a man ought to look like. In the novel, Wallace’s narrative centers on dependency and addiction, featuring Alcoholics Anonymous meetings where addicts practice radical honesty, surrender of the ego, and the importance of needing one another. These narratives surrounding emotional exposure, confession, and powerlessness seem to starkly contradict representations of traditional masculine autonomy.
This idea is echoed in Wallace’s characters as well; in Infinite Jest, characters are terrified of being unseen or unloved. Entertainment acts as a metaphor for withdrawal, underscoring the tragedy of emotional self-restriction. Wallace shows tenderness towards weakness: he does not mock fragility, but surrenders to it.
The concepts of fragility, emotional vulnerability, surrender, and dependence are all, in many cases, culturally-coded as feminine. So many representations of male media cite domination, conquest, and the absence of emotion as the pinnacle of masculinity, but Wallace’s characters want intimacy more than dominance; Intimacy that only comes from equal give and take. Characters listen, they confess, and they empathize, rather than draping experiences in a thick coat of irony.
In fact, Wallace seems to believe the opposite. Wallace once asserted that irony had exhausted itself in our culture; that the next literary rebellion would not be sharper wit, but unguarded sincerity. In a culture afraid of the honest, he proposed that the bravest thing a writer could do was risk authenticity. Bro literature, as a static, unnuanced label, depends on performance; intellectual dominance, ironic distance, and the gratification of having conquered a difficult book. But Wallace’s fiction repeatedly dismantles that posture. His characters’ cleverness isolates them; their survival depends on confession, cliché, and connection.
The real radicalism of Wallace’s work is not its density, but its demand for vulnerability: a quality culturally coded as feminine (and therefore easily misread as weakness).
But if the text so often negates the bro literature label, why is Wallace canonized as the salvation of the subcategory itself? Likely because of the obvious: Wallace is taught in male-dominated academic spaces, and the study of literature itself is historically considered a male field. In this, textual density and academic rigor become mistaken for masculinity, conflating intellectual effort with male endurance. After all, the author is dead: the interpretation of a work by its audience determines the significance of a text, not the author’s intention. Perhaps this bro literature label is a byproduct of the way certain men read Wallace (or rather, the way they display having read him).
Like Mark, many male fans of David Foster Wallace intellectualize his prose but resist his critique of irony as avoidance and raw, human depictions of sentimentality. Wallace’s work is not about masculine triumph, but rather fear of abandonment, the searing agony of desire, the innate need for connection.
I wonder if Mark was silent due to discomfort. Perhaps it was recognition? Was it simply too vulnerable to annotate? In a supposedly masculine text, one of the most celebrated quotes is left undiscussed. But perhaps in his silence, one more reader is left held, seen, and forgiven.