Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, first published in the U.S. in 1996, is an attempt to narrate today's world in 1500 pages, without reducing it to a single interpretation. Wallace states, I want to write about how it feels to live today, instead of distracting people from it. Hence, Wallace finds himself writing about everything from the serious, to the trivial, to the bizarre: birth pangs and death throes, blizzards, stories of love and separation, phobic men, excessive salivation, nurses who seem to emerge out of a racy-nursewear catalogue, and birds having heart attacks in mid-flight.

In doing so, Wallace approaches both his comical and tragic characters with an unprecedented delicacy and earnest. As Wallace believes, jokes are often the bottles in which we send out the most plangent screams for someone to care and help.

Part of the staging will centre on the three brothers of the Incandenza family: Hal, a prodigiously intelligent and talented student at the Enfield Tennis Academy; and his elder siblings, Orin, the punter for the Arizona Cardinals, and Mario, a severely deformed and disabled filmmaker and passionate radio listener. Other characters appear, such as Joelle van Dyne, a veiled radio announcer and member of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed and Don Gately, a former thief and medicine addict from the drug rehabilitation centre Ennet House. All characters of the novel are helplessly at the mercy of life's hasards.