‘So there’s this guy – middle-aged, married, father-of-three – who one day decides to end it all. He sticks his head in a microwave oven and cooks himself to death. His skull explodes under the pressure. His brains leak onto the floor. His suicide devastates his family and reserves a special torment for the son who returned home from tennis practice to discover his father’s remains. But here’s the kicker. The kid is haunted less by his grisly discovery than by the moment he stepped inside the house and thought to himself that ‘something smelled delicious! … That it’d been four hours plus since lunchtime and I’d worked hard and played hard and I was starved. That the saliva had started the minute I came through the door. That golly something smells delicious was my first reaction!’

This anecdote is the beating heart of David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest (1996) and, I think, the heart of Wallace’s body of work. I love it: I love how precisely it balances horror and heartache, perversity and poignancy. That poor kid is otherwise a thoughtful genius and a disciplined elite athlete, usually in complete control of mind and body. But the instant he lets down his guard he is mugged by the signature weakness of the human being: the realization that consciousness itself is imprisoned in a body too distracted by, and too eager to indulge in, the abundant stimuli of a deceptive world. And when he vents his anguish he illuminates the essential ‘Wallaceness’ of Wallace’s work – what makes it distinctly his and what makes it worth reading.