David Foster Wallace's suicide in 2008 was a shock that will go on reverberating for as long as people remain interested in the novel. Even if you had mixed feelings about his work, there was no doubting his colossal talent and no mistaking his centrality to his generation of American writers. If anyone was going to become the Melville of the corporatised society, the post-natural environment, the pharmacologically altered human landscape we all now inhabit, he was the one…

For all his baroque plotting, Wallace was generally more interesting at the level of the part than the whole. You go to him for the self-contained, usually comic, often staggeringly grotesque riffs and routines at which he excelled, rather than some sustained Jamesian evolution of story out of character. The provisional nature of The Pale King adds to this montage-like effect. You move through it as if through some mildly phantasmagorical gallery, making your own connections as you wander along…

There is a section in double entry columns that consists of little more than a roomful of examiners silently turning the pages of tax returns – "Ed Shackleford turns a page. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Ken Wax attaches a Memo 20 to a file. Anand Singh turns a page . . . " On it goes, column after column – "Ken Wax turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Lane Dean Jr rounds his lips and breathes deeply in and out like that and bends to a new file. Ken Wax turns a page . . . " It is one of the strangest, saddest, most haunting things I've ever read.

We all know about Trekkies. Or those Star Wars super-fans who go to Comic Con dressed up like Boba Fett. But what about all those Infinite Jest worshipers out there? Who can they turn to for obscure references to David Foster Wallace's magnum opus? Well, The Decemberists, of course.

For most of the book, I didn't understand the phenomenon of IJ's rereaders. I do now. It's not because the book is so fun. It's because of the explosive carnage of the final sections. The destruction of beloved characters forces a frantic search for textual clues that signal a rebirth in their future, or at least create some meaning amidst their fall. I didn't want to reread IJ because I loved the book, but because I wanted a way out of what the book was telling me. And so I could flip back to page one and begin again. And when I didn't find the answer, do it again. And again. What does this sound like?

We knew of two scenes in the Entertainment. A beautiful woman telling you something horrible about the way the world works. A revolving door in which you never quite caught your target. James Incandenza didn't create something entertaining. The title was, as Himself told Joelle, a joke. He created something terrifying. The central theory was outlandish and awful. But people couldn't let go until they found the information that would put their world right again. And that information never came, and so they never left. They just kept running through that revolving door, being told those horrible things again and again, which made them run all the faster.

So too with the book, at least in a miniaturized form. The conclusion is outlandish and awful. And that keeps you from letting go. In a dystopically idealized world, you keep rereading this immense, absorbing book, always looking to explain away the horrifying events of the end, but on each read, your connection to the characters becomes stronger even as the end doesn't clarify. You discover just enough new details and new theories to keep the cycle going, but never enough to resolve it. And the time you spend in the book's world takes you further and further from the real world. You spin in that revolving door again and again, continually hearing these horrible things.

Reading this book should be a terribly lonely experience. It is so sweeping and detailed and consuming. No one outside the novel can possibly understand what you're talking about. And if you're reading it twice? Three times? Before the acceleration of the internet, how many similar obsessives was the average reader likely to run into?

Not here, though. Here, people can understand you… A book that is about loneliness and that creates isolation has been subverted into a communal activity. Instead of being turned into Hal, we enrolled in the Enfield Tennis Academy, sharing a fundamentally strange and obsessing experience, but sharing it nevertheless.