Writer David Foster Wallace‘s doorstopper 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, has just been reissued in a 30th-anniversary edition, with a new foreword by Michelle Zauner. Oddly, when reading that foreword, one has to wade through a good deal of discussion of its readership’s demographic before one reads anything about the text itself. The ratio of words about the novel itself to words about the sociology of the novel’s readership is … unfavorable.

This, sadly, is to be expected, as Infinite Jest has fallen victim to an absurd and very modern phenomenon in which the obvious artistic greatness of the work itself plays second fiddle to the negative social implications of being a member of its fandom. Liking Infinite Jest or its author, after all, is the surest sign of being something called a “lit bro.”