Graphic designer Christian Swinehart wears thick-rimmed square glasses and a green button-down with the top button undone. He articulates his consonants and gesticulates with his hands and sometimes places a hand on his chin. “Yeah, so if you take a look at the endnotes one,” he says, showing me a diagram-in-progress from his Infinite Digest, a series of visualizations of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, “in the top left corner, this is just a histogram where I counted the number of lines of text in each footnote¹ and then counted the number of footnotes in each one of those lengths. And so you can see the overall distribution of sizes.” He has a Wallace-like speaking cadence with lots of “and so”s and even the occasional “and but so.” One suspects that the voice in Wallace’s novels sounds a lot like the voice in his head. “The one in the upper right is kind of the same thing,” he continues, “except that the colors of those—the brightness of the bar segments—the darkest ones are at the beginning of the book, and the lightest ones are at the end.”

He’s talking about his process for creating a diagram that maps “the distribution of footnote references and the sizes of the notes at the end of the book.” He’s got other diagrams on his website too, like one that chronicles various plotlines and a forthcoming chronology vs. narrative order chart.² Though Swinehart has read the book straight through only once, he’s “walked through every page³ multiple times to try to summarize each one of these episodes to come up with a biographical sketch of all the characters.”⁴

For the casual reader, even the casual reader of Wallace’s work, this whole thing might seem pointless. What, you might ask, is the fun in counting lines of text or mapping out endnote distributions? What does Swinehart get out of this process? That’s the question I had in mind when I reached out to him for an interview.

Of course, I somewhat understand the impulse. In November 2025, I published an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books about diagramming a 900-word sentence from Wallace’s short story “Mister Squishy.” I’ve perused Infinite Boston and taken what I’ve semi-jokingly called a “Holy Pilgrimage” through the novel’s key locations. And a computer-programmer friend and I are currently coding a browser game based on Eschaton, the war-simulation game played by students at Enfield Tennis Academy.⁵ The drive to categorize, catalogue, and detail the book’s elements exists within myself as well.

All this got me wondering whether there’s a segment of Wallace’s readership that’s gone undiscussed. 2026 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Infinite Jest, and a lot has been written about the apparent status of his fans. Are they “performative”? Are they incels? These questions are not without origin—with the revelation of Wallace’s alleged abuse of Mary Karr, some critics have wondered whether those same cruel tendencies are present in his writing. However, they’re going about it wrong. Not only do such oversimplifications often leave out Wallace’s vast female readership, they also frame Wallace fandom as a product of who one is when it’s really more about how one thinks and what one thinks about: namely, details, patterns, lore, and hidden meanings.

The examples of detail-obsessed fans are near-endless. There’s artist Chris Ayers, who’s designed a bunch of book-accurate merchandise; there’s Infinite Atlas, an interactive map of every location mentioned in the novel; there’s Ryan Compton’s “Infinite Jest by the Numbers,” which quantifies Wallace’s compound conjunctions and acronyms into hard statistics; and there’s artist David C. Jensen’s attempt to illustrate the whole book. Pretty much every Wallace fan I’ve talked to has some story of graphing, cataloguing, or looking for patterns in his life and work—Stephen Piccarella has written a condensed version of the Infinite Jest chapter about Ken Erdedy waiting for his marijuana delivery to prove that the chapter’s excess is necessary; poet/playwright Kimmy Joy has folded details from Wallace’s works into her scripts; and Wallace superfan Alex Fulton has “incorporated [Wallace’s] DOB and the release of IJ into a wider matrix of Philip K. Dick-esque speculations on the true (hidden) nature of our reality focused on Stanley Kubrick and his movies. […] I have noticed things like Dave was exactly 6666 days old on the day The Shining premiered, and at the exact midpoint of his life, The Shining aired as the ABC Sunday night movie.” For all these people, there’s a sense that a greater pattern—a greater design—can be uncovered if one studies Wallace closely enough.

Which brings us to Christian Swinehart’s Infinite Digest. I came across Infinite Digest when someone posted about it on Reddit, and its diagrams looked like the exact sorts of things I’ve imagined while reading and rereading Infinite Jest—the sorts of things I’d love to make if I had more design prowess. When one first opens Infinite Digest, one sees, in aesthetically-pleasing serif font, an introduction to Swinehart’s history with Infinite Jest, which intro includes lines like “It was hard not to be dazzled by the surface-level details, particularly the exquisite language and a bracingly parodic view of American culture that felt like a periscope pointed at the 21^st century four years ahead of time.” This intro was probably at least fifty percent of what drew me to his project. Put simply, Swinehart writes like Wallace, and this similarity reminds me of something Wallace once said in an interview with Richard Powers and John O’Brien about his ideal reader: “If stuff is going well, it feels like I’m talking to somebody. Or like there’s somebody there. And I think it’s somebody rather suspiciously like me.” For those of us who recognize ourselves as that person, there’s a sense while reading Wallace of being spoken to.

Then one gets into the diagrams themselves—color-coded maps, scatter plots, and semicircles charting things like footnote distributions and social networks. “The actual process of producing these starts with collecting the data,” Swinehart explains, “which for me usually involves figuring out what is the sort of atomic unit that I’m interested in. And so in the case of this book, you could think of the set of all of the characters as being the kind of base Lego pieces that you’re working with.” From there, Swinehart finds a way to “bring in a second variable”—something that can be measured against the original Lego pieces to create a visualizable pattern. “Edward Tufte, a theorist of information graphics, talks about the ways that data graphics can be more revealing than just looking at purely textual numbers. Only when charts are multivariate are we actually reasonably skilled at making sense of ‘how big is eighty-six percent’ or something. If you plot a bunch of dots on two axes, we can immediately tell you if there’s correlated behavior. But if you showed us a table with two columns of numbers, we’d have to do some arithmetic in order to understand that.”

The patterns Wallace intended were a bit loftier than scatterplots—he liked to say Infinite Jest was designed like a Sierpinski Gasket. Swinehart agrees. “I can see a couple of ways that Infinite Jest resembles the Gasket in terms of its ‘self similarity.’ I think thematically in the book, the obsession and addiction idea is the fundamental one. And you see it echoed in each of the different groups. You would think of the recovering addicts being different in some way from the aspiring tennis pros. But you, over the course of the book, see that they’re both kind of in thrall to their passions. And then likewise with the AFR⁶ and government subplot⁷—there’s a similar kind of ‘ideological obsession’ at play.”

Which brings me to my core point. The obsession and addiction that the book depicts is the exact mindset it encourages: a kind of conspiratorial thinking, a drive to pick things apart in search of patterns. Swinehart’s conspiracy-brain was engaged, he claims, from his very first reading: “I have this flashbulb memory of physically where I was when I finished reading it the first time, and that moment of recognition of the kind of anti-resolution of the final pages, and then remembering that the stuff in the first twenty pages actually feels related to what I have just completed. And so immediately upon finishing it, wrapping around and rereading the first twenty pages that’s the most chronologically final portion of it, and just sort of marveling at the way that this is a book that spoils itself. Recognizing the effect that had on me got me then wondering what else was hidden inside of this.”

Lots is hidden in Infinite Jest, according to Swinehart: “One thing I noticed with making the graphics about the chronology is that the amount of jumping around is something that is largest at the beginning and kind of gets more and more focused as things move forward. I think by the end of the story, Gately is flashing back to some of the earliest events in the chronology, but other than that, you are really on this more or less linear path into the future.” He discovered a certain symmetry in the book’s construction. “You notice the way that the earliest pages are talking about some of the latest parts of the narrative and the latest parts of the book are some of the earliest parts of the narrative. You are being told the end at the beginning, and as you think you’re approaching the end, you’re going back to the beginning with some of these pieces of information.”

He has wilder theories too. “One thing I wonder about is…the internet consensus at some point was that what happened to Hal⁸ was something involving the DMZ drug⁹ and probably involving his toothbrush. And so I guess my hottest take is that that might actually just be a complete red herring.” What really happened to Hal, Swinehart and I both agree, has something to do with him watching his father’s samizdat Infinite Jest V.¹⁰ There’s a certain exhilaration, I find, to talking with someone who’s thought about this book as much as I have. Both of us feel a deep need to solve this thing.

But despite its intricate construction, Swinehart believes the book is not fully solvable. “There’s something intentionally frustrating about the way in which you get pulled into a long footnote at a moment where you are left with a little bit of a cliffhanger, and now you are trapped in twenty-four pages of something else at the end of the book waiting to get back to some sort of resolution,” he says. “I feel like [Wallace] is constantly withholding the payoff. And so I wonder how much of that is creating for you as a reader the withdrawal symptoms [of quitting a drug].” Despite Wallace’s 1993 plea for more sincerity in contemporary fiction, “there is a certain irony to this book kind of keeping you at arm’s length. I think all of the experiences and emotions in it are incredibly sincere and raw, but the way that the story is told has all of these distancing techniques. And so there is a certain amount of standoffishness that you’re still exposed to.”

Whether that standoffishness is an accidental impediment or a necessary part of Wallace’s sincerity project remains to be seen, but I suspect the latter. Wallace, like Hal, had deep desire not just to make himself understood but to bring his ideal reader into the conversation. In his essay “Greatly Exaggerated,” he said writing should be “an act of communication between one human being and another,” and the odd use of “between”/“and” rather than “from”/“to” makes it seem like he expects readers to speak back. Through projects like Christian’s, perhaps they are. Perhaps the conspiratorial thinking Wallace inspires in those as detail-obsessed as himself is not conspiratorial at all but simply the other side of a decades-long conversation.