Last year, an article in the Guardian explored the risks of so-called performative reading under the title “Is it OK to read Infinite Jest in public?” For the Guardian writer, the question was a rare refutation of Betteridge’s law, the journalistic adage stating that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered with a no. Here the answer was a nervous and tentative yes. Mostly, though, the piece drew on and perpetuated the archetype of the noxious “Infinite Jest” bro which has solidified in the quick-drying cement of social media. In 2020, the “Jest” bro hit the big screen in Emerald Fennell’s heavy-handed “Promising Young Woman,” in which a D.F.W. fanboy tells Carey Mulligan’s character that she has to read “Consider the Lobster,” one of the author’s essay collections. Moments later, the fanboy is revealed to be a sexual predator. In this way, “would-be rapist” is added to the already toxic mélange of incel, mansplainer, and poser that constitutes the putative “Infinite Jest” reader. Has anyone met these guys? Not the female journalist in the Guardian: ostentatiously wielding her copy of Wallace’s novel in Washington Square Park, she waits “to be caught in the act, secretly filmed for a TikTok ridiculing my performance.” The only interaction she has is with a polite Gen X dude on the bench beside her, who asks how she’s doing with the book. Her bench mate is, she surmises, the “type of guy who might consider David Foster Wallace a modern-day saint.”