Wallace’s work exhibits a fascination with attention that is regulated and optimized through processes of self-administration, as well as an interest in how alertness and interest can be performed (I explored this in Contemporary Fictions of Attention, 2018). However, he also demonstrates a concern with forms of attention that do not just play out in the self-conscious practices of an isolated subject. Instead, his work also stages interactive moments of collective attention, such as the focus group in “Mister Squishy” or the game of Eschaton in Infinite Jest. This chapter will lay out a broader context for Wallace’s interest in attention, before going on to identify how Yves Citton’s notion of “attention ecology” might help to frame an argument about Wallace’s depictions of group attention.

In 1996, the year Infinite Jest was published, the Federal Drug Administration approved Oxycontin as a prescription drug, a move that would have dire repercussions for Americans’ relationship to opiates. Indeed, Wallace’s novel appeared at a pivotal moment in what is now considered the opiate crisis. Drug use, of course, appears throughout Wallace’s fiction, including the pot-smoking LaVache of The Broom of the System, the numerous addicts in Infinite Jest, and the amphetamine-popping Chris Fogle in The Pale King. Wallace’s work fits into a long tradition of drug use and recovery in fiction, a genre that reaches back to Homer, Thomas De Quincey, William Burroughs and many more. This chapter will argue that Wallace’s fiction marks a sociopolitical shift in this genre: the commercialization of addiction under late capitalism. This approach to Wallace’s work will, like the recent Cambridge Companion and Marshall Boswell’s latest monograph, further thicken our understanding of Wallace’s literary and sociocultural context.