“Infinite Jest” is one of those post-modern supernovels. It clocks in around 1,000 pages and has over 400 footnotes. And everybody’s reading it.

I had this impression a few months back. I figured it was either selective attention on my part, or one of those more-or-less localized book fads that occasionally occur in the more pretentious circles. Finally it happened that when I swung home and couldn’t find my copy of “Catcher in the Rye,” I found that giant blue-sky-jacketed behemoth was just about levitating off the shelf and into my backpack. At page 250, I mentioned it to anarchist friends, and one informed me that reading the book was actually an Internet meme this summer. So everybody is reading it. (So much as can be said for a post-modern supernovel.)

In fact, the last time I knew so many people reading the same book I was reading was high school, and those books were mostly forced upon us. That was top-down organization, fodder from the Powers That Be. This is grassroots. This is a whole generation of readers Saying Yes.

I feel like a book like this, one without sexy vampires or prepubescent wizards, hasn’t been Said-Yes-to in quite some time. The last few decades were dominated by video and music. These things are easy to acquire, consume and pass along. Books, on the other hand, take time to read. Send someone a YouTube link and he knows that it’s a 2:53 commitment. Ask him to read a book and you’re asking for weeks, maybe months. A personal recommendation just isn’t going to cut it. But now that we have a Cloud, and things like it, the Cloud can recommend reading material. My News Feed knows that a friend of a friend of a friend is reading “Infinite Jest” and thinks it’s possibly the Best Book of All Time (the B-B.O.A.T). And if I need to hear somewhere around 20 glowing recommendations of a book by people I judge to have reasonably similar tastes to mine before I read it, I’m going to hit that tally, well, about three weeks ago.

Written by the late great David Foster Wallace in the mid ‘90s, the book jacket plot to “Jest” revolves around a video so entertaining that you’ll die watching it. The way the book approaches this with a myriad of tight plots and complex characters, an elegant dystopia and some sometimes-moving, sometimes-mind-bending lyrical-essay-type things, is nothing short of dazzling. It’s very appropriate that the book is eponymous with the Highly Addictive video. I’m not halfway through, but if I were the kind of person to call artistic endeavors “triumphs,” I would call it a triumph.

What percentage of current “Jest” readers will become “Jest” veterans remains to be seen. But all of a sudden there’s something new in our cultural vocabulary. Sure it was written by a bandana-wearing white guy who signed love letters “Young Werther,” had an ex-girlfriend’s name carved into his arm and said shit like “Fiction’s about what it means to be a fucking human being.” But he was also a genius and I think this sudden wave of influence is going to have a lasting impact. Call it a pivot point. A revolution. Goethe may have caused a spike in the rates of suicide by sensitive young Germans when he released “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” but he also kicked off the Romantic Movement. If this is the Next Big Thing, at least it’ll be endlessly entertaining.

Infinite Jester? E-mail [email protected] to start a rally.

NOTE: See The Daily’s print edition for the full, footnoted version of this column.