David Foster Wallace novel translated by an 11-year-old – into Lego

How to get an 11-year-old interested in the works of David Foster Wallace? Crack out your copy of Infinite Jest, and recreate it in Lego. That was the project embarked upon back in April by American English professor Kevin Griffith and his 11-year-old son Sebastian. They've just finished, and – running to more than 100 scenes, as I guess any recreation of a 1,000-plus page novel would have to – it's something of a masterpiece. It certainly puts these Lego scenes of classic literature to shame.

Griffith and his son had the idea to "translate" Infinite Jest into Lego after reading Brendan Powell Smith's The Brick Bible, which takes on the New Testament. "Wallace's novel is probably the only contemporary text to offer a similar challenge to artists working in the medium of Lego," they write, grandly, on their website.

Griffith, who works at Columbus, Ohio's Capital University, told me that the book has also "really taken on a foothold as the 'novel of ideas' of the late20th and early 21st centuries". And what novel of ideas doesn't need a Lego version?

Picking which scenes to do, in a 1,079-page text, was something of a challenge, he says: Griffith would choose which he felt would work best, and then his son would tackle the toy brick reconstruction.

"I had taught the novel for three years in an introductory critical theory class at Capital University, so I kind of had some sense of which scenes were important thematically," he says. "We did, however, go through the novel page-by-page to also find scenes that would accommodate the kinds of Lego we had.  For instance, we had a Lego safari helmet, so we picked a scene in which a character, Randy Lenz, has a dream in which he is wearing one (page 558)."

Fantastic. I'm also loving some of the later scenes: "Gately's got to admit he would have tried to impress her, too, though, if she hadn't met him by holding a kidney-shaped pan under his working anus"; "Gately amused teammates by letting them open and close elevator doors on his head"; and the judicious roping in of a Homer Simpson figure for "Somewhere along late in the progression the old man let it be known he was working on a secret book that revised and explicated much of the world's military, medical philosophical and religious history by analogies to certain subtle and complex thematic codes in M*A*S*H*". "The American Century as Seen Through a Brick", meanwhile, is a work of 11-year-old genius.

Hardest, Griffith says, was the Eschaton  scene "in which the students at the Enfield Tennis Academy recreate total nuclear war by lobbing old tennis balls". "We decided to just do the simplest thing possible, though, by placing mini-figures on a Risk board," says Griffith. "What surprised me about the whole project was how many scenes were just devoted to characters' faces and expressions, and that would make sense, given the novel's focus on personal pain and addiction."

Sebastian didn't read Infinite Jest himself. "Let me be clear – Infinite Jest is not a novel for children," says Griffith. "Instead, I would describe a scene to him and he would recreate it in a way that suited his vision.  All the scenes are created by him and he then took photos of them using a 10-year-old Kodak digital camera he received for a present long ago.  I think that having the scenes reflect an 11-year-old's perspective gives them a little extra poignancy, maybe."

But Sebastian is now "definitely interested in David Foster Wallace", says his father, adding that "in many ways Wallace was a 'kid-ult' himself, someone who loved Tolkien, puppet shows, etc". There are no plans, by the way, to get cracking on another literary masterpiece. "No," says Griffith. "This was exhausting.  And after finishing Infinite Jest, what could anyone do, really?"

Well, indeed. Surely, surely, Wallace would have approved.