So many of the readers who did not love this book from deep in their hearts (as I do) want to compare and categorize and throw off Wallace as being pretentious. How sad! Unlike pretentious referential authors like Joyce, everything you need to understand Infinite Jest is there on the page. Sure, maybe it helps if you have some basic knowledge of theoretical physics and mathematics, but any reading on any topic requires a different level of previous experience, and that experience is not even necessary to enjoy the beautiful, sensitive, funny, HUMAN stories in IJ. This is not a cold scientific something -- this is pure human compassion and frustration and reminds me of what it means to be an American at the turn of the new century. (This is, of course, to say nothing of Wallace's prose, which sends me, as a writer, into alternating fits of jealousy and lust.)

I'm not trying to sell this book to all people everywhere -- it is a fact that most people over a certain age will find this book philosophically and structurally incomprehensible. I am 20 years old, and this kind of writing and the themes it deals with are closer and more real to me than hundreds of years of historical fiction. Having grown up in an age when entertainment is fast and hard and omnipresent (a fact which, like Wallace, I am slow to comdemn harshly), a novel like this reaffirms my belief in the medium. We haven't outgrown our literary past, and, much as films are becoming less linear (making less sense to the old and so much more to the young -- see "Magnolia"), the novel itself is learning, through authors like Wallace, to become the new animal that the upcoming generation needs to allow the medium to survive. The old avant-garde is tired now and needs to be put to bed.

Thank God for David Foster Wallace. Its because of him that I haven't quit writing yet.


Annular fiction   February 27, 2001
 150 out of 181 found this review helpful

Cleverness for it's own sake. Detail without depth. Literary onanism, as some other reviewers have pointed out. Still, Infinite Jest makes for a very good read, especially after you figure some things out. First, read the footnotes, as they advance and comment on the plot. Use two bookmarks. Second, have a dictionary handy at all times, the bigger the better. The OED would be optimal (Hal: "I'm an OED man, myself"), but a Webster's Unabridged will do in a pinch. This isn't one of those books where you can gloss over the big words or hope to pick them up from context. You need to know, for example, that "dipsomania" is another word for alcoholism. Third, be prepared for the lack of conclusion. Resign yourself to the fact that if you want to know what happens, you're going to have to read the book TWICE (or at least go back and read the first chapter again).

If I had known these things when I first read Infinite Jest three years ago, I would have been spared a great deal of anguish. After spending three weeks of my life night and day with this book, I felt personally betrayed that there was no conclusion. I was so angry I wanted to burn the book and send the ashes to the author accompanied by a nasty letter. It was months later when I finally found out that the beginning is the end. Of course, DFW gives the reader ample hints. I just didn't catch on the first time.

The footnote detailing JOI's (Hal's father's) filmography is really just a list of plot events in the main story; pretty much every subject that JOI makes a film about is really something that happens in the novel. This is a good place to go if you think that you missed something. Also important is the theoretical commentary on the nature of JOI's work. Don't forget that he pioneered a genre called "anticonfluential narrative" in which the separate strands of his subject's lives never converge into a satisfying conclusion (sound familiar?). Another hint to the book's structure is the prevalent discussion of annular fusion, a circular process that turns garbage into energy. The word annular (ring-shaped) is key.

The book gets four stars instead of five because the characters are mostly flat and because even though the book was written only five years ago, parts of it already seem dated (like "teleputers" and "film cartridges" - c'mon, we have the Internet and DVDs). But David Foster Wallace deserves credit for writing a thousand-page book on the themes of entertainment and addiction that itself manages to be very addictive and very entertaining. The hilariousness of the U.S. being at war with Canada is reason enough to read this book.


Alas, Poor Reader   April 23, 2000
 88 out of 107 found this review helpful

Look, I enjoy experimental fiction. When authors trust their readers enough to challenge them, I cheer. I do not, however, enjoy books that break promises, and like it or not that's exactly what Infinite Jest does.

Unlike other unconventional novels, such as the works of the oft-mentioned Thomas Pynchon, this one seems to prefer nasty tricks to genuine communication - it implies it's going to tell a complete if complicated story and doesn't deliver. That's the sort of thing well-educated showoffs do. It's one thing to subvert expectations, quite another to waste someone's time. Infinite Jest is nothing more than a shaggy-dog story.

Consider this: At the beginning of this book we meet a gifted young tennis player at an admissions interview for a prestigious college. Something is seriously wrong with him - his handlers desperately try to keep him quiet, but it's no use, he tries to speak for himself and babbles insanely. Cut to Chapter 2, one year earlier, and this same young man functions beautifully, quite in his right mind. Clearly, the novel intends to explain what happened to him, right? Well, close to a thousand pages later we not only don't know what happened to him, we don't even have him in the narrative anymore. That's worse than a mistake, it's a cheat.

Don't get me wrong, David Foster Wallace has plenty of great ideas and a skillful way with the language, but it doesn't add up to anything - that's the frustration. For instance, in addition to the young tennis star, we meet dozens of other brilliantly-conceived characters and learn the fates of exactly none of them. The settings are elegantly detailed, from a tennis high school full of secret passages to the train-station restroom home of a dying junkie, and none of them have any impact on any character from the first page to the last. The time period described, a few years into the world's future, includes several intriguing postulations from our current society, all of them dead ends. There's a cult for ugly people, a cross-dressing federal agent, a group of terrorists in wheelchairs, a lost movie that captures the minds of all who view it, and couple hundred more ingenious devices, not one of which changes a damn thing. Wallace's famous footnotes are more engaging than his story.

In all fairness, this author probably set himself an impossible task; he has tried, like many another writer, to encompass an entire world in his pages. Unlike others, he doesn't know when to shut up. Infinite Jest reads as though he wrote until he got bored, then stopped and foisted the results off on the world. If he couldn't finish what he started, the least he could do is keep it to himself.

Some have said that those who don't like Infinite Jest should stick to pulp romances, but the issue is not comprehensibility; it's the covenant with the reader, which says that a book should deliver what it promises. Infinite Jest, I repeat, doesn't do that. I'm delighted that so many have gotten so much pleasure out of this doorstop of a book - at least all those trees died for some useful purpose - but that doesn't excuse David Foster Wallace, who by the evidence of this work seems to believe that mere cleverness is enough to produce good writing. He's wrong.

Benshlomo says, Don't make promises you can't keep.


Overhyped logorrhea   August 12, 2004
 59 out of 84 found this review helpful

Infinite Jest? Interminable Jest, more like. This annoying novel is grossly overwritten, 1079 pages of 8-point type, plus 98 pages of footnotes in 6-point type. Large sections of it are superfluous logorrhea and should have been cut; the thing reads like the world's most awesome speed rant, though this may be deliberate. The plot is rudimentary, all telegraphed in advance, and moves at a glacial pace. When I finally finished the thing, I wanted my time back.

Hated one of the protagonists, Don Gately, for reasons requiring some self-examination to discover. (1) He's the sort of large ugly ignorant self-satisfied anti-intellectual homophobic cretin I've always disliked in real life. (2) His presentation is hypocritical, one of the most intellectual anti-intellectual statements I've ever read. The more apparent it became Wallace intended to reward him, the more I hated him.

Other unlikable things: (3) The polemical treatment of marijuana as virulently addictive, which most experienced people know to be nonsense; sure, some vanishingly microscopic percentage of users get into trouble with it, particularly since the introduction of the high-resin kind in response to pot's illegality (it being easier to transport and store in smaller quantities), but still a far smaller number than with booze, let alone cocaine, speed or narcotics. (4) The smarmy closet god stuff. (Sample paraphrase: "...the religion only morons believe in, but that works anyway.") At least this cannot be said to pander to Jesus freaks. No moron possibly could get through this book.

Probably the most annoying thing of all is that, after 1079 pages, it doesn't end! The story is left hanging up in the air, as if there were another 50 or 60 pages yet to come (or, considering Wallace's prolixity, 200-300). Evidently, Wallace simply got bored of writing it and decided we could make up the rest for ourselves, or maybe his editor finally put his/er foot down and said, "Enough."

True, the very first chapter gives us a skeletal outline of the principal events to come. This section reads as if it were written last, after the work had been abandoned, to prevent it from being a total cheat. But far more is left unresolved. Characters are abandoned in mid sub-plot. Painstakingly built-up mysteries are shrugged off

In short, virtually the entire denouement is missing. After 1079 pages, just as the excitement is finally building toward the events we've been promised, the thing ends. It's the book's final jest, and it's on us.

At least the language is inventive and original, and a bit harder to pastiche than one might think, considering that its principal device is merely to string clauses together without limit or punctuation. There are some truly comic bits too-conceptual comedy mostly, the kind you chuckle over only when you think back on them. Only wish there'd been more of them.

Altogether, I believe I have now had a lifetime dose of David Foster Wallace.


Replete with cleverness, devoid of wisdom   December 15, 2005
 37 out of 54 found this review helpful

The problem with everything David Foster Wallace has written, is that nothing in the work compels one to care. If you read Infinite Jest and enjoy it, clearly the driving force is your own, not the book's. It is unfortunate that most of the postive reviews of this book center largely on the reviewer's views of why others didn't like it. It is also unfortunate that those speculations are limited mostly to length and the difficult vocabulary. I have read books of equal length (Black Lamb & Grey Falcon, anyone?) and enjoyed them. I employ a dictionary with nearly everything I read. Surely no one accuses others of disliking The Great Gatsby simply because it contains difficult language. Condescending are those who believe that someone who dislikes a work is simply intimidated or bested by it.

I'm a lover of literature. I've read books over my head and am willing to admit it. At best, David Foster Wallace is dazzled by his own cleverness. At worst, he is a literary bully.