Infinite Jest: A Novel

by David Foster Wallace

book data

4,487 ratings, 4.21 average rating, 1,151 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		55%
4		23%
3		10%
2		5%
1		4%

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published

February 1st 1997 (first published 1996) by Back Bay Books

binding

Paperback, 1088 pages

isbn

0316921173 (isbn13: 9780316921176)

description

In a sprawling, wild, super-hyped magnum opus, David Foster Wallace fulfills the promise of his precocious novel The Broom of the System. Equal part...more

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11/23/07

Herbie added it

Read in January, 2008

It's my habit to write on the inside sleeve of a book the words from the text that I can't define or don't understand. Here is the resulting list from the back inside sleeve of Infinite Jest:

apocopes
bolections
reglets
dipsomania
quincunx
varicoceles
simpatico
aleatory
experialist
agnate
pedalferrous
fulvous
louvered
sangfroid
gibbons
apercu
eidetic
murated
tumescent
recidivism
erumpe...more

Like this review? yes (52 people liked it)

12 comments

01/25/08

David Beavers rated it:

I've been waiting, panther-like, for the right combination of caffeine and personal gumption to strike, to attack writing about this, since it really is one of my favorite books ever-ever, and one of the most fascinating things I've ever read. I've read this book twice and I could care less what people say about it, because when I *do* care, I tend to grit my teeth over the ridiculous comments & reviews that tend to come up in discussing David Foster Wallace's work. People like to levy the criti...more I've been waiting, panther-like, for the right combination of caffeine and personal gumption to strike, to attack writing about this, since it really is one of my favorite books ever-ever, and one of the most fascinating things I've ever read. I've read this book twice and I could care less what people say about it, because when I *do* care, I tend to grit my teeth over the ridiculous comments & reviews that tend to come up in discussing David Foster Wallace's work. People like to levy the criticism that the book is "sloppy" or "digressive". Really? You think? An 1100 page book with 200 pages of small-print footnotes might be a little digressive or indulgent or maddening? It might stray a wee bit into uncharted, dark-woods territory? Jeez.

There is, in art, what I like to call the "crazy project". Once you go to work on the Crazy Project -- C.P. for short -- you don't leave the Crazy Project. You don't FINISH the crazy project. You can -- when you are really involved in it, I mean really involved -- scarcely even talk about it; you may not even realize you're involved in it. The C.P. involves being given a hammer (the only real tool of the artist), a mouthful of nails, and being sent "over yonder hill" and told to do AS MUCH DAMAGE AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN with the hammer you have been given. When working on the C.P., the creative force is one in the same as the destructive force, and your hammer is a useful tool regardless of which way you are swinging it.

I think DFW is one of the most fascinating authors alive -- he's doing work with the English language in the tradition of Kathy Acker, Bill Burroughs, or James Joyce. The marketplace demands "novels" and so people oblige, but there is a difference between a "novel" and a BOOK, and I would consider a book to be more interesting -- if more difficult and less "composed"-- and Infinite Jest is definitely a BOOK, and shouldn't be treated as a "novel" in the same way, say, "Life of Pi" is a novel (and I do think Life of Pi is terrific, don't get me wrong). But, if you want immaculately written works of fiction by Wallace, check out his short stories -- especially the ones in Girl w/ Curious Hair -- because these conform more to what you would expect from traditional notions of "reading fiction". If you want a beautiful, wildly ambitious, insanely indulgent, uncompromising mind-bending skull-violating MESS, one that comprises an entire Victorian manor of the Crazy Project, then Infinite Jest may well be worth your while.

The book is, definitely, a mess, let's not mince words. It is also obsessively-compulsively mathematical in the way that DFW seems to enjoy; there is an order to the chaos, and it did take reading it a second time to pull out some of the exquisitely crafted crystalline plot strands he was working at. Linearity & coherence of disparate plot elements is not what the book is interested in, be warned.

But before I make the case of this being some academic project with no soul, let me say that reading this, I was genuinely surprised and moved by how deep & real the characters in it become. The characters in here are terribly tragic, in a real Shakespearian sense (the book's title is after all a reference to Hamlet), and their tapestry in this book's pages is as intimate and heartrending as it is vast; this book is a language project but one that remains absolutely invested in the lives of the people involved in that "project".

The book is about a lot of things: American culture & the nature of desire, fathers and sons, art, addiction, institutions, drugs, consciousness, film & the nature of narrative . . . too much to go into. More than anything, I think, the book is about addiction, and how our desires are moderated and mediated by culture, and how desire & addiction are entwined, and how Westerners approach these things.

Infinite Jest is wildly funny and, like I mentioned above, almost unexpectedly moving: there is a kind of veneer between the reader and the characters; they are guarded and stoic people, for the most part, and "getting to know" them can be as frustrating as trying to "get to know" someone in your own life who is guarded and careful with their emotions. But over the course of hundreds of pages you learn the inner-workings of IJ's huge cast, and their emotional motivations and subtleties begin to resonate with you in ways that dig so deep I think they're almost frightening.

This book is dense enough -- to say the least -- that I think you can get out of it whatever you are willing to put into it. Isn't this true of most good art? But the depth here is incredible. To say I'm "biased" and a bit blinded to criticisms about this book is hardly the point -- I think its a marvel, I think its a mess, I think it taught me what the difference is between a book & a novel, and why I think BOOKS are what the front-line artists working on the Crazy Project are really hammering out.(less)

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12/10/08

Manny rated it:

(review of isbn 0349108773)

bookshelves: science-fiction, strongly-recommended, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, well-i-think-its-funny

Read in January, 2009

I've finally reached the end of this amazing book. It's not an easy read, but after a while you discover that there are good reasons why it has to be the way it is.

The review is the start of the mini-blog I kept while I was reading it (there is a link at the end to the concluding part). It sort of contains spoilers: I don't give away very much about the plot, but I do spend a lot of time speculating about what the overall point of the book is. So if that kind of thing bothers you, y...more

Like this review? yes (20 people liked it)

25 comments

10/19/07

Matt rated it:

(review of isbn 0316066524)

Read in January, 2009

A preface: If you haven't yet read Infinite Jest, this review won't serve to persuade you to make the commitment. Other reviews will tell you how long and complex this book is, or how some of the vocabulary comes straight out of the Oxford English Dictionary's left field, or tell you how brilliant or pretentious or overwritten or other Red Flag words the book and author are tagged with. Et cetera, et cetera.

A review: In his book Howard's End, E.M. Forster wrote, "Only connect!"...more A preface: If you haven't yet read Infinite Jest, this review won't serve to persuade you to make the commitment. Other reviews will tell you how long and complex this book is, or how some of the vocabulary comes straight out of the Oxford English Dictionary's left field, or tell you how brilliant or pretentious or overwritten or other Red Flag words the book and author are tagged with. Et cetera, et cetera.

A review: In his book Howard's End, E.M. Forster wrote, "Only connect!"

That short little diddy has long been one of my favorite literary quotes; and although I have no tangible evidence to prove either way, I think a variation of this ran through David Foster Wallace's mind constantly.

I had the misfortune of having started this just a few weeks before DFW committed suicide, so naturally, my perspective on the book changed mid-read. For those of you have read Infinite Jest, recall how Hal starts perceiving the world horizontally instead of vertically. Yeah, it's kinda like that. Adding to the emotional baggage of this read was an uncle of mine who also committed suicide a year prior, not to mention a few good friends who have been to rehab and recovery houses. Then, on top of that, is the capitalized Personal Identification I discovered having with DFW too, which quite possibly transcends ways in which I am able to coherently express.

Suffice to say, circling back to the quotation above, you know how some have said words and language are the only real way we connect as human beings, right? Well, to me, Infinite Jest is Wallace's personal own Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), his way of sending out a transmission signal that said, "I'm here. We're here. We're alive and suffering, trying to be happy, living the only way we can. Please respond. Please Identify. Please commit."

Last night after I closed Infinite Jest for the final time, I had an image in my mind of DFW presiding over a dying plant and slitting his own wrists to water it with blood. I think it will stick with me for some time.

Concluding thoughts: this review is probably too somber and narrow, and I find it difficult to say what really matters without going on and on and on and on, so it's time to cinch up the tourniquet and spare the limb. It's worth noting how compulsively laugh-out-loud hilarious this book can be, and how the philosophical digressions will get you nodding affirmative, the observations of persons, places, and things so spot-on and vivid some won't want to leave your head, a literary entertainment so gentle and brash and enlightening and real, and yes, entertaining too, that I will truly miss reading it.

What more can you say about a book than that?
(less)

Like this review? yes (15 people liked it)

13 comments

04/11/07

Alex rated it:

recommends it for: anybody with a good chunk of time on his or her hands

Heart-breaking, hilarious, and ultimately all-too-human.

Infinite Jest is a mammoth slice of American pie, tipping the scales at 1079 pages, including 388 endnotes. Some of the endnotes have footnotes, too. A book of these proportions is bound to have its nay-sayers, from people who believe verbosity to be a sin akin to gluttony, to those who got lost somewhere in the mid-500s and never found their way out.

I had some reservations; I'd heard the book was overwritten, over...more Heart-breaking, hilarious, and ultimately all-too-human.

Infinite Jest is a mammoth slice of American pie, tipping the scales at 1079 pages, including 388 endnotes. Some of the endnotes have footnotes, too. A book of these proportions is bound to have its nay-sayers, from people who believe verbosity to be a sin akin to gluttony, to those who got lost somewhere in the mid-500s and never found their way out.

I had some reservations; I'd heard the book was overwritten, overclever, overconfident, and overpostmodern. But I can emphatically say, none of these is actually the case. In the end, after roughly three months of getting through this beast, I can report that it was worth every word and superscripted numeral.

In IJ, David Foster Wallace wants to get at this Janus-faced überAmerican dual-concept of Addiction/Entertainment. Each of the characters has some form of addiction, be it to alcohol, marijuana, television, tennis, cleaning, sex, lying, or addiction-recovery meetings. The characters use their addictions as escapes from their selves, as something Other to focus their powers on so as to avoid the pain of true self-scrutiny.

One of the two main characters is Hal Incandenza, junior tennis star and secret savorer of THC. He is the youngest of the three Incandenza brothers, and the most promising regarding a future playing competitive tennis. But he's also an empty young man. And it's this emptiness that his covertly getting high fills. It's this emptiness that his father feared was making his son mute before the old-man suicided.

The other main character is Don Gately, a live-in staffer at an addiction halfway house and ex-break-and-entering specialist with a recovering penchant for Demerol. Gately offers the book access to the other side of the proverbial coin from Hal's juvenile dependence on marijuana; a look into the sphere of Boston AA and drug-addiction environs and a cast of characters trying to learn how to fill that emptiness without their Substances of choice.

That said, Wallace doesn't just set these two characters up on intersecting narrative arcs and let the story play out like we expect it to. In many ways, Infinite Jest is a refutation of exactly that sort of passive expectation that American culture has taught us to bring to our Entertainment. The author, in fact, goes out of his way to chop up the accustomed flow of the book and makes the reader work, in a way, to "get it". Hence the endnotes, disrupting the linear aesthetic we expect, and the use of non-numerical years (the book takes place after the advent of "Subsidized Time", in which each year is given the name of the highest-bidding sponsor).

While this could come across as chaotic or desultory, it actually lends the text a delightful experiential quality. It lacks the big-picture central truths that some might demand of literature, but it does so in the same way that life, at least in late-twentieth-century America, does. Truth is rather constructed through bits of memory and tangents of thought. The book does not have a climax, though in retrospect one might be constructed by connecting some dots. By defying literary formality, Wallace is doing more than just pulling some intellectual-postmodern stunt; he's reasserting the human element, placing real emotion and desire at the fore. The result is heart-felt and eschews the hipness of glib irony admirably.

In all, Infinite Jest is the best account of the cable-television era that we now live in, of a strange America seemingly on the verge of suicide-by-hedonism. But most of all, it's just an extremely touching and deliciously unironic book with some of the best-developed characters I've ever met, and worth a couple months out of anybody's examined life.(less)

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1 comment

05/07/08

Tal rated it:

(review of isbn 0316920004)

Read in July, 2008

It was a year ago, almost to the day.

I was sitting on the southeast corner of 54th & Park; the first day I worked with Simon, king crawdaddy of the axe slayers, hardhat in hand shining like an unpeeled orange in the sun. Opened up the book and page one was already impenetrable and confounding. Tried to read a couple pages and put it down--looked over at Sy, did a children’s puzzle book to hair metal bands. Two weeks of non-stop conversations with a guy I now barely talk to. Then I ...more

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09/28/07

Andy rated it:

bookshelves: read-but-not-recommended

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in November, 1998

recommends it for: I would not recommend this book.

I actually wrote and posted a review of David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest:

Nearly a decade after publication, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest remains a literary ink-blot test. With its 1,079 pages (including nearly 400 footnotes), and its fondness for gags, drugs, cultural theory, recent US popular culture, scientific minutiae, and Latinate vocabulary, the novel still divides readers on matters of literary technique and the question of Wallace's literary talent.
...more I actually wrote and posted a review of David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest:

Nearly a decade after publication, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest remains a literary ink-blot test. With its 1,079 pages (including nearly 400 footnotes), and its fondness for gags, drugs, cultural theory, recent US popular culture, scientific minutiae, and Latinate vocabulary, the novel still divides readers on matters of literary technique and the question of Wallace's literary talent.

I tend to believe the author's stylistic pyrotechnics are not bright enough to hide the comparatively dull substance of his writing; but I can't completely dismiss Wallace as a literary artist. Infinite Jest is not the Next Big Thing (except for the size of the tome itself), but it's not truly fodder for the Moronic Inferno, either, as Dale Peck and the rest would have it.

The novel's tragic flaw is its lack of emotion depth. Wallace seems more interested in inventing acronyms and an "après" filmography than in developing characters. The author's utilization of the language of pop psychology and millennial technological frenzy to portray teenage tennis phenoms is largely dead-on. Wallace hits definite false notes, however, in drawing the mostly lower-class residents of a halfway house as if they were operating from the same frames of reference as the junior tennis stars.

Focusing on such young, shallow characters violates the Big Rule of compelling fiction: There has to be something at stake. You may not forget Hal Incandenza, the teenage tennis and linguistic prodigy who is as close to a protagonist as this novel offers; but it is this implausible combination of natural gifts, not Wallace's rendering of character or of his story itself, that make Hal memorable. Hal's lower-class counterpart, a thirtyish petty thug and recovering addict named Don Gately, is more intriguing for the difficulty of his situation. But Wallace presents Gately as lacking self-awareness to a degree that kills whatever sympathy readers might otherwise hold for him.

Wallace's experimental style does not disguise the essential weakness of his writing here either. Few of the narratives coalesce, and it is often difficult to imagine why editors did not simply send certain passages off to the exosphere. The apparently arbitrary chronology works against any sort of pace Wallace might have established. And, though the novel wisely ends on an ambiguous note, this note is frustratingly oblique. It's difficult to imagine why a writer blessed with such intellectual gifts would offer up a shaggy dog story as his magnum opus. Infinite Jest feels like it should have ended at least 500 pages before it actually does, and yet it hasn't earned an ending.

Wallace should be commended for his attempt to add intellectual depth to modern American fiction without sacrificing the traditional literary devices of characterization and narrative, and to dramatize the effects on the consciousness, and the conscience, of our hydra-headed consumerism. But the difference between a laundry list of our contemporary social maladies and a novel that compellingly addresses these is all but infinite. (less)

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08/08/08

Jon rated it:

Read in December, 2008

While I am trying to decide if I am going to write an actual "review" of this book, maybe I will just rattle off some thoughts...that will more than likely act as a permanent placeholder.

~

...almost everything you have read or heard about this book is more than likely true. And it is brilliant.

...one of the themes I found interesting, that I seldom see discussed, is the way DFW uses James Incandenza as some kind of simulacra for his heroes of post-...more

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03/29/08

Tara rated it:

I only wish I could give it zero stars. Infinite Jest is a symptom of something wrong in the literary world: is there nothing else out there with meaning people can find to adore? It's neither a work of genius, nor is it insightful. There are serious things wrong with this book. I think the bigger problem here is why anyone, anywhere, thinks this is brilliant. Somehow the advent of smarmy advertisement and sterile, banal corporate living over the past one hundred and fifty years has invaded our ...more

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09/24/08

Matthew rated it:

Read in December, 2008

I started this book about a week after DFW died. I’d tried to read it about ten years ago, but I’d gotten frustrated with it, partly because I thought DFW was a showoff and possibly a douchebag, based solely (and stupidly) on the fact that he’d worn a bandana in his author photo in a bandana (I’d wondered WTF was he trying to prove—as if proving something was the only possible reason). This first attempt at IJ I’d only gotten about 300-some pages in and given up, thinking (because I ...more I started this book about a week after DFW died. I’d tried to read it about ten years ago, but I’d gotten frustrated with it, partly because I thought DFW was a showoff and possibly a douchebag, based solely (and stupidly) on the fact that he’d worn a bandana in his author photo in a bandana (I’d wondered WTF was he trying to prove—as if proving something was the only possible reason). This first attempt at IJ I’d only gotten about 300-some pages in and given up, thinking (because I really had no other reference-point) that he was trying to out-Pynchon Pynchon and doing a not-so-hot job of it (and also congratulating myself for having read most of Pynchon and being able to recognize an imposter). But then, ten years later, DFW died, and I ordered it on Amazon, feeling sort of sheepish and guilty about diving into the guy’s work so soon after he passed, wondering if and sort of at the same time acknowledging that there was something maudlin about that, me being, let’s face it, morbidly curious about a suddenly dead guy who I’d totally taken for granted would be around for four more decades at least, a guy whose essays and stories—especially “Girl with Curious Hair,” about a military guy who drops acid with some punk rockers and goes to see a Keith Jarrett concert—I really admired but who’d written this book that I had pretty much dismissed because of its discursiveness and heft. So I started the book in September and was immediately like, wow, this is good, realizing very quickly that DFW had committed himself to accomplishing a number of things in the writing of this tome, the most interesting and inspiring (to me) being his commitment to hunkering down—like unfathomably deep down—inside a(n often very) troubled character and giving us, in prose that is florid but totally (this time around anyway) non-show-offy, what it’s like for that character to experience his/her environments, whether it’s Hal getting high and then dipping Kodiak in the tunnels underneath the tennis academy or his brother Orin the NFL punter roaming the “scalp-crackling” heat of Arizona or Don Gately observing the nuances of old timers vs. newcomers of people in Boston AA or this guy named Lenz who’s in AA but also does toots of coke he’s hid in a carved out book and roams the streets looking for cats to strangle inside of Glad bags or Bruce Green whose mom died from a heart attack after opening a fake can of peanuts (from which a plastic snake exploded) on Christmas day or this woman named Joelle a former beauty disfigured in an accident who must now wear a veil so as not to horrify others with her revolting visage. So anyway, one of the reasons it took me so long to read this—other than the length and the fact that it is my job to read all day even without having to read pages upon pages of gargantuan paragraphs of 10 pt font—is because early on I did get a little frustrated by some of the digressions (of which there are many) and a lot frustrated by being urged so frequently to turn back to the end notes (of which there are 388, which translates into a hundred pages of even smaller font) and sometimes (especially at first) downright discouraged by the nearly-Sisyphusian task of moving forward through the book (on a good day, I’d get through 20 pages and think damn, this is pretty good but then be totally worn out). Then, around page 300, the thing started to really gain some momentum, and I was finding that I could get through 50 or 75 pages in a day, and then around page 620, I decided, okay, I’m gonna read the rest of this thing TONIGHT (last night) and announced to my wife and son that after I cleaned up the kitchen I would be hunkering down in my office to finish this book, which I was at this point very much enjoying but also tired of lugging around and even holding (you basically have to prop it against something because it’s so heavy), a book which at first felt simply like something to bludgeon someone with, and had for a while felt more like DFW’s tombstone—something you felt honored to be lugging around but also didn’t really want to keep doing much longer, feeling sort of like even he wouldn’t exactly want you to keep lugging it around (it’d been several months, after all). I felt skeptical, remembering how difficult the first 300 pages had been, but told myself I was going to blaze through it, drank a coffee at 6 pm (which I never do normally, being somewhat of an insomniac) and resumed reading. And what I discovered was that the book actually kept getting better, and funnier, and darker, and that I never had to tell myself to “stay awake” or force myself to read anything but more like I had dropped down into a universe of terror and beauty, a truly uninterrupted dream, and that I as I was reading I was actually feeling something as I read, not like “oh I can really sympathize with this character” but actually physically feeling a weird pressure inside my chest, not only in response to the intricacies of description of these various troubled souls’ lives, but because of the writing itself, and what it said about someone who was able to write so lucidly and clearly about depression and loneliness—that he knew what it was like, understood it in ways that, barring some unspeakable future events, I never will. So now, I’m glad and sad to be done and look forward to going back through it, reading old reviews, and copying stuff out of it to show my future classes, and in general spreading, however insufficiently, its gospel.(less)

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05/08/08

karen rated it:

(review of isbn 0316066524)

bookshelves: hamletian, littry-fiction

this book...

i think it is time to write a proper review for this book, as it is one of my all-time favorites and deserves way more than two words. back when i was a junior in college, i was at the nyu bookstore, trying to sell back some textbooks before going away for winter break. the person in line in front of me was trying to sell back infinite jest (where was i when this class was being offered?? ) and of course, they werent taking it back because nyu is a stingy fucking school. ...more this book...

i think it is time to write a proper review for this book, as it is one of my all-time favorites and deserves way more than two words. back when i was a junior in college, i was at the nyu bookstore, trying to sell back some textbooks before going away for winter break. the person in line in front of me was trying to sell back infinite jest (where was i when this class was being offered?? ) and of course, they werent taking it back because nyu is a stingy fucking school. she turned around to me and said "you want this??" and i said "yes",cuz i dont say no to free, and she said "merry christmas",and kinda just thrust it at me. and it was the best present i ever got. a true christmas miracle. i was on my way to see my then-boyfriend in italy for the start of a european jaunt, and i missed out on a lot of european cities because i could not put this book down. i read it on planes and trains and a gondola, in restaurants and bars, by canals and in a cafe on top of the alps. fuck cathedrals, i had this book. i am a truly bad traveler, but i am a committed reader. as soon as i finished the book, i started right over. and since then i have read it a total of seven times. it is the most glorious collection of words that has ever been published. it is everything - it is funny and sad and creepy and disturbing and completely absorbing and brilliant. and he was just a gem of a man. the first time i got to meet him, i dropped this book in front of him - by now all tattered and smooshed, and he seem surprised that "someone has actually read their copy". and then i gave him a card that had been a thank you card, but i crossed out thank and wrote "fuck" in its place and said fuck you for writing the great american novel before i got the chance to. this is the kind of thing i think is charming because i am deeply flawed. but it worked, and he called me and it was really nice - he was a great man who was truly kind and courteous to his fans. i ended up getting a proper thank you card from him because he is more traditionally charming. and now i am sad just thinking about this. so the review ends here because it has served its cathartic purpose for me and i guess if anyone is reading this you just got a free glimpse into the softer side of karen. it happens.(less)

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07/17/07

Oren rated it:

Read in January, 2003

recommends it for: people who I don't like

I want to give it zero stars.

This book is a giant pile of pretentious drivel. With a thousand pages and hundreds of endnotes (endnotes dammit! you need two bookmarks for this shit!) it's a book full of promises that are never delivered. By the end it feels like a practical joke has been perpetrated on you and the appropriate response is to punch the author in the face. Seriously, it would be a mild response. I feel that assaulting him blows to the head with a copy of the book would b...more

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08/21/07

Emirate Mooch rated it:

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in February, 2006

recommends it for: people that like roller coasters with loops/that almost make you throw up

If you read through online reviews of the book, Infinite Jest seems to have divided the fiction reading world largely into two camps: those that are in it (it="the reading of fiction") for the satisfaction that comes from having witnessed an author deftly tie together a narrative; and those that seem to be in it for the simple exposure to moments of humanity and new ideas (regardless of subject matter) (nuggets, if you will).

Normally, I kind of consider myself to straddle t...more If you read through online reviews of the book, Infinite Jest seems to have divided the fiction reading world largely into two camps: those that are in it (it="the reading of fiction") for the satisfaction that comes from having witnessed an author deftly tie together a narrative; and those that seem to be in it for the simple exposure to moments of humanity and new ideas (regardless of subject matter) (nuggets, if you will).

Normally, I kind of consider myself to straddle this line - or rather to look for that rare work that exists in the shaded portion of the venn diagram. However, in spite of the fact that, yes, Jest does leave a bunch of loose ends and that, yes, I was moved to throw the book against the wall as a way of dealing with the sense of injustice at (what I would then have called) Foster Wallace's abdication of his responsibilities to his audience (I didn't throw the book for fear that the impact of the tome would simply have shattered my rare collection of antique porcelain mice (I'm just kidding, I'm incredibly poor) (but seriously, the book is fucking enormous)), that rage was calmed quickly by some ensuing thoughts: it's a great read; it's got intricate and beautifully imagined characters that put you quickly in touch with some powerful themes (addiction, redemption, struggle, meaning, modernity, etc) all in a way that's so fun, intelligent, creative and fucking 'hip' that it might almost be called subversive. You have no idea how much you goddamn care - really - until that last word.

To me, whether DFW tied the remaining strands of the plot together (and let's face it, he just let them hang; perhaps because he was just more focused on the internal struggles of his cast, yes, but please don't make the argument that this is some post-modern work of blah blah blah - he just fucking let the plot float away), he certainly reached out and pulled me closer to some incredibly human figures (I'm crying as I write this). All books and narratives end, but the moments from this one just seem to stick with you (now I'm just weeping uncontrollably; i'm so happy no one's here to see this.)

If you're the kind that could see yourself writing that last line, I'd say this is the brick for you.(less)

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07/18/07

Michael rated it:

Read in September, 2007

“I wanted to do something real American, about what it's like to live in America around the millennium. There's something particularly sad about it, something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.” says David Foster Wallace in an interview with Salon.com. His sp...more “I wanted to do something real American, about what it's like to live in America around the millennium. There's something particularly sad about it, something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.” says David Foster Wallace in an interview with Salon.com. His sprawling novel, with multitudes of characters, narrators, tangential anecdotes, and endnotes, is an exploration of this very distinct and profound feeling. The result is exhilarating, earnest, and somehow cathartic.

Infinite Jest is set in a kind of near-future world in which the U.S. has annexed Canada and Mexico. The internet, telephones, television, and movies have merged into a single device which enables the middle-class to work, access all entertainment (ever), information, and contacts from their homes. The ensuing isolation which such complete availability causes leads to widespread psychological problems, a rise in the production of, use, and abuse of prescription drugs, and a rise in AA-type self help groups which try to restore faith and community. The story neatly juxtaposes a group of boys at an elite tennis academy who turn to drugs as an alternative to the Spartan lifestyle and oppressive purposiveness of their academy, and a halfway house where a group of addicts try to flee drug abuse through a stringently structured and dogmatic AA program.

The narrative structure is intentionally convoluted. Snippets of the story from various points in time are presented without apparent order, leaving the reader to actively construct a chronology. Years are no longer numbered, but subsidized and named after corporations, further obscuring the temporal setting. It is often unclear who exactly the narrator is. With a real virtuosity, the third person telling of a story will shift in tone from chapter to chapter to suggest a character already introduced, or more often being introduced or described. Throughout the novel there is a sort of supra-narrator who interjects comments, technical references, and sometimes entire tangential stories or conversations through extensive footnotes.

The ambiguity of narrator, time, morality, and ultimately of plot conclusion illustrates rather than explicates the sense of “lostness” which Wallace refers to, much the way a poem obliquely conjures a sentiment without any outright declaration of it. Through the patient introduction of a seemingly endless number of characters, and the minute details of their distresses and struggles, Wallace continually probes the “lostness”, and ultimately reveals it as a certain lassitude of modern society. Nothing is absolute. Each character struggles with a deep-seated psychological and emotional emptiness that comes from isolation, lack of purpose, and an inability to believe absolutely in anything. Through various characters, entertainment, drugs, financial success, athletic achievement, sexual gratification, intellectual achievement, grammatical activism, nationalism, and art are considered as meanings for life- all with disastrously fucked-up results. In fact the one character who doesn’t get a 90 plus page hearing is a mystical gym instructor who levitates in a sauna. Short of that, there really aren’t any answers in this story- just many important questions, and a very heavy, complex and immediate sensation throughout.

All that said, it’s thrilling, hilarious, and completely enjoyable to read. His writing is exuberant and masterful…
(less)

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05/10/09

Bram rated it:

(review of isbn 0316066524)

bookshelves: 2009, american-lit

Read in June, 2009

Take a look at the reviewer quotes on and within this book. Most of them extol DFW’s brilliance—as they should. He’s obviously brilliant; it oozes from the pages. And yet a writer’s intellectual fortitude does not a masterpiece make, and I’m not convinced that Infinite Jest is a faultless harnessing of the man’s genius (although is any book really?). That said, this novel is very, very good.

For some reason, I feel an overwhelming need to explain why I’m giving thi...more

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11/08/07

Morgan Engel rated it:

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in October, 2007

Barrie recommended this book to me, but I swear, I must just not be smart enough to really get it. David Foster Wallace's style is reminiscent of Vonnegut who's listened to one too many vocabulary builder subliminal message tapes. He has scenes that are very interesting, but the book as a whole is like watching a Family Guy episode only instead of cutaway farting and penis jokes, there's drugs, crazy men who eat sweat, and a dysfunctional family who's obsessed with tennis.

If you're ...more

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09/21/07

Michelle rated it:

Read in February, 2009

This book consumed my life for so long setting it down for the last time last night was like some post-coital sigh of exhaustion. I have carried it with me on planes, read through meals, ignored family and friends.

This book is brilliant and anyone that tells you otherwise ... well they should stick to Harry Potter.

I have all these questions still running in my head and putting them in print would lead to spoilers. So is this our future? Is this the path we are headed? Wh...more

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10/27/08

Nick rated it:

Read in November, 2008

recommended to Nick by: Joe Yoga
recommends it for: most

as if the sheer heft of the book wasn't enough, there's a culture of active intimidation that's grown up around infinite jest (which is why it's taken me so long to pick it up). it's sold as impossible but "incredibly worth it," something you can't read on the subway but have to take "a few months to read" - the intro to my edition had the always cloying but also always well meaning and usually lovable-despite-yourself Dave Eggers likening the read to some sort of initiation:...more

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09/16/08

Kate rated it:

Read in January, 2002

You all know I don't review old books I've read before, but this is timely. This is one of my all-time favorite books, and a great way to spend a month. Here's a write-up from my blog today:

Bad news: David Foster Wallace hung himself Friday night, at the age of 46. While I didn't cry, I felt a pang of sadness that the world lost an incredibly inflammatory, insanely ridiculous, awesomely talented writer.

I read Infinite Jest in 2002. This is a book that has been called a mo...more

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08/29/08

Jimmy rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

Yeah, I'm actually going to do this. I read it about four years ago while living in Las Vegas. To call it a life-altering read would be putting it lightly, and even though I'm prone to hyperbole, I typically do not say that about a lot of fiction. I'm probably going to pick at it. I feel like maybe I could benefit emotionally from reading this and some film books for awhile, as recent heavy waves of depression and alcoholism keep my mind from focusing on anything too heavy, like Kant. I'm g...more

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"It didn't matter one fuckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result, or whether he understood the like fucking baking-chemistry of how a cake would result: if he just followed the motherfucking directions, and had sense enough to get help from slightly more experienced bakers to keep from fucking the directions up if he got confused somehow, but basically the point was if he just followed the childish directions, a cake would result. He'd have his cake." More quotes...