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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6759.Infinite_Jest_A_Novel?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Infinite Jest: A Novel" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1165604485m/6759.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6759.Infinite_Jest_A_Novel?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Infinite Jest: A Novel</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4339.David_Foster_Wallace">David Foster Wallace</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/11793146?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 5 of 5 stars<br/>I had mentioned previously that this was one of the best books I've read in recent years. At first, upon finishing this, I plopped it down and mulled my disappointment at the ending. But after settling down and mulling this over a bit, I don't see how I could give this anything but a perfect score. <br/> <br/>Where to begin? I won't go to much into the bizarre plot itself, which, although it includes such things as tennis academies, 12-step programs, militant Quebecois separatist wheelchair assassins, avant garde film, substance abuse, etc., is only a canvas for the maelstrom of poignant observations generally neatly bookended within the horizon of pages, if not paragraphs and sentences. <br/> <br/>This quality is what first struck me. Wallace is erudite but hip, loquacious yet brusque, frequently all within the same sentence. He conveys little vignettes of crazed human behavior that only an inveterate people watcher could. And above all he does so with a wry, nerdy, smart-alecky sense of humor that I can only deign, well, vastly entertaining. I almost never laugh out loud at prose, even that which I find very funny, and this book made me do so almost every time I picked it up. <br/> <br/>Alas, entertainment is one theme of this book; entertainment as a form of addiction, the primary theme. Not just rat-pushing-the-lever-for-more-cocaine addiction as seen in the street addict and halfway house portions of the plot, but mindless, ennui-stricken cognitive abeyance. The plot itself vaguely orbits the existence of a film said to be fatally entertaining: those who glimpse it lose their mental faculty and will almost instantly. <br/> <br/>Can we become so caught up in entertaining ourselves, titillating our synapses to produce certain firing patterns, that the comparison to substance addiction is warranted? Should we be frightened of the 7+ hours a day that the average household has their television running? Are books off the hook? It should make us shudder to think that all of our activities, even ones we think are altruistic, are ultimately devoted to repeating pleasurable sequences of brain activity for a few hours a day, until said brain dies and rots. <br/> <br/>Wallace doesn't offer much in the way of cure, either. Religion is scarcely mentioned, although Wallace may see it as an ultimately substanceless palliative - more of a mantra than anything - by way of comparison to the nebulous "higher power" of AA (for some reason this oft-mentioned phrase in this Boston-set novel reminds me of the song Higher Power by the band Boston, which addresses some of these themes, albeit in a cheesy manner. Also, the song contains the Serenity Prayer, also repeated in the book. Ah.). That we lack something and try to fill it with various distractions - substances, religion, entertainment - is not a particularly novel or thrilling thesis. What Wallace has created, though, is an in-depth scrutiny of some of the manifestations of existential flailing. <br/> <br/>In the end, this novel is not "about" any one thing, beyond the superficial level. Realizing this helped me to better accept the ending, or lack thereof. It also makes me feel better about the nagging suspicion that the novel itself was designed as an entertainment similar to the film of the same name in the book; Wallace loves meta- anything, and the book about the film may be morally equivalent to the film itself. <br/> <br/>This makes it onto my very short list of books to reread again in my life. <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/749020?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>