How far along are you, Manny? I still haven't gotten around to reading this book! I hereby make it a New Year's resolution.

About 300 pages in. It's weird and sometimes very annoying (intentionally) but definitely interesting and funny. He has a wicked sense of humor.

One of the best books I've ever read. Pretty deep but his humor keeps everything in check. Looking forward to hear what you think when you've read the entire novel.

i picked this up at the book store today and considered... considered... before putting it down again. one of these days.

"My main gripe to date: the book is so heavy that it hurts my wrists to hold it."

I agree. I may actually need to visit an orthopedic surgeon when I'm done with this book. Currently, my left wrist, left shoulder, and lower back are in pain. I also may be developing carpal tunnel from constantly flipping to and from the end notes.

Manny said: My main gripe to date: the book is so heavy that it hurts my wrists to hold it.

Chris said: I agree. I may actually need to visit an orthopedic surgeon when I'm done with this book.

Obviously you guys don't masturbate enough.

How much is necessary? I'm just curious.

If you have time to ask, you're not doing it enough.

I'm building up a picture of the daily routine necessary for maximal enjoyment of Infinite Jest... clearly this is a big lifestyle decision. I'll have to consider it carefully. Thanks for the pointers.

Notice that I said my left wrist and shoulder are in pain. So, in my case, the problem may be that I don't masturbate enough with my non-dominant hand.

Keep Coming! Keep Coming!

Tom wrote: "Keep Coming! Keep Coming!"

Oh, thank goodness for that. I was wondering why the Crocodiles were so quiet.

I do get the feeling that he's sometimes dropping rather broad hints about the way he's funning with you. Just read the scene where Joelle is having her big conversation with Gately, and he says (p. 535 in my edition): "You seem like you drift in and out of different ways of talking. Sometimes it's like you don't want me to follow".

I like Gately, he is a very sympathetic character. Despite what he does to spaghetti :)

Manny:
I think there should be an automatic "star-a-review" option for certain GR-er's reviews. What I'm saying is I should like to have my profile star all your reviews automatically, you know, while I'm sleeping, whenever they appear, so I never miss any....this has to be one of my very favorites of yours.
thank you!

Manny, nice catch on the comment about drifting in and out of different ways of speaking. If Gately notices that Joelle does it, I as a reader notice that Wallace himself does it, adopting assorted different voices and styles of prose to reflect the varied voices of the characters. Loving reading the section on Lenz with all of the deliberate malaprops.

Jessica wrote: "Manny:
I think there should be an automatic "star-a-review" option for certain GR-er's reviews. What I'm saying is I should like to have my profile star all your reviews automatically, you know, wh..."

Wow, thank you Jessica! That was really nice of you. I'm almost blushing. I'm a great believer in Martin Amis's theory of the "ideal reader"... perhaps you are my ideal reader? I didn't even suspect I might have one.

Since this is a David Foster Wallace page, I am allowed, even encouraged, to provide an endnote. From http://www.godofthemachine.com/?p=592 :

"In Martin Amis’s memoir, Experience, he has this to say of the ideal reader:

I am not [Saul Bellow’s:] son, of course. What I am is his ideal reader. I am not my father’s ideal reader, however. His ideal reader, funnily enough, is Christopher Hitchens.

There is a theory to infer here, once we discard the prissy Platonism of the word “ideal.” A single ideal reader does not exist any more than a single soulmate. Still, some readers are better than others, and for the best of them the word will serve.

An ideal reader is a kindred spirit, not a doppelgänger. Hitch, the Trotskyite, and Kingsley, the Tory, are savage and bloody-minded in a way that Martin is not. Martin and Saul Bellow, on the other hand, both have a taste for wistful picaresque and a sense that even rotten bastards aren’t rotten all the way through. They treat phonies and frauds sensitively where neither Hitchens nor Kingsley would have the patience. (To see how Kingsley handles such people in his novels, read Hitchens on Mother Teresa or Bill Clinton.) It is no accident that The Adventures of Augie March is Martin’s favorite Bellow novel. Martin’s own best novel, Money, is a sort of picaresque itself: its moneyed yob, John Self, blunders and binges through America.

An ideal reader sometimes vastly surpasses his author — Poe’s ideal reader was Baudelaire. The other way around is impossible; understanding presupposes intelligence.

An ideal reader often writes about his author, but he is too near him, temperamentally, to play the judicious critic. He reads the author as the author would want to be read, not as others would want to read him."

What a great review, I need to remember to keep coming back to it as updates are added. I feel like my understanding of the book has improved by leaps and bounds after reading about your own struggles and triumphs with it.

Manny: I'm pleased to be considered your 'ideal reader'! I like that bit by Amis...it's great.

Your commentary throughout the book was very enjoyable to read. For anyone that has read it, it is a reminder of your own process through it. Very good stuff.

Thanks Jon! And thanks to everyone for all the encouragement I received while reading it. It was an incredible experience.

Now you've done it. I'm going to have to add that book to my shelf of need to reads. The first time I tried to read it, the sentences made me wanna throw the book away and not even return it to the library. But, you've convinced me to try it again.

At least it's not Gertrude Stein!

Ah, as I argue in my review, you're supposed to feel like that some of the time. But there are quite a lot of bits that are straightforwardly enjoyable...

I second your comments about enjoyability Manny--this book is eminently readable (surprisingly, at least for me). The big pages just make it feel slow. I'm really digging the ongoing, existential Marathe/Steeply conversation.

Manny--
I'm finally giving your review a full read through (which I initially avoided so as to miss any spoilers), and I'm encouraged to see that you also found much of the syntax painful to read. While I can see that this was intentional, I'm still not convinced it's justifiable. Well, maybe justifiable isn't the right word, and the size of the issue probably depends on one's sensitivity to this sort of thing. But with an 1100-page book, doesn't this "intentionally-ugly" practice cross the line at some point?

Well, if it were intentionally ugly all the way through, I'd agree. But, as you saw, my thesis is that he uses the technique in a controlled way, and gives you many clues that the ugliness is there for a purpose.

I thought it worked, but I know there are many people who disagree!

That's a good point--I don't think I paid enough attention to what exactly was going on when the prose was especially frightful vs. not bad at all.

A fascinating account, Manny; a "mini-blog" was the perfect way to write a review for a book such as this. Bravo!

Great review Manny, as usual. I haven't read that much DFW - this book has always intimidated me, but I do like his essays, although after reading the collection of essays, Consider the Lobster, I can see why he committed suicide.

Thanks guys! I really must read Consider The Lobster.

And this book also makes it very clear why he ended up killing himself. A particularly horrible and memorable passage where he talks about people who jump to their deaths from burning buildings. They don't want to die; it's just that the alternative is even worse. Well, says DFW, it's like that to have depression...

"I read it until I have David Foster Wallace all over my face."

That's the way I read it, too. Thanks for your review.

It's Brian's fault this book is on my TBR list, but it's your fault I know Brian! What a review - the equivalent of 1100 pages of prose.

who's greg?

That explains everything :)

Thanks everyone! And this reminds me that I really do need to read his other stuff too. I quite enjoyed Time, Fate and Language last week, and from what people say it's probably the least impressive thing he wrote. So many books, so little time...

I got to your review and blog account after seeing your red and black review/story... I was looking to red and the black as I've read a critical piece arguing that IJ was structured in some ways on Red and the Black... what's your take? I admit I have yet to get around to the Stendahl, though I may now.

I've read a critical piece arguing that IJ was structured in some ways on Red and the Black... what's your take?

I must admit that I don't immediately see the link. Well, I guess Julien, like Hal, is some kind of intellectual prodigy and there's a generally cynical take on society in both books... but I feel something more specific is intended. Maybe I'm just sleepy.

well, no endorsement of the view, but here's a little digest of what Tim Jacobs, heap big lit crit, said in 2000: Like Stendhal's novel, Infinite Jest examines why despair abounds in a culture of plenty. ... Attempting to revive the lost aesthetic of mimesis, Infinite Jest itself mimes what is arguably the first realist novel, The Red and the Black...In Infinite Jest Hal Incandenza is an adolescent autodidact who memorizes the Oxford English Dictionary (30), recalling Stendhal's hero-villain Julien Sorel, who similarly commits to memory whole volumes, such as the "New Testament in Latin" (22). Hal, like Sorel, is alienated from his father, James, an alcoholic filmmaker who creates the film Infinite Jest as a conversational means of bringing Hal out of his withdrawn state, much like both novels' conversational style, which proposes to bridge the existential gap between writer and reader through mediation. Remy Marathe's status as a double agent in the novel puns on Stendhal's character's name, M. de la Mole. James Incandenza kills himself by inserting his head in a rigged microwave oven--the head is later exhumed by Hal and Don Gately (17, 934). Julien Sorel is guillotined and his head buried separately b y his lover Mathilde, who insists on burying it "with her own hands" (Stendhal 529).

and then there's a whole lot about knife imagery... ummm... I know, it sounds like the hilarious parody of art film criticism in the guide to JOC films...

...anyway, happy to be in conversation and I really like your posts (there's nothing like meeting a stranger on a train)...

I know, it sounds like the hilarious parody of art film criticism in the guide to JOC films...

It does rather :)

Maybe Hal is a little bit like Julien, but The Mad Stork is nothing like Julien's father, I don't see any link between JOC's suicide and Julien's death apart from heads being involved and Marathe in no way resembles de la Mole. But it's certainly an amusing example of how far some critics will go to push their pet theory. Thank you!

Brilliant insights Manny, I just finished the book and my mind is swirling. I'm trying to get out a review despite the wealth of reviews already up.

Thank you Stephen!

As you may have noticed, I often try to write my review so that it's patterned on the book. In this case, I've been told more than once that it's way too long and kind of boring... but every now and then I get a positive response as well. So I will claim that I succeeded in what I set out to do :)

Indeed, I would say so. Although, you don't have any endnotes within endnotes!

Damn Goodreads doesn't support the superscript tag! Otherwise I would have, believe me :)

Great review, man. I just finished the novel m'self; quite the experience I must say. This novel seems to be one of those rare reads that once you have read it, a part of you dwells with it indefinitely.

Thanks Johnny! And I agree about it staying with you...

Brilliant review! It has these insights that make so much sense that you wonder how you could ever have missed them. Made me like the book even more!

Thank you Hal! Many people have disagreed with the reading I suggest here, and it's nice that someone else thinks you can see it this way...

It does make a shockful of sense to me. Looking at some of Wallace's essays, it's clear that he likes to indulge, but it's also clear that he is neither sloppy nor thoughtless, and too clever to show off in an obvious way. So I am entirely with you to assume that there must be purpose to the seeming disorder and unevenness that is IJ.

With your interpretation, a lot of things fall into place, e.g., why does an author with a clear talent for entertainment write large chunks of tedious text (the role of the editor is unclear, by the way: I had heard that about 400 pages were cut from the manuscript, but one of his early reviewers claims otherwise, and gives an intriguing list of scenes that were added after his review -- in particular all of the Marathe/Steeply dialogues outside Tucson! --, see here, esp. at the end "And so but it should be obvious by now ...").

The device of using style and structure to make the reader feel what the main character is going through reminds me of Then We Came to the End, or Catch 22, where you have a host of characters thrown at you without introduction, to make you feel like you just arrived in a new place where you don't yet know anyone (an office, or an army camp). In both cases, the confusion is, after a while, deftly replaced by fine character portraits, showing that the authors only held back for strategic reasons what they could have delivered straight up.

I like the blog-style of this review. It's a book I've heard so much about, and yet until now, I've never had a very clear idea of what it's about. I'm still unsure as to whether I want to read it, but you've piqued my interest.

It was a real blog - I actually did compose it as a series of posts! Glad to hear I've got you interested :)