Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

by D.T. Max

The most significant negative note came from Michiko Kakutani of the daily Times, who had expressed qualified affection for Broom. Faced with a behemoth in which narrative strands consume hundreds of pages and then fade away for several hundred more, in which the two principal plots of the story don’t clearly intertwine until more than six hundred pages into the book, in which the reader is consistently distracted by the need to thumb the back for endnotes that often offer information no reader seems to really need, in which digressions, playlets, urban legends, quasi-science, and pseudo-history break up the narrative, she found herself skeptical that she had read a masterpiece: “The book seems to have been written and edited (or not edited),” she wrote, “on the principle that bigger is better, more means more important, and this results in a big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, soliloquies, reminiscences and footnotes, uproarious and mind-boggling, but also arbitrary and self-indulgent.” The end or non-end of the book particularly bothered her: At the end, that word machine is simply turned off, leaving the reader—at least the old-fashioned reader who harbors the vaguest expectations of narrative connections and beginnings, middles and ends—suspended in midair and reeling from the random muchness of detail and incident that is Infinite Jest.19 But such reviews did not dampen the impression, especially among the sort of critic interested in the dialogue ...