Customer Reviews

Infinite Jest: A Novel

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David Foster Wallace is a genius, and he knows it. But unlike other geniuses that you might know, he never tries to make you feel dumb. He just wants you to understand the same things that he does, so occasionally you'll feel out of your depth. But he's also a gifted writer, so odds are that you *will* come out understanding him. And what he's saying is brilliant, so you'll feel like a better person for it.

Wallace has been described as ``postmodern", a word that seems to get smacked onto anything written after World War II. I don't see it. To me, postmodernism involves a few things: 1) irony, in liberal doses (e.g., DeLillo's _White Noise_); 2) a continuous awareness that we're *reading a book* and that there's an author talking to us, and that the characters are under his control (e.g., anything by Kurt Vonnegut); 3) self-reference, sometimes to the point of disorienting involution (e.g., Wallace's story ``Westward The Course Of Empire Makes Its Way" from his book _Girl With Curious Hair_ - and that story is, notably, a spoof of postmodernism). This may be an overly conservative definition of postmodernism, but the word's overapplication justifies some conservatism.

_Infinite Jest_ is not postmodern; it's just a great story with beautifully constructed characters. It is a book about a movie that is so addictive that anyone who starts watching it has no choice but to keep watching it forever - foregoing food, water, and sleep, and suffering as much pain as is necessary to keep watching. The movie itself is, to paraphrase a friend, an uber-McGuffin (I'm never sure whether I've spelled that right) - an object that never gets clearly explained, but around which the plot coheres.

The movie itself is not the main point of the book. _Infinite Jest_ is a novel about American addictions: television, drugs, sex, fame, and indeed the American need to be addicted to something. An addiction to addictions. Wallace summarizes the book's mood well when he says,

``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. Whether it's unique to our generation I really don't know."

(...)

The main sign of Wallace's genius - and yes, I mean that word with all it entails, content in the knowledge that it is overused but that it fits here - is that he can make us feel this gut-level sadness without even appearing to work at it. Heavy use of irony can make you feel that there's some deeper, unseen, lurking gloominess about the world, and for that reason it's the easy way out. Ditto self-reference, which after a while is dizzying and confusing. Wallace is too brilliant a writer to take any of the easy postmodern routes. He's just written a great story with an unpleasant underlying mood. It's been a long time since I've read a book of such masterful subtlety.

It has all the classic aspects of a great novel: characters whom the reader *understands*, a compelling story that edges inexorably toward an uncertain ending, a gut-level mood, and a habit of dispensing brilliant toss-offs so suddenly that the reader can't help but gasp. For instance, see the attached text file containing Wallace's future-retrospective explanation of why videophones failed.

My first inclination was that this book - weighing in at over a thousand pages, including hundreds of footnotes (some of which have their own footnotes) - needed an editor. And it may, at points. But there's very little chaff amongst the wheat: the book's heft serves at least three purposes:

1) To build characters, slowly and methodically. One of Wallace's flaws is that his characters' dialogue - particularly that of his youthful protagonist and tennis prodigy, Hal Incandenza - doesn't sound genuine. It sounds like Wallace talking through 17-year-olds, not 17-year-olds who've been transcribed. I think Wallace realizes this, which is why most of his character development comes through narration.

2) To dump out the contents of Wallace's swirling brain. He has so much to say, and he seems to want to get it all down on paper in this one book. Less profound thoughts from a less talented author might have left me screaming for an editor, but they didn't do so here.

3) To structure the book as a conversation. Reading this book, one feels as though one is talking directly with Wallace. More often than not, his sentences will contain heavy Latinate words like ``epicanthic" just a short distance from the conversational stammerings ``like" and ``and so but". Again, had a lesser writer written these words, I would have edited the book myself, filling the margins with red pen.

The book's length will discourage all but a few readers, but it handsomely rewards the patient.

Say farewell, at least for a month or so, to your family, friends, and other hobbies. Figure out a way to fortify your fingers, wrists, and arms so you can hold this book up for hours at a time over a period of weeks. Reconfigure the lighting arrangement in your reading area for maximum glow. Find two sturdy bookmarks. Take a deep breath, let it out real slow, and you are ready to begin the monumental task of reading David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest." It took me three solid weeks to navigate a path through the byzantine structures of Wallace's magnum opus, three weeks of reading at least twenty pages a day (often more than that, of course) to get through the nearly 1,000 pages of text and the ninety plus pages of endnotes that make up this novel. If you have heard of Wallace before, and you probably have if you are checking out reviews for the book, you know "Infinite Jest" has quite a reputation in the literary world. You will see stuffed shirts tossing around words like "post post-modernism" and other academic jargon while referring to Wallace's oeuvre. Don't let these old fogies get you down; "Infinite Jest" is an immensely readable, hypnotically fascinating novel chock full of great humor, great sadness, and thought provoking themes.

The novel takes place in Enfield, Massachusetts in the near future. In the story, Canada, the United States, and Mexico formed a federation called the Organization of North American Nations (known as O.N.A.N.). The citizens of this confederation spend their time watching entertainment cartridges playable on their "teleputers," devices that came about when broadcast television went bankrupt. Advertisers predictably had a cow over the loss of television, so the government allowed companies to purchase calendar years and rename them. Hence, we have years called "The Year of Glad," and "The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment." Not everyone is happy with the O.N.A.N. arrangement; Quebecois revolutionaries continue to seek an independent homeland from their Canadian masters, only now they have to deal with the United States as well. In a devious bid for independence, a group of terrorists known as "The Wheelchair Assassins" (!) are seeking a film cartridge that supposedly kills anyone who watches it by turning them into pleasure seeking zombies. Moreover, a new energy system called annular fusion requires the confederation to dump its toxic waste into a place called "The Great Concavity," an abandoned area encompassing most of Maine and other northeastern regions. The concavity borders Quebec, and the toxins flung there with giant catapults (!!) have leeched into surrounding areas, thus causing thousands of people to develop life-threatening deformities.

Wallace introduces dozens of oddball characters in the course of his narrative, with special emphasis placed on the students at the Enfield Tennis Academy and the addicts populating a drug rehab right down the hill called Ennet House. The primary character at Enfield is one Hal Incandenza, a genius and a tennis star with a growing addiction to marijuana. Living with Hal are his horribly disfigured brother Mario, his promiscuous but hyper intelligent mother Avril, and several fellow students who redefine our conceptions of the bizarre. Hal has difficulties dealing with his family due to, among other issues, the horrific suicide via microwave oven of his father James. Dad was a scientist who helped develop annular fusion before going into experimental filmmaking. It was, in fact, James Incandenza who made the fatal entertainment cartridge that is causing so many headaches. In opposition to the madhouse that is Enfield is the madhouse that is Ennet House, where drug addict Don Gately attempts to take things one day at a time. Gately lived a life of desperate abandon, burglarizing homes in order to pay for his addictions. The only thing harder than living on drugs is kicking the habit, and Wallace describes in minute detail the hard sought sobriety of Don Gately and his fellow addicts. I know this summary stinks, I know I'm leaving tons of stuff out, but place the blame on Wallace for constructing such a complex novel.

Several themes thread their way through the novel. The most notable is the theme of addiction and recovery represented by Hal Incandenza and Don Gately. Another theme is the role of entertainment in American society, something Wallace sees as a calamity of epic proportions that will only end in death. If you tire of looking for deeper meaning in "Infinite Jest," don't worry. You can laugh yourself sick over the humorous aspects of the book or stare in open-mouthed awe at the numerous digressions from the main story. Wallace is a powerful writer, capable of infusing seemingly banal situations like filmmaking and sports with amazing energy. Check out the story about Hal's brother Orin punting in his first football game, or the Eschaton disaster at the academy, or James Incandenza's filmography in one of the endnotes for proof of this assertion. I especially loved the filmography and the endnote explaining the origins of the Wheelchair Assassins, two of the funniest, most wildly inventive things I have ever read. Most of the book is as equally brilliant even as it veers off in a dozen different directions.

"Infinite Jest" is intricate, with its multitude of subplots, OED inspired vocabulary, and tragic characters, yet the book still entertains because Wallace knows how to drape a compelling, easily understood story over all of the complexities. I'm under no illusions that I picked up on more than a fraction of the many things Wallace was attempting to say, but who cares? I had a heckuva a ride through this book, and hopefully you will too. Remember, take your time, breathe easy, and don't worry too much about carpal tunnel syndrome.

P.S. Allston Rules.

When I picked up this book, I intended to read just the first few pages to see what it was about, and maybe finish some other time. 1100 pages later, I finally put it down. OK, I didn't read it all in one sitting, but the single mindedness you could call an addiction. Which is appropriate, because this book is about addiction in all sorts of forms: drugs, alcohol, athletics, entertainment, and so forth. The scope DFW attempts (and succeeds) is amazing: every page, every chapter is a constant surpise. DFW sets up his own kind of reality, and then stretches that reality to the breaking point. To try to summarize or encapsulate in a 1000 words is impossible. INFINITE JEST is comic and tragic, science fiction and mystery, socio-political commentary and literary fiction. Now for the bad news. Sometimes, the writing is....pretentious. The footnotes get to be a little much. It is as if DFW is showing off his virtuosity at wordplay for the sake of showing off. He actually addresses this criticism in a very good interview ................. INFINITE JEST is not an "easy read," but it is well worth the effort.

It is a daunting task to review this novel. The text is 981 pages long and the end notes close to 100 pages long. The book is also quite heavy. My almost continuous need to check these notes kept interrupting the flow of the novel, but necessarily filled in lots of the details of its characters' family backgrounds, historical facts and fictions, and Mr. Wallace's infinite knowledge of myriad pharmaceutical products mentioned in the novel. _Infinite Jest_ is as complex and dense as it is entertaining, funny, horrifying, painful, bizarre, and at times graphically nauseating and hallucinatory.

It is the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment. By the beginning of the 21st century time ceased to be designated chronologically, but began being named for well-known products on the market, e.g. Trial Size Dove Bar, etc. The setting is the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N. [ha, ha, ha]), no longer the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The big annual holiday celebration is Interdependence Day. From time to time the book is populated by wheelchair bound, legless Quebecois terrorists who want Quebec to break away from O.N.A.N. Their story, told in some detail, is extremely odd and mind boggling to say the least.

The cornerstone of the novel concerns the characters associated with Enfield Tennis Academy, a training school for young tennis prodigies. The head was formerly the late James O. Incandenza (called "Himself" and "The Stork" by his sons), who also dabbled in experimental film making, his wife Avril (called "The Moms" by her sons), and their three sons, Orin (football star), Mario (a gentle dwarf and like his father, a film maker), and Hal (the youngest, but extraordinarily brilliant and drug addicted). Some of Hal's descriptions of his late father's story are bizarre but incredibly funny!

In my opinion the hero of _Infinite Jest_ is Don Gately. He is a formerly heavily drug addicted, but currently seriously sober staff counselor at Ennet House, a residential home, near Boston, for individuals suffering from drug and alcohol problems. Here is a man who formerly financed his habit through robbery, burglary, and other illegal money making schemes, who is justly beloved by Ennet House occupants. Gately is the "Christ figure" of the book who suffers for the various transgressions of others. Toward the end of the book a "victim" of one of Gately's past shennanigans pays tribute to him.

_Infinite Jest_ can be a slow read (it took me several months to complete the book) because in addition to its length it is rarely told in a conventional narrative form. I also found myself at times zipping through all the strange, but delightfully recited situations and characterizations. To be enjoyed one must be patient with it and allow oneself to go with its relentless flow. If it is not already, _Infinite Jest_ is destined to become one of the world's great classics.

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.

With "Infinite Jest," David Foster Wallace has created an exhaustive, and exhausting, look at modern life. Set in a twisted but strangely recognizable near-future North American semi-dystopia, the book sets forth Wallace's own post-apocalyptic vision. Wallace's future hasn't been ravaged by nuclear war, but rather by Americans' increasing dependence on material possessions, controlled substances, and above all, entertainment. Although you have to navigate through Wallace's myriad (and often entertaining) rhetorical excesses to find them, this book is filled with profound statements on the nature of choice and the pull of addiction.

The radically non-linear plot is centered on a likably dysfunctional family named the Incandenzas. James Incandenza (aka Himself), a tennis-academy founder and wannabe film artiste, has killed himself by sticking his head in a microwave before the book's action, leaving his promiscuous wife and three sons: the emotionless tennis/lexicographal prodigy Hal, professional football punter Orin, and the deformed but endearing Mario. Their everyday problems may be removed from what most readers experience, but Wallace still manages to make the Incandenzas, including the late and eccentric Himself, into relatable characters in one way or another.

Himself has also left another legacy in the form of "Infinite Jest," an entertainment cartridge (the book takes place after conventional TV has given way to all-cartridge viewing) so addictive that it turns the viewer into a mindless zombie with no desire whatsoever to do anything but watch the film again. A group of murderous and legless Quebecois separists (the Wheelchair Assassins, who provided the inspiration for my reviewer name) are trying to get a hold of a master copy of this tape to distribute throughout the newly created Organization Of North American Nations. If this cartridge sounds like a metaphor, it's because it is. It isn't hard to guess that Wallace probably feels modern-day notions of entertainment are rotting our brains and free will even as we speak, albeit a lot more slowly and insidiously.

The plot isn't the main attraction here, though. It merely serves a springboard for some inspired weirdness. Not even Chuck Palahniuk displays such a gift for alternating between the profound and oddball as Wallace. In one scene, two characters are having a philosophical debate about the nature of choice in modern-day society. In another, Wallace is expounding on Orin Incandenza's gift for punting a football (as a raging football fan, I found this passage especially enthralling). In another, we get to see how the United States ceded its toxic waste-infested Northeast corner to Canada to form O.N.A.N. What do these three passages have to do with each other? Little to nothing, but they're all gripping just the same.

Wallace devotes long passages to the state of America life in his near future and how it got that way. His descriptions of the evolution of entertainment from TV to viewing cartridges displays a remarkable perception of how entertainment works and what people want from it. Wallace occasionally delves into winding, wordy descriptions of Himself's film work, which apparently straddled a fine line between profound and pretentious. Himself's films, with names like "Blood Sister: One Tough Nun," "Baby Pictures Of Famous Dictators" and "Good Looking Men In Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter Of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency," serve as catalysts for speculations on what people like Himself hope to achieve through film, how others view it, and what our views of entertainment say about us as individuals.

The book, as this site's editorial review mentions, contains an enormous cast befitting a work of such magnitude, and Wallace has a knack for creating flawed, but likeable, characters. Much of the action takes place at a tennis academy and drug addicts' halfway house in the fictional Massachusetts town of Enfield, and Wallace paints vivid portraits of the residents of both of these institutions. Everyone is this book seemingly has some sort of issue, whether in their past or present, and there are few if any characters here who could be described as completely "normal." But that's part of what makes reading this book fun.

Of course, the most attention-grabbing aspect of the book is Wallace's stunning verbal dexterity. This guy can seemingly make words do whatever he wants them to do, and I often found myself enthralled by passages that had little if anything to do with any conventional plot mechanism. Wallace's description of an amazingly abstract and complex tennis-academy game called Eschaton may not serve any real purpose in the narrative, but it had me glued to the pages just the same. He even manages to make tennis, a sport in which I have no interest whatsoever, seem fascinating because he writes with such a wide-ranging scope and grasp of detail.

Of course, with a book this long (about a thousand pages), what I've written is just an overview. Everyone can get something different out of this book, and if some of the less enthusiastic reviews on this site are any indication, some people will get nothing out of it. But you still owe it to yourself to read it and find out for yourself what it holds for you. So if you have an extra three months or so on your hands, "Infinite Jest" is definitely worth your time.

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.

Here is a work with many flaws and cheap devises: men in drag, several birth-defected and malformed characters lifted without significance from K Dunn's Geek Love, and a few long and cripplingly boring scenes which DFWallace returns to again and again. And, oh yeah, the author is smarter than us, we get it. So much intellectual "onanism", re: the 100 pages of endnotes: many are vital, many entertaining, many mundane, many simply belong within the pages of the main text, but DFW makes the point clear - many of these endnotes exist simply to be endnotes! As for the novel's socio-politcal satire, I'll take Vonnegut twice on sundays.

STILL, though he may need a talented and aggressive editor, this guy can write; a true heavyweight, he strikes out, sure, but he hits 'em perfectly too. And How.

While there were times I thought I couldn't recommend this book to any but one of my friends, thinking I could not wait to just FINISH this behemoth, I eventually and decisively reverted my stance. IJ's pleasures are rich and plentiful, far too numerous to mention here. (Will say: the AA sections are consistently wow.) All told, this thing's assets far outweigh it's liabilities. I have not read a more rewarding book since.

Probably a Must Read, if only for the adventurous: many of DFW's ideas about art are relayed via one character's avant-garde film-making: he aims to tell of Life, without singular focus or neatly tied and tapered strings, and he sticks to his conceits. I have now recommended this novel widely & [GASP] would like to read it again.

It's that good.

(I don't know anyone who has now read it, who hasn't really enjoyed it.)

Living in an nation where we all share the "inalienable" right and bear the legal burden of an unending "pursuit of happiness," I feel people have a responsibility to themselves (and others) to set aside 30-50 hours and give David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest a serious read. Despite the book's imposing girth, a vocabulary that sends the well-read scuttling for a dictionary, several hundred endnotes, a seemlingly endless disjointed catalog of outlandishly crippled and damaged characters, and the reader's final unsatisfying realizations of dissolution, I haven't felt this strongly about a book for years.

Infinite Jest's characters and plots at first seem foreign and hard to understand, but as the pages turn, they become friends whose dilemmas become more accessible than your own problems. Characters such as Hal Incandenza, the pot-addicted tennis player who memorizes dictionaries and trapped between the exploded legacy of a father and a terrifyingly pleasant mother; and Don Gately, a heroic square-headed Demerol addict, start out disjointed and at the periphery of the text become the two counterpoints in a story about something larger than their problems. The Quebecois terrorists in wheelchairs, numerous drug addictions and occasional perversions, feral hamsters, childhood flashbacks, apocalyptic tennis games, and cinema theory all start to come together clearly around page 200 to form a pattern of ideas much greater than the sum of the parts.

With a firm grasp of the innate absurdity of humanity, a ton of pomo irony, a sweeping dystopic vision of a future, and a keen understanding of psychological disorder, Wallace offers an insightful indictment of a society, our society. It is a place totally disconnected from itself, intrinsically damaged, forcing the inhabitants of this culture to escape into self-feeding forces of further disconnection. Wallace manages to make his point without actually saying it-nowhere in the book does he saddle a high horse and beat the reader over the head with his 1000+ pages of prose. Instead, he presents the complex perspectives of impossibly comedic and hurt characters vaguely intertwined in a struggle which is never fully explained and his point is made.

I found the messages of Infinite Jest reminiscent of Aldous Huxley's dystopic observations in his Brave New World. That future of scientific predetermined mindless pleasure, addresses one of today's pressing problems of the role of meaning, truth, and pleasure, in a society continually engaging in acts of diversionary mental masturbation. It is about freedom gone awry as individuals have lost control. In writing about the point of Brave New World, Huxley notes:

"The early advocates of [...] a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened [...] the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main with neither the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." [Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 28-29.]

Both Infinite Jest and Brave New World lack the convenient and centralized evil of Orwell's 1984, only the undefined evil of individual consumers who lose themselves and others as they blindly attempt a futile escape from their culture. Wallace's vision is much more terrifying, insightful, less preachy, and more believable than Huxley's; delivered as a form of hilarious entertainment; and is worth a serious read.

How is it that one novel can cause half its readers to put ZERO STARS - I HATE THIS BOOK and the other half to write I WISH I HAD 100 STARS TO GIVE? I am, obviously, in the second category. I found a copy in an outlet bookstore for 6 bucks and thought, "What the hell?" Since I am a literature student and already have to read 3-4 novels a week, it took me months to finish, but now that it's over, I am genuinely sad. The entire time I was reading it, I felt like my life had another dimension that was going on while I attended my university classes, saw friends, etc. Everyone I spoke to knows a couple of the plotlines of Infinite Jest because that's all I could talk about.

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.