Rating: 
Summary: The joke's on us, folks
Review: Sigh. And I was so looking forward to a good read... I forced myself to read the first 255 pages (and every blessed footnote along the way) of this Generation-X encyclopedia of drugs, alcohol, and adolescent tennis before I decided to stop torturing myself and throw the book away. Oh, the guilt! Since books are my passion, throwing one in the trash was, well, difficult. So what's wrong with it? Have you ever seen one of those pictures that at first glance looks like nothing more than millions of colored dots? If you relax your eyes and look "through" the dots, a 3-D picture begins to take shape, and pretty soon you don't see the dots at all because you're inside the picture. That's as close as I can get to the magic of reading a good book. Sadly, with Infinite Jest, I couldn't find the story inside the words. I was always uncomfortably aware of the "dots" - of Wallace's sentence structure, his choice of words, his background research, and, most of all, the prodigious amount of EFFORT that went into this book. Infinite Jest contains a thousand pages of disjointed character sketches with nothing but the book binding to hold them together. Too bad the sum of the parts doesn't add up to anything more than a technical (w)hole.
Rating: 
Summary: Hipster Posers will ask if you have read this so they can
Review: Hipster Posers will ask if you have read this so they can tell you they did not like the ending, but loved the book. This book is required reading for Hipster Posers, but none of them have read it. If you are at a Party and someone asks you about this book, just reply:
"Yeah, that book is great. I loved all the stuff about tennis, but the ending sucked." Then change the subject to the movie "Kids" or anything directed by Darren Aronofsky. This will at least get you to the next drink, at which point you can casually excuse yourself to go to the bathroom and contemplate your next move. The book is not worth reading, it is only worth mentioning at parties. I think DFW was aiming for just this effect so he could get invited to a lot of parties, but not have to discuss his book.
Rating: 
Summary: Wallace is Clever
Review: ... a fact that is confirmed by the amount of time Wallace has apparently dedicated to proving that point. I wouldn't so much call this book a novel as I would call it an essay disguised as one. It is generally quite difficult to empathize with the characters in the book when most of them are used as vehicles for Wallace's observations. This book is extraordinarily self indulgent. I could not finish reading this book without getting the feeling that its aim was to entertain its author more so than its reader. This is not necessarily bad. Wallace's observations (largely focused on domestic and drug abuse) are often witty and insightful. However, for over one thousand pages of dense reading, I was hoping for more "jest".
Rating: 
Summary: Infinitely Entertaining
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful read, if you have the time, patience, and energy
Review: This is the kind of book that you are likely to have extreme opinions about. You'll either love it (I fall into this category), or you'll find it completely unreadable. There is a plot (of sorts) revolving around the Infinite Jest video (the book's McGuffin), an "entertainment" so completely involving that viewers will starve to death watching it over and over. However, this is merely the backdrop for a series of stories involving tennis, drug and alcohol recovery, the nature of addiction: the stories go on and on. The book is VERY long, but I found myself enthralled by Wallace's storytelling ability - for all of the book's modernist quirks, the good old fashioned storyteller's art saves Infinite Jest time and time again. As with any book of this length, there are passages the book could probably do without (for my money, a long sequence involving a nuclear war game, Eschaton, would be cut), but I didn't want the book to end. At 1000+ pages (with footnotes), some of the individual stories are left unresolved, which is perhaps part of the point; I would gladly read a sequel
Rating:
Summary: Wild - A workout for the brain.
Review: I've run into several reviews of Infinite Jest where the reviewer hasn't actually been able to read the book, whether it be through laziness or incompetence but rest assured you can discard these "reviews" aside as unqualified. Entertainment Weekly featured one where the critic stated her review was based on the opinions of people who actually read the book. And this got published?!?
It is daunting in size and complex in detail but the rich and creative style of DFW's writing is what elevates the story. The language is unique without being pretentious, the characters (there are about 30 of them) are well documented and personable and yes, the ending caught me off guard too but after digging back into the book to specific reference points, the possibilities of the conclusion are seemingly clear.
There are parts of this book that are laugh out loud funny, really hysterical stuff, a couple of movingly beautiful descriptions of a seizure and an impaling death that rival Denis Johnson's "Angels" final scene and an undercurrent of sadness tied within the humor of America as a society willfully addicted to anything put in front of it.
This is my opinion and although I loved the book, my opinion is not gospel. I just hope that others reading this review page will have the sense to disregard the "reviewers" on here that admit they haven't / couldn't read the book. The 'How To Be A Hipster' post is funny though!
Cheers
Rating:
Summary: Nice Cover - Stops There
Review: Ok - I am pretty hard to chase away from a book, espically one that got as much hype as Infinite Jest. Is the praise for this book some kind of publisher-sponsored cabal? This thing wanders around worse than Blog. Does the next wave of fiction not require editing? Is there a voice in there? I confess, I couldn't even pick it up anymore after 150 pages. I came to this site just so I could rant somewhere. Comparisons to Pynchon are perhaps the greatest jest of all. Pynchon's work has a voice and a world. This book reads, at best, like the notes for a book. The first draft maybe, or the spewings of someone with a serious case of hypergraphia. And what's up with the middle name? Why doesn't the author just go all the way and call himself D. Foster Wallace? That's the pinnacle of pretense, which perhaps is the wellspring of this tedious tome. A bit harsh, to be sure, but with so many pages, I expected so much good reading. This soup needs reduction. There - now I can move on.
Rating: 
Summary: The Dawn of The Big Load
Review: I painfully remember those thick bodacious books of the 1970s that I labored through as if on a chain gang: those capacious fictions which were a contemporary answer to Joyce, Proust, Mann, and Musil. When these books of genius emerged, people were rightly afraid. A disturbed person could kill someone with this weapon called a thousand-plus page book : John Barth was a little before my time, but Thomas Pynchon wrote these types of books that were actually best sellers (his bloated-ness included comedy, and hip academics jumped on board), and Gilbert Sorrentino came through at decade's end with the brilliant Mulligan's Stew, a novel about a novelist writing a novel, with a play and assorted journals. Anything but a good old story. These inflated novels included everything, but the readers of the 1980s were not so friendly to these sorts of self-conscious fiction. When David Foster Wallace writes, "It's funny what you don't recall" in the new book, he's pulling our legs. Only if he didn't remember. I am thinking now of the genre's swan song of Alexander Theroux and Joseph McElroy. Theroux's Darconville's Cat, an encyclopedic love story and study in misogyny, was a heavily promoted book, and eventually died on the bookshelves. I sense that Henry Holt's belated reissue plans have not went so well due to that reason. McElroy's Women and Men had a similar push, plenty of reviews and essays, but little sales. Readers rebelled against the genius writer. Ten years later, hardly anyone can remember who McElroy is. Even Pynchon was smart enough to produce a short novel after many years in obscurity. Just think for a minute about the few novels in the past few years that have received serious literary appreciation; most of them clock in under 300 pages: Nicholson Baker, Rick Moody, Stephen Dixon, Philip Roth, Suzanna Moore, etc. The general consensus would be that anything more is pretentious, an act of stretching what should be condensed. Even in the wake of highly technological advances, readers expectations have been damaged by impatience. Even yours truly can't sit still! Which brings us to Infinite Jest. Wallace has been artistically silent for many years. So has Jay McInerny. If you don't count Wallace's half-baked tell-all about rap music, Signifying Rappers , his last book of stories, Girl With Curious Hair, was more than six years ago. So when his new book came in I was immediately concerned with the size: Could I commit two weeks of my life to such a book? Such demands are heavy duty and only the most religious could give up their lives of TV watching and Lollapalooza attending. I cracked open this massive tome, with almost 400 footnotes (some obtrusive), and the book hurt my arms and after reading a few pages, my neck began to hurt. I remember years before, how I read the first 100 pages of Women and Men about four times before I abandoned it entirely. I thought it odd that a writer like Wallace, who has relied so heavily on TV, now expects me, the reader, to sit down at a desk, and actually slow down my novel-reading habits. As I studied Infinite Jest, a novel plotless and expansive, it turns out best read in an interior mental voice that sounds like a pedagogic and fat lecturer. Once this verbal tick is assumed it's easier to follow the over-analysed obsessed monologues, the hundred-odd characters, mostly centered around a drug rehab halfway house in Boston and a group of tennis players, one named Harold Incadenza of the Enfield Tennis Academy. The history of tennis is mixed up with drugs, chemicals, activity in Quebec, and Phoenix, Arizona. What the book is inevitably, cannot be regurgitated, but only experienced. Eventually Wallace has written another heady book about solipsism and alienation. What a downer! In conclusion, this is a daring book, and I don't know if it will attract any readers. Looks like there's another Titanic on the horizon! All the best of luck to you, sailor! Endnotes: (1)Infinite Jest is 1079 pages. Good luck!
(2)One wonders what was actually cut from the book, if any material?
(3)Rumors about the next Pynchon book is that it is short and Beckett-like.
(4)Several of the authors that I have interviewed: Mark Leyner, Martin Amis, Mary Gaitskill, Rikki Ducornet, Lynne Tillman, and so on.
(5)I couldn't imagine sitting down and reading a good old 19th century novel by Dickens or Thackerey. I have heard about people dedicated years to Proust. (Ha!)
(6)I guess that Wallace was too white to have known about Dolomite.
(7)Among book reviewers the hand signal of "two inches" width made with thumb and forefinger has come to signify "That Wallace guy has written one thick book!"
(8)When I finally finished W&M a few years ago, I felt ripped off. The characters never meet. I think that's McElroy's achievement: To have readers invest in you and rip them off.
(9)Wallace is the master of the endnote. Thanks to Microsoft. I guess that they're supposed to be like TV commercials.
(10)In fact, this book reminds me of Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon, as it does of McElroy. Well, at least Wallace is ambitious, I'll give him that.
(11)Wallace always had disappointing women characters.
(12)I don't want to give the impression that this is an unworthy book. It is a challenging book, but as readers there are few risk takers left. Wallace is an important writer, no doubt. I just don't want him writing me any more angry letters for my opinions. So what: I find his depiction of Los Angeles to be of minor interest whereas when he writes of the Midwest, it is always intelligent and interesting.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I just finished reading the most recent review of this novel (from 1999), a scathing piece of drivel by some self-important, overly-educated nitwit who pendantically lambasted a fellow reviewer's intellectual capacity and attention span for misspelling "intelligent", when in the very same sentence he misspelled "misspell" (that's two s's, genius)... How's that for irony?
I read this novel about 8 years ago and I hold it fully accountable for changing the way I view fiction. It served as my introduction to Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce, Umberto Eco and Gabriel Garcia Marquez as well as a host of other authors who experiment with the structure of novels. Terrific piece of writing by an outstanding author whose work crackles with ideas.
Rating:
Summary: Quick and to the point
Review: The working title of this book, from what I've read on various Wallace-related sites, was "Infinite Jest: A Failed Entertainment", but the publisher didn't want that on the front of a huge book, for understandable reason.
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