Rating: 
Summary: Alas, Poor Reader
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Great.
Review: I have never been able to say of any book that this is the best book I've ever read. I've never even been able to put together a "top ten list." A couple of weeks after I had finished Infinite Jest, after the book had had time to settle in on me, I was suprized to realize that this was the best book I had ever read. I can't really explain why. People complain about the book because it so long, but as far as I'm concerned it could have gone on another thousand pages. Read it.
Rating: 
Summary: An Intellectual Marathon
Review: Be prepared to read. Technically, the book is impressive. DFW crafts 1076 pages containing words you never thought you'd see outside of the OED, references to more drugs than your average pharmacologist could ever hope to know, and a relates a world where the "every-day things" blow up in your face. Sometimes comical, sometimes reading more like a dissertation. Don't rely much on a plot element. That's not the goal of the book. This is perhaps one of the most anti-climactic books I've ever read. It's a thread of stories, vaguely connected, that make you reflect on some of the things in life you don't normally see anything hidden in. Tennis. Drugs and alcohol. Entertainment and commercialism. Politics. Dysfunctional families. Don't rely on chapters to form coherent points for you. You have to think. Otherwise, you'll only complain about the book not getting anywhere. And remember, don't get your hopes up on plot resolution.
Rating:
Summary: Things Like This Keep One Reading
Review: I finished Infinite Jest about three years ago. Even so, I remember the reading experience as vividly as I remember eating oranges for breakfast this morning. When the covers of the book were open, I lived in a different place and among a different group of people. I loathe sappy love-notes to writers and books, particularly those penned by the Gen-X crowd, but the world DFW created in Infinite Jest was for that month or so as sharply real -- as sad, funny, bawdy, dumb, pointless, meaningful, infinitely inconclusive -- as the actual world that pushed back in when I closed the book's covers. I am a jaded reader to whom that never, ever happens. For it to happen at this stage of my reading life is a gift, because it means that I will continue to read good hard books forever, confirmed in the knowledge that it is possible for someone to create something this good, and that if I keep working and reading I may once again be fortunate enough to find it.
Rating:
Summary: Overblown and overrated
Review: Driven by some work ethic perhaps or maybe guilt, I rarely fail to complete a novel once started. In the case of Infinite Jest it got the better of me. Length is not a problem. Craft is. Themes are. Too much has been written about this bloated piece of work already. Reading it is just not worth the effort, and effort is the right word here. For a comparison try a page of two of The Wind-Up-Bird-Chronicle.
Rating:
Summary: THE BOOK
Review: This is not so much a review of Inifinite Jest or David Foster Wallace's unquestionable talent. This is a review of people who claimed that the book was sterile, long-winded, pointless, "a joke in itself". I suggest you finish reading "Peter and Jane Go To The Beach" or get your IQs tested. I understand that, for some people, books that exceed 25 pages are difficult and if there are more than two characters, things really get tricky. Could you please stop polluting this space with your pointless and pseudo-intellectual critiques. Long live DFW!
Rating:
Summary: A tough read..... and well worth it
Review: Infinite jest is complex, at times difficult and a constant puzzle. It is a fabulous book. If you like a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, then you should try this book. More aggressive and complicated, it is a book that you will carry with you for as long as you are a reader. Few books will generate a greater return for the effort that you put in.
Rating:
Summary: Not really one to build shrines...
Review: ...but if i ever do this'll have a prominent place.... IJ may be the most thoroughly enjoyable reading experience i've ever had; it's been a couple of years since i've read it & it still resonates vividly. I'd approached it with low expectations -- i'd read some of DFW's stuff & found it a little too pretentious, or maybe i should say too self-consciously literary. But what surprised me most about IJ -- not just its thousands of little kernels of truth -- or even its ambitious take on the whole breath of contemporary American culture -- was its warmth. Beautiful, sad, rich, human, funny, clever. Great stuff!
Rating:
Summary: Pay no attention to the bad reviews
Review: After reading so many amazon customers warning people from away from this book, and mind you it is one of the greatest books ever written, that I feel I need to warn people about the warnings. I can see how fans of pulp and romance novels would have trouble with this one. Infinite Jest is structurally very challenging and a lot of the actual "story" is told in the structure. If you're looking for light reading on the train to and from work everyday- for the print equivalent of network television- by all means pass this one by. It's difficult to try and explain what I'm saying without ruining things for someone that hasn't read the book. I get the feeling that the other positive reviewers have felt the same constraint. Please though, if you are a fan of intelligent and pointed fiction, and don't mind having a laugh or two at your own expense, then you must read this book. If you are looking for a way to pass the time until the next Dean Koontz or Michael Crichton "novel", don't waste your time. But so and don't try and poison the minds of other people who can appreciate a work or this depth and magnitude.
Rating:
Summary: What's important here?
Review: This is a novel about addiction - to drugs, to drug treatment, to sex, nationalism, tennis, and more. In turn the novel becomes addictive, and thus as with any addiction there are highs, lows, cravings, remorse, anxieties and so on. No, it is not always "easy" or "fun", and yes it is challenging, maddening, and confusing, but so are addictions, and so is life.
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