Rating: 
Summary: Jest a position
Review: All the prosemongers and haiku-hacks. Here the one star, faded four. Strike it through with balanced line, measure of the whole - please bring it back.
Rating: 
Summary: It's not where you're going, it's how you get there.
Review: It took me about 100 pages to get into the groove of this book. What a trip! I loved the sense of slender connections between the initially independent storylines, which later fully materialized, but also expanded the web. The idiosyncratic style of the narrators, the grungy other-worldly atmosphere reminds me of David Lynch movies, which I absolutely adore. And never having had any experience with taking drugs, I was very surprised recently to be present in a conversation where someone was trying to decide how to take a particular drug: It seemed to have been lifted off the pages of Wallace.Then, when the book was over, I was simultaneously dissappointed and thirsting for more! It can't end here! I have to go read it again! I was just beginning to see how the various threads interweaved! But, for now, though I'll put it to rest: My psyche isn't quite in shape for this book just now. Heartily recommended for those who have no preconceived notions of what a novel should be.
Rating: 
Summary: Rewarding.
Review: Sure, it's tough to keep flipping back to read endnotes. So keep 2 bookmarks in the book. This is originality, a rarity in modern fiction. The humor alone is enough to hold the 1100 pages together, but there's more. (Oh, so much more). It's easy to make fun of this book. What's weird is that it's also easy to read if you ever give yourself the chance. DFW is the voice of the post-60s generation lost in the emptiness of a wealthy culture. This book is destined to be a classic.
Rating:
Summary: How could somebody enjoy this book?
Review: I'm sorry, but I just don't understand how my fellow Amazon reviewers could have scored this book highly. The first chapter sets up a potentially enthralling narative style, and the concept of a TV show that gives viewers infinite bliss (so much so that they ignore things like eating and living) is great. However, it's all downhill from there. The book seems to spend forever talking about tennis and drugs, without particularly wanting to tell a story. If this is the perfect example of a 'contemporary' story, then I'll stick with the classics. Don't say you haven't been warned!
Rating:
Summary: Missed the hype, loved the book
Review: American readers may be interested to learn that the hype about Infinite Jest was entirely confined to America. In Dublin, Ireland it seems to have sold approximately six copies. However, one of them was bought by me. I didn't know I'd ever say of a 1000 page book that I couldn't put it down, but I couldn't. I don't take Wallace especially seriously as a constructor of fictions (I was particularly disappointed by the way the narrative appeared to just stop, as if the author's desktop printer had finally given up the ghost), but his humour and his capacity for inhabiting a vast range of different characters are amazing. I kept reading bits out to people - however, when they saw the size of the doorstop from which I was reading, none of them ventured to borrow it. In a way, I hope Infinite Jest isn't the coming thing in modern letters - books so vast that their shapes (if they have any) are indeterminable - but it's a pretty stunning achievement, and it's got enough ideas to keep most novelists occupied for half a career.
Rating:
Summary: Wallace is different from DeLillo
Review: It is disturbing that many reviewers lump Wallace and DeLillo into the same camp as writers. Moreover, they'll throw Pnychon, Coupland and the occasional Updike in there. This is madness I think. What DeLillo tries for is the painting of a picture and an overall sense. Each book of his explores how to paint this picture. Wallace should be called the opposite of Raymond Carver. While Carver seeks to give his readers the absolute minimal amount of info needed to understand the theme, Wallace challenges the reader pick the theme out of the extraneous details and the endnotes. Wallace is not trying for an emotion or a feeling like in DeLillo's case and he is not trying to express feeling of post corporate angst like Coupland. Wallace is a modern day hyper involved Tolkien, whole worlds spinning at his finger tips. Wallace is the future of modern fiction and as Wallace points out in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," DeLillo and Pynchon are a fiction from the past generation. Modern fiction writers need to set themselves apart in some way and I think Wallace has done this.
Rating:
Summary: A modern Karamazov, IJ contains every lesson one could need.
Review: A magnum opus of human relationships, fear and hope on into the twenty-first century. Impossible intricacy and detail, you will read this book again and again for years into the future. It is only a matter of time before DFW has his place in the pantheon of writers who deserve their own courses of study. Your children will read IJ in college and comment about its insights to the pain and desperate love of the millenial turn.
Rating:
Summary: Give me more
Review: I would gladly read another 10,000 pages of Infinite Jest. Maybe, just maybe, Wallace will write a sequel, or better yet a prequel to this masterpiece. James Incandenza certainly deserves his own 1,000+ page book.
Rating:
Summary: Puerile.
Review: Blatant in its themes, sophomoric in its comedy, textbook in its characters, to read that IJ can be compared to _Ulysses_ is to feel like that guy in the beginning of Scanners. . .We all know Pynchon and DeLillo, and, if it's some Big Fun trenchant social observation laced with hilarity you want, climb down from your ivory tower and check out Jack Womack and Neal Stephenson. Poor Philip K. Dick had more to say about consciousness, mind-expanding substances, the nature of reality, and human relationships in any one paragraph than exists in any random 250 pages in IJ. Cleanse your palate with a viewing of the work of Joseph Beuys. Then, for a real mind-blowing combo, read Steiner's _How to Know Higher Worlds_ followed by Murakami's _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle._ Better than DMZ!
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Part of the reason IJ is as difficult read is that DFW makes no attempt to highlight important information for us. Key facts are buried in the endnotes or given to us early in the novel, before we understand their context. But it's also a bit re-assuring to know that somewhere in the novel, most everything will be explained. In fact, it's actually a lot of fun piecing together the story, and there aren't five pages of the book that don't contain at least one wonderful insight (the section from p.200-205 contains many). I've never before read such a long book that I was so eager to re-read immediately upon finishing.
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