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Summary: Hey Hal? What's the best book of all time?
Review: I've been working on it for over two months now, gradually paring my time down to just a few minutes on the daily AM and PM MARTA trains. And so but now at the end, knowing what I know from friends who've read it and from what's posted here, I can write a review. Soon it will be over, and I will miss this book more than any other novel I've ever read. It's pretty useles to address all the topics, but I can safely say that I think DFW is el hombre, that if you are a fan of language and a critic of modern humanity, this book will make you feel totally at home. It's no harder than flipping channels -- think of it as a TP SponDis, er, TV movie (hee hee). There is nothing to be 'afraid' of -- not the 1000+pp. length of the book, or the 380-some-odd footnotes, or the disparate plotlines that intersect only at skew, not the boggling Crime-and-Punishment-like # of characters. It's all easy if you let Wallace do his thing and avoid trying to make it into what you might be used to as a quote-unquote Novel. Those who disparage the book display their exact levels of 'intelegence'(sic). One reviewer has apparently tried to 'skim ahead' and based his decsion to quit after 100 pp. on the fact that he couldn't figure out what was happening plotwise by reading a sentence here & there. Here's one word that apparently eluded your hawklike attention: anticonfluential. And one more term for your Word97 Thesaurus: stream-of-consciousness. It's called the 20th century, guy, look into it... The point is, the achievement is obvious (to anyone who's graduated from reading Nancy Drew books, that is) and the art is tremendous. The book is better than the most glowing review.
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Summary: one day at a time, sweet jesus...
Review: I felt I had to warn people about this book. If you like Pynchon, fine, go ahead, you'll like this. If you are looking for anything "traditional" like storyline, character development, images or descriptions that set the tap root a-tapping, forget it. A digression on a digression, detail where it is not needed, false direction, piss take academe... easy target after easy target. If you are the type that likes mental games, read Calvino, Borges......
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Summary: Blah Blah Blah - A Big Pile of Linguistic Sludge
Review: The hype around this book is swirling. People will tell you that you must read it. Don't listen. Don't listen.
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Summary: I wondered too
Review: I also wondered about the reader who said he's been reading Wallace for 30 years. Wallace is one year younger than me, 37 years old. Now I was writing at age 7, but it was usually on the walls of my bedroom with a crayon. Perhaps that reader knew DFW as a child, and saw that even then he didn't color within the lines. Infinite Jest definitely colors outside the lines of the conventions of contemporary fiction. I can assure anyone who reads this book that you'll either love it or hate it. It's too prodigious for middle ground. I'm sure DFW would ask only that you read with an open mind, and I mean really open, open to a novel that is a new idea of what a novel can do.
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Summary: Infinite Jest - the joke is on the reader
Review: I love reading, I love books, I love to play with words. This is the only book I have ever read where when I finished I wanted to hurl it across the room. I was furious. Self-indulgent, mental masturbation with no real point, tripe. The only good thing I can say about it is that it finally convinced me to go out and buy the OED (though I settled for the two volume "shorter unabridged".)
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Summary: challenging...but worth it...
Review: to the reviewer from San Diego who wrote...."I've been reading Wallace for 30 years..." - what exactly were you reading 30 years ago? How old do you think that he is?
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Summary: How to enjoy the journey...
Review: A lot of unhappy readers have picked up this book expecting to find a compelling plot, a magnificent conclusion, or a tragic irony at the very end. I've been a reader of Wallace for 30 years. His writing is manic, satirical, hysterical, and insightful, but like Douglas Coupland, he cannot be digested all at once. A book of 1000 pages must be read in at least 40 sittings. And as with adventure travel, the beauty of a Wallace Book is not in attaining the destination but rather it's in the enjoyment of daily adventures along the way ...
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Summary: Help! I'm addicted and need more Infinite Jest.
Review: This has been one of the funniest, most endearing, and most affective reads I've had in years. It's already changing my whole outlook and use of language. I have a new baby, about 2 months old, and when I read to my wife the title of a course called "The Toothless Predator: Breastfeeding as Sexual Assault" we both burst out laughing, holding our sides. We still refer to our 2 mo as "The toothless predator." It's linguistic acrobatics like that that make me keep going to the well for more. I am now adjusting my entire life style so I can find time to read this book. I am simply dying for my hour each night to read another scene or two. And since the book is about addiction, I'm hooked. I'm afraid I'll go cold turkey when I get to the end and, thank god it's so long, I can start over. It's a Wonder of a Book. Thanks DFW.
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Summary: Brain Aerobics
Review: Best book I ever read. My sides actually hurt from laughter after the Eschaton scene. Just remember: every seemingly digressive or irrelevant passage becomes very important to understanding the resolution of the story, although I didn't realize just how important until I re-read much of the book.
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Summary: In the top five of all-time
Review: Infinite Jest contains so much life, humor, zest, despair, and just plain oddness it leaves you breathless trying to recommend it to a friend. It's hard work, sure. But it's ever so worth it. Vaults to the top with Lolita, Gravity's Rainbow (or maybe Mason & Dixon), Brothers Karamazov, and Light in August. A masterpiece. (So where does DFW go from here...?)
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