Rating: 
Summary: Worth a shot.
Review: The first 200 pages seem painfully pedantic. "Why can't he say that the character has a COLD? Why does he have to say that they have a RHINOVIRUS?" Then the payoff begins: layered, hilarious, sorrowful, lovely. "Ah, the narrator is pedantic. Not (necessarily) the author." Is it worth it? YES, if you don't mind the fact that Wallace DOESN'T BOTHER TO WRITE AN ENDING!! At least not one that anybody with a lot more free time than I can discern... Petty, perhaps.
Rating:
Summary: Great if you've got the stamina.
Review: This is the greatest 450 pages of fiction I've read--the problem is I'm not halfway done with the book yet. There are 100 pages of footnotes to boot! This guy is too original for words. He is a genius at the art of the context switch, changing voices as easily as I do my socks. Whether or not he's really been a drug addict or a tennis prodigy, he talks about those worlds as if he's lived them many times over. But the plot meanders without taking you with it, there is no story buildup, just a seemingly endless enumeration of scenes, the connections among which are only now starting to hint at themselves. I'll hang with it until I finish. It is stimulating, thought-provoking, real, moving, and hilarious, but not what you'd call a pot-boiler.
Rating:
Summary: unbelievably great
Review: I thought the book was great. The huge size and interminable length made it all the better. I was, to say the least, very impressed by Wallace's skill. His stylistic ability, his creative flare, his sheer story-telling ability, and his originality all attest to his power as a novelist. Reading Infinite Jest was one of the more fun things that I have done. It took me a while, but in the end I have to say that I enjoyed the novel more than most books that I have read. The realism of both the halfway house and the tennis academy struck me especially. Wallace made these two places seem convincingly real. The characters(eventhe more bizarre ones) all seemed like people whom I knew by the end of the novel. The first 50-60 pages of the book were difficult to get into, but once past that point, the book becomes quite easy. The narratives embrace the reader, pulling him through the pages by the hundred. The endnotes made the book even more enjoyable. The novel itself was funny, sad, tragic, sickening, and very weird. The one flaw that I found with the book was its complete lack of closure. The ending left too many issues unresolved. How did Hal ingest the DMZ? What happens to Gately? What happens to the rest of Enfield Tennis Academy? Does the AFR ever find the Entertainment? These questions still plague me. However, I thought that the book on a whole was a masterwork; Wallace shows much promise for the future.
Rating: 
Summary: Infinite Ingestion
Review: If you love a good linguistic Rorschach, David Foster-Wallace's "Infinite Jest" is very much worth reading. All the same, I know folks who simply can't hang after the first fifty pages, so it isn't everybody's cup of tea. Demographically, I would bet enjoyment of this book breaks out along several time-tested human duality's like Mac vs. PC, Thinkers vs. Feelers, Nerds vs. Hipsters, Minimalist vs. Maximalist, and so on. Yet in my experience people come in all combinations of the above, so it is hard to predict who will resonate with this book and who will not. I would say for the person seeking that very elusive combination of artiness, hipness, and serious emotional depth in a concise poetic-form, you won't make it past page 50. But if you're anything resembling a neurotic math geek in rehab trying to work out the crinkles of a truly awful childhood, David Foster-Wallace has likely got your E-ticket right here baby. First, ignore the silly comparisons to Pynchon. To me, the book is crisp and readable despite its length, and although many will heap scorn upon Foster-Wallace for all the hyperbolic pharmaceutical jargon, ignore that criticism too because "Infinite Jest" comes complete with an appendix of entertaining footnotes to help the reader with background information on concepts and characters in the main text. Overall, the book moves along with an interesting "cut and paste" montage style with respect to the subplots, and this approach should only present a problem for people who haven't watched MTV. You may have heard alot about how David Foster-Wallace stands the entire concept of the novel on its head etc... but I didn't find it to be that strange. No, the truly strange part about "Infinte Jest" is how surprisingly small the "core" of the book that actually sticks with you is. Like real life, "Infinite Jest" places an egalitarian sense of timing and importance to all events and characters, so even though it is entertaining to read, some of it is ultimately capricious and requires some serious off-line time to process. While the effect is powerful and life-like in many ways, it does impart a certain fuzziness or depersonalized coldness to the reader as you attempt to bifurcate the stochastic chaff from the wheat in David Foster-Wallace's universe. This is especially true in terms of coherent character development which is to me, possibly the weakest aspect of the book. Sometimes I think this "style" was an intentional metastatement of some kind, but at other times I don't. I guess I'd like to think the "heart" of this book comes from a person who has inhabited many of the feelings experienced by the book's characters, and in that light, "Infinite Jest" takes on a more confessional tone. Perhaps Foster-Wallace himself has a history of substance abuse and this book is about working some things out for himself too. Who knows. I suppose by its very size and obliqueness, there is a kind of intellectual defensiveness to the book itself that seems, at least in part, a kind of personal thing. One must wonder: What demon was Foster-Wallace exorcising himself with "Infinite Jest"? On the other hand, the most conceptually compelling aspect of the book for me was the substitution of an "entertainment" cartridge for physical addiction (although television consumption is darn close already...) and, the intriguing use of neonatal nystagmus as part of the visually addictive quality. This allowed the author to say something very sad and universal about separation anxiety, and in doing so, I think David Foster-Wallace has done a powerful and original job of illuminating the dark potential for addiction in all of us. So this is reasonably deep stuff. But you do need to wade through some quasi-peripheral material to get to it. So was it worth reading? For me, yes. I found "Infinite Jest" downright fun. Could it have been done better in fewer words with a more satisfying development? Possibly. George Saunders ("Bounty") packs nearly as much soul and dystopian bizzarity into fifty pages as Foster-Wallace does in 500. But I think Foster-Wallace certainly has the edge on Saunders in the goofy verbal fun department. Goofy Verbal Fun seems to be the best reason to read this book. I guess one might hope that David Foster-Wallace has written the longest book of his life and from now on, perhaps strive to say more with a little less. He's got ideas, talent, and time, so anything is possible. Entertaining as it is, "Infinite Jest" isn't the one book I would take with me to that proverbial desert island. Desert islands, like life perhaps, ultimately require one to separate the kitsch from the soul food. With "Infinite Jest", Foster-Wallace has served-up a monumental kitsch-fillet with a reasonably soulful sauce. My advice: bite, chew, repeat.
Rating: 
Summary: maybe it's me but I just don't get it.
Review: I've tried to read this book 3 times and have had to admit defeat about three hundred pages in.Maybe I haven't taken the required drugs in the required combinations.I tried 3 times because I felt that it was a book that I should read. On the third attempt I decided it wasn't. What it is basically is a vomit of vocabulary.David Foster Wallace is a John Barth for the late nineties and that ain't no compliment baby.
Rating:
Summary: The first truly great writer of his generation
Review: THE best book written in the past 50 years. Wallace out-Pynchons Pynchon, and tops Amis at his peak.
Rating:
Summary: two pounds of hilarity and pain
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Joycean in its scope, annular in its content.
Review: Having first been put off this book because of all the hype, I finally read it when it was given to me as a gift. Never let the hype put you off (or on)to a book. And don't be afraid of its length. "Infinite Jest" is either the best book I've ever read, or one that needs a good deal of editing. It is difficult to say, because David Foster Wallace practically invents a new style of literary composition, and, in its unfamiliarity to me it is difficult to determine whether it is truly audacious or fantastic. But I give it the benefit of the doubt, and was so moved by its story and delivery (cerebrally if not viscerally) that I did nothing else but read it for a few weeks, eschewing all other forms of entertainment. And there is irony in this, as part of the plot involves a form of entertainment that is so involving that its viewers refuse to do anything -- eat, sleep, use the bathroom -- but watch the entertainment. David Foster Wallace, whose work I first encountered in Harpers magazine, may not be a genious (although the MacArthur Foundation certainly thinks he is), but his command of language and a multi-tentacled story is firm. The story simply flows from beginning to end, and the footnotes, though off-putting at first, become as interesting as the body of the text. My theory for his use of footnotes, and the length of the book itself, is that Wallace wants you to understand that you are reading a book, and doing just that. It's interactivity is that only a book can provide, and thus the sheer weight of the book combined with the fact that the reader must constantly wrestle back and forth with the endnotes makes perfectly clear you are READING A BOOK -- not reading a novelization, not reading a text that can be anything but what it is -- a book. In addition to the format, the story itself is so involving that the reader must frequently return a few pages back in order to double check the timeline, revisit a character, etc. And its very theme -- circularity (or annular) -- becomes evident when you come to the end of the story and then reread the first chapter to gain closure. In short, the book is an academic and literary challenge, one that forces full involvement of the reader, and one that revises the fact that books are a unique form of communication, at once intensely private and a dialogue with another person. Read it.
Rating:
Summary: It's DFW's universe, we just live in it.
Review: Infinte Jest was one of those myths you hear about lurking just underneath the surface of modern pop culture; the polar opposite of today's user-friendly,57-channels-and-nothing-on attention span and therefore, sadly, neglected. When you add in the media's bewilderment and Jay McInhery's ridiculously jealous review in the New York Times Book Review, the odds are that Wallace and his gorgeous masterpiece will be sitting on the shelves of mom-and-pop bookstores coast-to-coast, like most true magnum opuses, horribly overlooked by the masses out of fear and intimidation.
Which is by no means unwarranted. Infinte Jest is an oil-tanker of a book, perhaps a small illegal weapon in some states. Which is perhaps its down fall. When the size factor is overlooked, the reader will realize that he/she is reading the most important book on modern American culture since White Noise, and that DFW is simply the second most important writer in North America today (second only to DeLillo of course.); and while the scorn rolls in on its girth and unfriendliness to a passive society used to being spoon-fed their intellect, in the end , Infinte Jest simply over- powers all criticism. The inter-penetrating plot- lines and virtual revaluation of the English lang- uage are stunning. DFW is a writer of the highest caliber, and the sad thing about this book is the fact that it falls prey to its own excess. While always visceral on the level of language and style alone, it none the less adds a new dimension to the word "drag" ( do we really need to read ten pages about the dismantling of a bed?),and while perhaps DFW's main point was to be as annoying as he could possibly be, the idea of Infinte Jest being the ultimate anti-book, the post-post-modern stew of oververbosity, 1,057-channels-and-nothing- on, and surreal absurdism, gets lost somewhere in its collective mass, much like American Psycho's brilliant portrayl of 80s decadence and yuppie vulgarity will always be overshadowed by the story's cartoon violence. Infinite Jest is a book that must be approached with a sense of exploration. The reader will not be taken by the hand through every nook; each page is a new, untapped land rich in linguistic prowness and hillarious irony that just might sail completely over the skulls of most. There has never been a book like Infinte Jest and anyone with at least two toes in the usually-stagnant puddle of modern trash fiction should run swiftly to the nearest bookstore for this. Finish it just to prove that you can. And along the way be prepared for an experience that just may change your life the way it did mine.
Rating:
Summary: In the time of chimpanzees, i was a monkey...
Review: Hmmm..... give a million monkeys a million typewriters and imortality....or how about a donkey the english language, a win95 'puter, a bad pack o' hemmerhoids, and a bee sting on the forehead..... I used to think that the only reason to write a review was too lick a keister, but after reading all the metaphorical ink, you'd think that Infinite Jest was some kind of book report slapped togather on the bus ramp outside of third grade. Perhaps the kind folk who have been so down on this book should climb out of their little insulated hampster cage, break the celing door open with their furry little noses, and reaize that when you live in squalor, the roses smell bad. The era of romanticism and pastoral poetry died with Omar Khyamm, and no ammount of Daniel Steele and Fabio- look- alike covers can dispute that. This book takes a nice little look at <gasp> REALITY!!!!!!-- a place where no one really gives a flip about a ranting, angry little man who demands three weeks time in tangible form as retribution for a masterful author destroying his illusions about the shredded- paper- lined box he's kept himself in since the 50's. I f anything, this book will proove it's own point as soon as everyone hits rock bottom at page 1094 and runs out of the perfect drug, then maybe we can sober up, toss in a few fermenting cliches, and get on with our lives with a b.s. filter over our eyes. Remember, it could be worse, you might have cancer.....or herpes..... or legionaires.....or FAULKNER!!!!!!AHHHH!!!!!!! nooooo!!!! make the bad man stop!!!!!!!
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