Rating: 
Summary: This wonderful book does have an ending, really.
Review: Upon finishing "Infinite Jest," I was reminded of a junior high joke where you write "How do you keep an idiot busy?" on both sides of a piece of paper and leave it on a table in the library like a rabbit trap. (This is a big clue as to where the end of the story is, by the way.) David Foster Wallace's writing in this huge novel is like Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Stephen King, John Irving, and a sprinkle of Kurt Vonnegut put in a blender, run through "puree" and poured gloppily into the tome. The point here is not the destination, but the journey, and you are going to want to bring a dictionary (if only to remind yourself there are smaller books with more words in them). The language will haunt you, and you will become obsessed, which you'll find hilariously paradoxical when you are in the midst of this read. Clear your calendar and lay in supplies, you'll be gone for awhile
Rating: 
Summary: Little, Brown & Co's Infinite Jest Web Site
Review: Infinite Jest Web site provides, information and opinions on David Foster Wallace's acclaimed novel - including a weekly updated excerpt, author notes, critical reviews, a forum for comments, an author tour schedule, a preview of the author's new essay collection, and an Infinite Jest screensaver.
Visit our site at http://www.infinitejest.com
Rating: 
Summary: If bad endings don't bother your, a worthwhile read.
Review: Be sure to have a dictionary beside you while reading Infinite Jest, as well as a few bookmarkers. Certainly a good read, but midway through, I thought, if this has a bad ending. . . Well, it did. It just seemed to peter out altogether and was very unsatisfying, particularly after all the craftsmanship that went into the 1,000 plus pages. Still, a fascinating book
Rating:
Summary: There's hope for GenX! Literate, funny and hip.
Review: A monumental tome but worth wading through. The list of characters can get almost baffling at times but David Wallace keeps up a breakneck pace for most of the thousand pages in this monster. Irreverence, intelligence and wit live on in the younger generation
Rating:
Summary: Don't know if it was good or bad but couldn't stop.
Review: You can read the rest of the reviews for a discussion of the
plot, characters, etc., but the way I read it best describes it. I used it as a soporific at night, and eventually got to
the point where like an addictive sleeping pill, I couldn't skip a night without tossing and turning. I have eighty pages
to go, and I'm beginning to worry about what will happen when I have to go cold turkey. Maybe like an earlier reviwer,
I'll have to maintain the addiction and read it again, looking
for the seeds and stems.
Rating:
Summary: Thinking about Infinity
Review: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, is, without question, the best book I've ever read. As a college English major, I've read my fair share of great literature, and very few authors even approach Wallace's ability to entertain, enlighten, mystify or infuriate. The length of Infinite Jest should not be an obstacle to finding pleasure in it. In fact, having to take such a long time reading the book makes it even more satisfying when you finish it. When I hear things like, "only for the most patient" or "be prepared to spend a lot of time," I wonder what sort of readers these people are. In a book as entertaining as this one, and it is monumentally pleasurable throughout the 1000+ pages, I would think people would want it to last as long as possible. I know I tried to read more slowly than usual toward the end because I didn't want to finish it. And it was when I finally did reach the last page, and what many have called an extremely weak conclusion to such a brilliant novel, that I fully realized the genius that went into this book. I had previously been simply marveling at Wallace's incredible flair for both comedy and drama, simplicity and complexity and the phenomenal layering and cross-referencing within the story. Then, as I sat looking dully at the last page of the book, it ocurred to me. This is the last page, but not the end of the story. I had read the story's conclusion a month before, when I first began reading the book. So I went back and started reading again, and my jaw dropped open in awe of the true genius of this book. Sentences that had seemed insignificant or inconsequential when I first began reading were infused with new meaning, providing me with the conclusion to the story, cleverly hinted at by the books title, which refers to the graveyard scene in Hamlet. I kept reading for maybe fifty or a hundred more pages and continued to find these "buried treasures" that made so much more sense, and were so much more entertaining now, and I knew then that if I didn't just put the book down and stop right then, that I never would. I would succumb to a fate similar to the viewers of the lethal entertainment in the story that the book shares its title with. The length of Infinite Jest is actually a necessity in making the book the work of genius that it is. It is because it takes so long to get to that final page that the reader forgets many of the seemingly superfluous sentences and sections from the beginning of the novel, which makes rereading them later, continuing in the book's infinite loop, after you've spent so much time with these character and you know them better than some members of your own family, so wildly, mind-bogglingly, possible even addictively entertaining.
Rating:
Summary: POSSIBLY THE FUNNIEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN
Review: Quite simply, this book is hilarious (in a good way).
Reading Wallace reminds me why I can never be a great
writer. I love the right brain/left brain jazz that is
Wallace's style.
I also just finished "Girl With Curious Hair", Wallace's
collection of short stories which is also great.
If you're scared of the length of "...Jest", check out his
short stories first. You'll be back
Rating:
Summary: Feel your attention span stretch back out where it belongs.
Review: The Doorstop's Here
A hellaciously gifted young writer named David Foster Wallace has just written a huge new novel called ``Infinite Jest,'' and somebody really ought to smack him with it. It takes a special kind of nerve to write a book with roughly the mass of a medicine ball, and then end it so unsatisfyingly that the poor reader perversely finds himself wishing it longer. But Wallace's limp coda only disappoints because the preceding three-and-a-half inches of ``Infinite Jest'' have succeeded so well at projecting a world of brain-scalding complexity.
But when is Wallace carefully teasing out a recurrent motif, it's worth wondering, and when is he just repeating himself? Literally from first page to last, though, Wallace has given us a meditation on addiction -- the addiction of a tennis prodigy to organic narcotics, of a paroled second-story man to inorganic ones, of the terrorist to his cause, the couch potato to mindless pleasures, and ultimately, the unkickable addiction of readers to all those old storytelling conventions Wallace gleefully blows up like a rotten kid cherry-bombing an electric train.
The biggest addiction on display here may be Wallace's own, to writing, a habit so consuming that the only way for him to shake it is with an abrupt, cold-turkey ending. Luckily, savingly, ``Infinite Jest'' has a second serve to fall back on: its authentically hysterical, drink-milk-at-your-peril humor.
Here's Wallace doing an overzealous high-school tennis announcer: ``Lamont Chu disembowelled Charles Pospisilova 6-3, 6-2; Peter Beak spread Ville Dillard on a cracker like some sort of hors d'oeuvre and bit down 6-4, 7-6...while Gretchen Holt made PW's Tammi Taylor-Bing sorry her parents were ever in the same room together 6-0, 6-3...''
This is comic overkill of the wettest possible water, the sort of stuff good for reading aloud to one's more indulgent friends -- ``Wait, just one more'' -- taking care to leave out expressions like ``SACPOP'' that Wallace doesn't even see fit to explain until 100 pages later, in a slapstick set piece so funny you forgive him immediately. The passage is also symptomatic of one of Wallace's bad habits, namely, too many characters too quickly introduced and never adequately differentiated -- not a bad metaphor for the whole high school experience, but also a hallmark of too many fat books one finds in used-book stores with their first couple of chapters thoroughly begrimed and the rest in near-mint condition.
``Infinite Jest'' should find a kinder posterity in just about any near future except the one where it takes place, sometime early in the next century. Books don't count for much in Wallace's dystopia, and the only one mentioned is a copy of William James' ``Varieties of Religious Experience'' long since hollowed out as a stashbox.
Just how early in the next century this is can't be pinned down, as the Gregorian calendar has long since made way for Subsidized Time, which takes the concept of commercial sponsorship to its logical terminus by rechristening 2001 or 2020 A.D. or whatever, as the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken, the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, &c. Like much else in the book, this tactic is mysterious at first, a scream when Wallace lets you in on the joke, and kind of a pain by the time he beats it into the ground. Mercifully, he starts abbreviating the years after a while, then changes his mind and goes right back to spelling them out.
Approriately for a book about addiction, ``Infinite Jest'' is told largely in flashbacks. The novel begins with Hal Incandenza, its tennis prodigy antihero, suffering a mysterious seizure during an Arizona college interview early in the Year of Glad, as in trashbags. We then backpedal to the rigorously regimented Enfield Tennis Academy near Boston, Hal's and our home off and on for the bulk of the book. E.T.A is the brainchild of Hal's late father, J.O., a man of high and wide attainments, last but not least of them artfully cutting a large hole into the door of a microwave oven, inserting his head, and letting it rip.
J.O.'s place on campus and in Hal's mother's bed has fallen to a shady relation, giving rise to the suspicion, reinforced by the book's title, that what we've really signed on for is some hypermodern pastiche of ``Hamlet.'' This holds water as far as it goes, viz., until Wallace starts cross-cutting between the Academy and its Enfield neighbor, a dilapidated halfway house for dipso- and other maniacs. At this point, a fresh scenario pokes its head out of the verbal thicket -- that ``Hamlet'' is just a red herring, and that Wallace is really concocting a sort of elephantine variation on ``Entropy,'' Thomas Pynchon's classic short story of contrasted chaos and regimentation.
Wallace's other novel, ``The Broom of the System,'' has already elicited cries of ``Pynchonesque!'' from diverse quarters, some of them, to be sure, using the adjective in its usual sense, i.e., as reviewer's code for ``I didn't finish it,'' others so besotted with Pynchon that they see his scat everywhere, but a few finding genuine similarities. Both men do share a head for science, a stomach for gross-out humor, a great ear, and a soft spot for the word ``maffick,'' but Wallace definitely has the lower opinion of sloth.
This emerges from a third thread in ``Infinite Jest,'' one that pulls it beyond the realm of homage to either Shakespeare or Pynchon. Hal's father, during his avant-garde filmmaker phase, has somehow made a movie so enjoyable as to be 100% lethal. All viewers unfortunate enough to catch even a snippet of this mortally popular production, which ironically shares its title with the novel, at once live only to see it again and again, lapsing into a persistent vegetative state from which only drool-drowning will ever deliver them. All copies have now gone missing, and the post-NAFTA Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.) is ineptly racing to find them before they can fall into the Wrong Hands, namely those of a splinter group of legless Quebecois separatists in wheelchairs.
If this starts to sound a mite daffy, it's also deadly serious. Like ``1984'' and ``A Clockwork Orange,'' both of which he unmistakably invokes, Wallace's critique of a future society whose only grail has become the hangoverless bender, the infinite jest -- the neverending Year of Glad -- rings so true and contemporary it's almost late.
In a way, of course, it is. Everybody from Neil Postman in ``Amusing Ourselves to Death'' to 10,000 Maniacs in ``Candy Everybody Wants'' has tilled this ground before. What keeps it fresh is Wallace's prose style, a compulsively footnoted amalgam of stupendously high-toned vocabulary and giddy low-comedy diction, coupled to a sense of syntax so elongated that he can seem to go for days without surfacing. At times he appears determined to end each sentence with a preposition or not at all, with perhaps the slight edge going to not at all. A Wallace sentence finally draws to a close amid reluctance and relief, like a hitting streak. Half the time you'll want to pitch the damn book clear into the next room, with or without benefit of doorway, but the other half you can actually feel your attention span stretching back out to where it belongs.
Then, contrary to the occasional renegade suspicion, it ends. Little gets resolved, least of all a reason for Hal's first-chapter seizure, although at least three good guesses come to mind. Several well-developed characters and one improbably touching romance all come to naught. Pynchonesque, some will say, but with Pynchon, he's playing with the whole idea of narrative closure, not thumbing his nose at you for giving a damn. Finishing ``Infinite Jest,'' one feels less played with than toyed with. Still, better to be toyed with by a genius than pandered to by some second-rater who'd write a few hundred pages and give up. And Wallace has a toybox to do Pandora proud.
Rating:
Summary: It's a Mad mad Mad World
Review: Addictive to the point of the chocolate, Infinite Jest is a definite masterpiece, completely modern and hyper-
realistic. The setting is the near future of a plugged-in
North America. Commercialism is the rule, not the exception, and the populace is ever addicted to drugs, television, or
a certain movie with the same title as this book. With an anally retentive, physcopathic, clean freak, ex-lounge singer as president, and years named after products (Glad,
the Whopper) the book traverses from farce to complete
surrealism, yet this book is chillingly real. It explores the
sad lonliness of addiction in a wacked out society spinning
into chaos. Highly recommended for people with a distinct
disliking of the world today, because this book will make today look like paradise! Overall a work of genius.
Rating: 
Summary: Pynchon me no Pynchons: this book is overrated
Review: I have to admit I'm not sure why I bought this book; I never did get through Gravity's Rainbow, although I liked parts of it. I feel the same way about Infinite Jest: the decent parts aren't enough to redeem the whole. It's just another self-indulgent inside joke for the postmodern cognoscenti--I suppose you're supposed to feel you'er not with it if you're not laughing along or, worse, that you're too hopelessly mired in popular culture to appreciate this work of "genius." What did Bernard Devoto say: "genius is not enough?" Yes, that's it. I've also had it with this precious trick of embedding footnotes in novels, which is even more aggravating in Infinite Jest because the book is so huge and the footnotes are set in what looks like 4 point
type. I'm not sure where the novel is going, but if this is
the best the form can supply, it's in trouble. Don't be fooled by the chorus of praise for Infinite Jest (I wonder how many of the people slavishly praising it actually read
the whole thing?)--it's a windy waste of time.
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