Rating: 
Summary: Michael McGrath review
Review: David Foster Wallace is the kind of author who makes aspiring writers weep for both joy and self-pity. He is so good that it hurts inside. This book contains everything anyone would ever want to read on both hope and hopelessness. Touching, hilarious and scarily clever, this mammoth novel is worth the time. I advise everyone to pick it up yesterday and call in sick to work until they've read it twice. And while the footnotes seem like a nusiance, and finding two bookmarks can be hard, by the end of the book you'll find they have been worth the trouble. Ignore the "Hipster Handbook," Wallace is no poser, he's just a super cool writer with a lot on his mind.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring
Review: Rarely do I put a book down, no matter how bad it may be. This one I found myself thinking not about what I was reading, but rather how much more of it I had to read. When I got to page 230 (still over 750 pages to go), I couldn't take anymore. Flashy vocabulary and overly technical drug references are amusing for awhile, but when I found myself dreading picking up the book again, I knew it was time to stop. Easily one of the five worst books I've ever read.
Rating:
Summary: Can't get enough Infinite Jest?
Review: If, like me, you loved reading Infinite Jest so much you wanted to explode - and especially if you are unsatisfied with loose ends not being tied up in the end - check out the message board at the Howling Fantods DFW fan page. Can't give you the link, but just do a search on "Howling Fantods" and you'll find it. And, as others have suggested, read the beginning of the book again, and make sure you didn't miss those all-important two sentences toward the end of the novel (like I did).
Rating:
Summary: Start it, finish it, think about it
Review: The first thing you, the consumer, has to do when considering this book is ignore the negative reviews written by people who have not even finished, let alone started the book. There was a review in EW by a moronic reviewer who had not even opened it because it looked too daunting (Lisa Schaurtzbaum or something). Short attention span is one of the very things Wallace is criticizing, so I guess it's fitting that most people never try this book for just that reason.Really folks, this is a great book. The story starts out with the story of Hal Incandenza, a tennis phenom at the Enfield Tennis Academy in Boston, MA. The story is set in the near future where Canada and the US have formed a self-gratifying, but tenous union known as ONAN. Hal comes from a long line of wunderkids, his late father was the founder of Enfield and an avant garde film autuer. The Incandenza family is truly one of the more endearingly screwed up in recent memory. Similar to Salinger's Glass family, only less religious overtones (and really when you get right down to it, a little less pretentious, but no less precocious.) The story has another important character in Don Gately, a recovering drug addict in the nearby Ennett House. It's really a beautiful and sad, but mostly incredibly funny story about entertainment and being bored and being lonely. And no, it's not pretentious at all! It's just long, but any patience is rewarded (not only by the end of the story, which happens early on, but on every single page there will be at least one time where you laugh out loud, often times many more). Just be patient, it took me two and a half monthes to read with school and work, but I finished and loved it. OH, and for crimmy's sake - READ THE FOOTNOTES!
Rating: 
Summary: I felt cheated
Review: I bought this massive book after reading Wallace's brilliant (and hilariously footnoted) critical essay on Bryan Garner's "Dictionary of Modern American Usage" in Harper's magazine. As I first dug in, my expectation was that reading "Infinite Jest" would be a lot of work but worth it in the end. For the first few hundred pages, this seemed like a reasonable expectation. Then Wallace dropped in a really obvious bit of foreshadowing, and I spent the next 600-odd pages waiting for the other shoe to drop ... and it never did! Baffled, I went back and read the last 100 or so pages again, only to find that he did, in fact, resolve the foreshadowing -- in two nondescript sentences which he then blew right past, dragging two subplots to the fore and leaving the main story completely without climax or resolution. The title turned out to be ruefully accurate: The story never really ended, and the jest was on me, the hapless victim of a 1,000-plus-page literary practical joke. Wallace really is an exceptional word wrangler, and there are several scenes and a couple of footnotes that are laugh-out-loud funny, but on the whole "Infinite Jest" simply is not worth the effort it demands of the reader. After this experience, I flatly refuse to tackle any other Wallace work longer than a magazine essay.
Rating: 
Summary: The early sprawl of a young, SOON-TO-BE-great writer?
Review: As I understand it, Wallace wrote this book as his college thesis (by chance, my roommate had classes with him at Amherst). This made perfect sense to me as I plodded my way through this formidable tome. There is no doubt that we are dealing here with a brilliant mind, of absolutely astounding range and razor sharp wit. And a fine writer, who has great command of the language and a stupendous vocabularly. However, it seems painfully clear to me that he focused way too much of his energy on creating an original post-modern novel and not enough on developing a truly engaging story. This is not to say that I was not interested. I was. But I can't say that I really cared about or empathized with any of the characters in any profound way. I'm no stranger to long, complex and non-linear fiction writing. Indeed, I welcome the challenge and originality of it. However, only so far as the characters and story are not sacrificed for the benefit of the form. Unfortunately, the 21 year old David Foster Wallace fell prey to this. From what I've heard (heard, mind you, as I have not read any of his later work), his subsequent writing is far superior to this in it's coherence, whether linear or non-. One of the other reader reviews mentioned that after you finish the book, if you go back and reread the early sections, previously insignificant-seeming passages take on a whole new meaning. I agree with this and it is a rather clever phenomenon. However, it does not make up for a really average story and overdone post-modern themes. OK, I won't ramble on. Basically, I think this book is overrated in general. And I'd prefer on any day: Pynchon, Doestoevsky, Tom Robbins, Umberto Eco, Herman Hesse, or Michael Chabon. (Actually, regarding the latter of those above: I think Chabon is what Wallace and Jonathan Franzen would be if they would just loosen the reins a tad on form and let the story unfurl a bit more effortlessly. Indeed, Chabon's writing, while complex in its own right, comes across as elegant and effortless, and offers up richly developed characters that you can almost touch. Whereas, with the other two, I get the feeling they're desperately trying to control something all the time.) But
Rating:
Summary: A Total Immersion Experience
Review: I love books whose authors play with the experience of reading, teasing the reader by witholding and releasing information at just the right moment. In this category I place authors like Nabokov with his unreliable first-person narrators, Rushdie with his swirling, poetic prose, Joyce with his stream-of-consciousness, nonsensical word play, and now David Foster Wallace. Reading _Infinite Jest_ is a wonderfully disorienting experience from beginning (where the temporal relationships between the events being described are left totally unclear) to the end (in which a sedated character relates events witnessed through a heavily drugged haze). But the events and characters are so quirky, so imaginative, and so 3-dimensional that none of it matters. It's as if this extremely complex, near-future, dystopian world exists fully-formed in Wallace's head and he reveals it, bit-by-bit, to the reader, not in chronological or thematic order but as necessary or convenient. Almost never (except occasionally in the copious and vitally important footnotes) does he resort to bald-faced exposition. Instead, important background is constantly revealed or implied by the events of the novel. It should be said that if you are the sort of reader who likes fast-paced plots with clear, clever resolutions leaving few loose ends, you will hate this book. Although a huge number of events take place, this is not a plot-centered novel. Instead, it's more like an extended visit to a foreign (and yet eerily familiar) country to take an extensive but not always coherent guided tour. And yet the world (with its Subsidized Time, experialism, and Quebecois secessionist politics) and the characters (rising junior tennis players, recovering (and not-so-recovering) substance abusers, and Wheelchair Assassins) are so engaging that I was perfectly content for 1000 pages to be fed drips and drabs and left to my own devices to piece together what I could. It is entirely appropriate that I was unable to put down and sorry to finish this novel that deals with all sorts of addictions and whose title refers to a film so fulfilling and entertaining that those who watch it are unable to do anything but continue to watch it over and over and over...and as soon as I finished _Infinite Jest_ I found myself wanting to go back to the beginning and start again.
Rating:
Summary: Infinite Book
Review: About 100 pages in I started to realize that this was science fiction -- sort of, anyway. In Wallace's crypto-dystopian future, the federal government is reduced to earning extra cash by "subsidizing" the calendar to various corporations so that the years are no longer designated by numbers, but by products ("The Year of the Whopper") whose images are placed, every January 1, at the end of the Statue of Liberty's arm where the torch used to be. Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and parts of Massachusetts and upstate New York are rendered uninhabitable by toxic waste and are therefore summarily "ceded" to Canada in what's referred to as "ecological gerrymandering." Subsequently huge metal ballistic waste containers are hurled into space and literally "thrown" into this area, called the Concavity, now North America's hugest landfill. All of this we glean by inference rather than by direct information, until, 350 pages later, we learn the details of this great North American restructuring in the description of a low-budget puppet show shot on video by the main character's developmentally-disabled brother. This is a huge heavy daunting book, physically and intellectually demanding. Forget about reading it on the subway. Wallace loves to write, and hates to edit, apparently; he also wants to make sure you know you're reading an Important Work by making it a job simply to pick it up. He's one of those contemporary novelists who employs copious notes, some informational and some which simply continue the story as if within parentheses. This is fine, except that Wallace has chosen to use endnotes instead of footnotes, which sends you flopping over to page 1000 every few minutes to find the next note, some of which are formidable -- note 110, for example, is almost twenty pages of 6-point type and has twelve of its OWN endnotes. Note 123 includes several complicated mathematical diagrams. Some notes merely refer you to other notes. The plot, such as it is, involves a short film that is so fulfilling, so pleasurable, that anyone who even glimpses a moment of it is instantly rendered catatonic, unable or unwilling to do anything but watch the film over and over forever, incommunicative except for insistent pleas for just a few moments, even just a trailer or a teaser, of the Entertainment. The US government wants to get its hands on this film that it knows no American will be able to resist. A Quebecois separatist group, the Wheelchair Assassins, wants to acquire the film and assess its possible utility as a terrorist weapon. But if you're the kind of reader who likes stories to have endings, let me go ahead and ruin this one for you right now: this plot is never resolved and you will never learn what happens to any of the characters involved in finding or in making it. The book will be more enjoyable if you focus on its two main settings: The upscale tennis academy and the deliciously dysfunctional family that runs it; and the substance-abuse recovery halfway house at the bottom of the hill, which is filled to the brim with vivid and arresting character portraits including the staid and somber Don Gately, the most likable character ever to addict himself to Dilaudid.
Rating: 
Summary: If spoiled slackers became serious authors...
Review: ...you'd get Infinite Jest. One of the most original books that I've ever read. It's hard to sum up this sprawling book, even harder to figure out what it was really about. I have to say that the main draw in this novel for me was the style of the prose. Wallace's lengthy, twisting, complex langauge is like a tasty taffy...it's to get through at times, but the struggle is oddly enjoyable. Wallace is addicted to detail that both amuses and infuriates. (For example, his lengthy footnotes, many of which cover the particulars of the pharmaceuticals that the characters are taking for allergies or other reasons.) I stuck with it to the end, expecting a good wrap-up that would explain the point of the story. Instead, the book simply ran out of pages without ever attempting to tie things together. Depite my disappointment over this kind of ending, I still recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: original!
Review: All I want to say is that this is one of the most original books that I've ever read. The prose blows me away. You've got to read it.
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