Rating: 
Summary: Infinite waste
Review: A reviewer from the New York Review of Books put it best: "Infinite Jest is the longest novel ever written about tennis." That about sums it up. There are some bright moments, here and there, scattered throughout some 1,000 odd pages. But they don't really add up to much.
Don't waste your time on this.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but where is the hope?
Review: Wallace provides the reader with a great work of beatifully written prose, but why does it have to be so cynical? Good books on society should not only leave the reader a better person, but also they should leave the reader with a source for hope.
A similar "post-modernesque" novel, yet much shorter and more exciting, is called "The Most Amazing Thing." This book also provides a kind of paradigm of American ideology, but left me with a notion of hope and satisfaction at the end which Wallace failed to do.
For readers who were not fully satisfied with wallace, this might be a good book to turn to. Good luck
Rating: 
Summary: A great book...
Review: ...if you ever need to stop a bullet.
Rating:
Summary: Infinite Jest
Review: Long, but worth it. It holds up, even though there are few less trees in the forest.
Rating:
Summary: Genius rewards the patient
Review: David Foster Wallace is a genius, and he knows it. But unlike other geniuses that you might know, he never tries to make you feel dumb. He just wants you to understand the same things that he does, so occasionally you'll feel out of your depth. But he's also a gifted writer, so odds are that you *will* come out understanding him. And what he's saying is brilliant, so you'll feel like a better person for it.Wallace has been described as ``postmodern", a word that seems to get smacked onto anything written after World War II. I don't see it. To me, postmodernism involves a few things: 1) irony, in liberal doses (e.g., DeLillo's _White Noise_); 2) a continuous awareness that we're *reading a book* and that there's an author talking to us, and that the characters are under his control (e.g., anything by Kurt Vonnegut); 3) self-reference, sometimes to the point of disorienting involution (e.g., Wallace's story ``Westward The Course Of Empire Makes Its Way" from his book _Girl With Curious Hair_ - and that story is, notably, a spoof of postmodernism). This may be an overly conservative definition of postmodernism, but the word's overapplication justifies some conservatism. _Infinite Jest_ is not postmodern; it's just a great story with beautifully constructed characters. It is a book about a movie that is so addictive that anyone who starts watching it has no choice but to keep watching it forever - foregoing food, water, and sleep, and suffering as much pain as is necessary to keep watching. The movie itself is, to paraphrase a friend, an uber-McGuffin (I'm never sure whether I've spelled that right) - an object that never gets clearly explained, but around which the plot coheres. The movie itself is not the main point of the book. _Infinite Jest_ is a novel about American addictions: television, drugs, sex, fame, and indeed the American need to be addicted to something. An addiction to addictions. Wallace summarizes the book's mood well when he says, ``There's something particularly sad about it, something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whether it's unique to our generation I really don't know." (...) The main sign of Wallace's genius - and yes, I mean that word with all it entails, content in the knowledge that it is overused but that it fits here - is that he can make us feel this gut-level sadness without even appearing to work at it. Heavy use of irony can make you feel that there's some deeper, unseen, lurking gloominess about the world, and for that reason it's the easy way out. Ditto self-reference, which after a while is dizzying and confusing. Wallace is too brilliant a writer to take any of the easy postmodern routes. He's just written a great story with an unpleasant underlying mood. It's been a long time since I've read a book of such masterful subtlety. It has all the classic aspects of a great novel: characters whom the reader *understands*, a compelling story that edges inexorably toward an uncertain ending, a gut-level mood, and a habit of dispensing brilliant toss-offs so suddenly that the reader can't help but gasp. For instance, see the attached text file containing Wallace's future-retrospective explanation of why videophones failed. My first inclination was that this book - weighing in at over a thousand pages, including hundreds of footnotes (some of which have their own footnotes) - needed an editor. And it may, at points. But there's very little chaff amongst the wheat: the book's heft serves at least three purposes: 1) To build characters, slowly and methodically. One of Wallace's flaws is that his characters' dialogue - particularly that of his youthful protagonist and tennis prodigy, Hal Incandenza - doesn't sound genuine. It sounds like Wallace talking through 17-year-olds, not 17-year-olds who've been transcribed. I think Wallace realizes this, which is why most of his character development comes through narration. 2) To dump out the contents of Wallace's swirling brain. He has so much to say, and he seems to want to get it all down on paper in this one book. Less profound thoughts from a less talented author might have left me screaming for an editor, but they didn't do so here. 3) To structure the book as a conversation. Reading this book, one feels as though one is talking directly with Wallace. More often than not, his sentences will contain heavy Latinate words like ``epicanthic" just a short distance from the conversational stammerings ``like" and ``and so but". Again, had a lesser writer written these words, I would have edited the book myself, filling the margins with red pen. The book's length will discourage all but a few readers, but it handsomely rewards the patient.
Rating: 
Summary: Where's the editor?
Review: A friend saw me reading this novel and said "Let me guess, the joke's on you." By the time I finished it, I almost agreed with him. I can tell the author is talented, but this book needed a lot of editing. The main reason I don't give the book a higher rating is that the footnotes on the endnotes was just too much.
Rating:
Summary: If Only I Could Write Like This
Review: Wallace proves that he is one of the smartest, if not THE smartest, authors around today. Infinite Jest covers every topic from complex mathematics, the troubles of gifted teenage athletes, drug addiction, the influence of the media, and things I probably didn't even notice. It looks huge and intimidating, but once I started I couldn't stop. Wallace's style is laugh-out-loud funny with occasional pauses for awed contemplation. And let's not forget the footnoted footnotes to the novel. A must have for anyone seeking to understand contemporary literature, and anyone willing to be humbled in the face of greatness.
Rating: 
Summary: disappointing
Review: The large work of fiction is nothing new, especially during the last century with Proust, Pynchon and Joyce as the primary and most reknowned of the sophisticated "big book" school of writing. Much lauded and celebrated as a writer of genuis, DFW is the newest member of this increasing tiresome school. While Proust and Pynchon were clearly gifted writers, creating with not only intelligence but authentic fire, even they become uninteresting. DFW's erudition is obvious, perhaps obtrusively so, and for all the techinical sophistication, he does lack the one intangible quality that makes a writer great, the spirit or spark. As all creators. he is indebted to others, particuliarly about notions of the "self", but here the inbebtedness is too clear and the relation to Pynchon is far more than merely superficial. About DfW, there is an almost painfully immature quality , particuliarly considering the various relations of these characters, while the humor is iritatetingly sophmoric and not to the standards of great art, like Cervantes, Proust or, to name a minor figure, S.J. Perelman.
Rating:
Summary: frequently brilliant, read it with sunglasses on
Review: This is one of the few books of which I think all the reviews from one to five stars are all true. This is because this immense work fluctuates so much, sometimes it is really sharp, funny, brilliant, but all in all I still think it should have been shorter, because there is a lot of boredom in it too. There are too many pages used to make his point about the 'crazy plastic entertainment America of now and the future'. I still give it 5 stars because frequently I read some of the best and funny bits of sharply depicted writing ever put on paper, much better to my opinion than Pynchon, and that is just something you very seldom find. And because the opinions differ so much of many readers: read it youself.
Rating:
Summary: Am I the only person who doesn't like this book?
Review: Infinite Jest reads like a math textbook, and I question my sanity for pressing through till the end. The plot, if that's what we're to call it, is motionless. The characters are as sterile and flavorless as hyperbolic topological expressions -- it's not exactly that they are flat or dimensionless, they're just dull. Wallace inexplicably includes mathematical equations as part of the text, rather than in the footnotes ( ! Too full with the real plot events already?), and these equations are either simplistic or just wrong. Perhaps the nicest thing I could say is that all this is intentional, an attempt to match the style to the central theme of addiction, and if this is the case, Wallace's succeeded brilliantly: this book has all the coherence of the verbiose ravings of a strung-out cocaine addict. If you want verbiage as well as a decent read, I'd suggest Pynchon, Gaddis, or Eco.
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