Rating: 
Summary: I couldn't do it
Review: A friend of mine read it all. He loved it, probably would have given it a 5-stard.So I bought it. The clerk said: "Hey, that's a cheap price for so many pages!" Well, it wasn't. I could never finish this book. Go through a 200 pages or so, but then would lose momentum and attraction. I've put it down I don't know how many times, tried re-reading it with a new angle so many times... never got further. Maybe it's just me.
Rating: 
Summary: literary onanism
Review: Wallace's style is absolutely addictive (and mildly schizophrenic)1. Don't let the sheer weight of this book intimidate you; it's a very readable 1200 or so pages. With references flying like wood chips from a table saw, you'd swear that Dennis Miller asked David Markson (Wittgenstein's Mistress--a must read) and Camus to help him co-write the AA welcome kit. Don't try to catch them all. The beauty of this novel is its self-reference. Upon turning over the last page and realizing that it was, indeed, the last page, I realized that, like "The Joke" (a film directed by one of the characters), the "Infinite Jest" is ultimately on the reader. The two discernable major plots (the tennis academy and the half-way house) both seem to hint at what Wallace must think of his own craft (including the writing of Infinite Jest itself): it is a communal hiding place, cohabited by people collectively excused from their "normal" lives and individually driven to attain purity and perfection. The only other work of his that I've read is "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men", but Infinite Jest is so loaded with throwbacks to it (through Orin and James Incandenza, Gately, Pemulis, and other male characters), that I'm sure readers that enjoyed his other works will find this familiar. It's comically on par with "Brief Interviews...", with the biting dark undertones that almost make you embarassed to be a man (if you are one). The comic/pathetic pull of Wallace's work reminds me also of George Saunders' "Civilwarland in Bad Decline". If you dig the postmodern lack of structure and temporality, and you aren't too attached to conclusions and climaxes, this book is going to keep you moving through all 1200 pages. If you don't, or you're Canadian, I wouldn't touch this with a ten-foot-pole. 1. Okay, maybe not so mildly ;)
Rating: 
Summary: stick with it
Review: Here is a work with many flaws and cheap devises: men in drag, several birth-defected and malformed characters lifted without significance from K Dunn's Geek Love, and a few long and cripplingly boring scenes which DFWallace returns to again and again. And, oh yeah, the author is smarter than us, we get it. So much intellectual "onanism", re: the 100 pages of endnotes: many are vital, many entertaining, many mundane, many simply belong within the pages of the main text, but DFW makes the point clear - many of these endnotes exist simply to be endnotes! As for the novel's socio-politcal satire, I'll take Vonnegut twice on sundays. STILL, though he may need a talented and aggressive editor, this guy can write; a true heavyweight, he strikes out, sure, but he hits 'em perfectly too. And How. While there were times I thought I couldn't recommend this book to any but one of my friends, thinking I could not wait to just FINISH this behemoth, I eventually and decisively reverted my stance. IJ's pleasures are rich and plentiful, far too numerous to mention here. (Will say: the AA sections are consistently wow.) All told, this thing's assets far outweigh it's liabilities. I have not read a more rewarding book since. Probably a Must Read, if only for the adventurous: many of DFW's ideas about art are relayed via one character's avant-garde film-making: he aims to tell of Life, without singular focus or neatly tied and tapered strings, and he sticks to his conceits. I have now recommended this novel widely & [GASP] would like to read it again. It's that good. (I don't know anyone who has now read it, who hasn't really enjoyed it.)
Rating:
Summary: Yeah, it's infinite
Review: The incredible praise for this book is further evidence to my theory that the world has gone temporarily insane. So what's wrong with this book? Quite simply, it's lacking both a plot and compelling characters. However, it is quirky and goofy at times and long and has lots of big words and lots of detailed information about nothing in particular. So if you're some post-modern type of guy or gal who thinks plot and character are hakneyed devices of old, then this book may be just your stick-o-buttah.
Rating:
Summary: infinite joy
Review: 1088 pages. 304 endnotes. one would think that within a book of this length you'd be able to find all of the answers, cf. the holy bible, which, incidentally, it's longer than. while still reading the book, i commented that i got the feeling that the book was building to some immense conclusion. but it never happened, and i've come to realize that that's the magic of this particular novel and why it'll never be an oprah "book of the month" selection: there is no grand emotional climax and you're not fed all of the answers; the mysteries of infinite jest transcend the page and are grappled with in the imagination. now i'll foolishly attempt a plot synopsis, bear with me: most action in infinite jest takes place in the very near future, in the year of the depend adult undergarment, which calculations indicate is approximately 2008. oh, about that year name, in this future, year sponsorship is sold to the highest bidder and the money goes to the government, who in turn use the money to make up for the funds lost when the nation was reconfigured and the great concavity was formed. nation reconfigured? what? well, virulent toxic waste was "discovered" in new york and new england, near the canadian border and the area, needless to say, had to be evacuated. that area became the great concavity, a virtual wasteland where giant feral infants (or hamsters) were said to roam free. in the town of enfield, mass., there exists a tennis academy, founded by the late james o. incandenza, optics specialist and, later, apres-garde filmmaker, and a halfway house called ennett house. at the enfield tennis academy, many of the youngsters are getting high and dream of making "the show, a term for the professional tennis tour, and at ennett house, the inhabitants are getting clean and dream of making it back "out there," their term for the outside world. the lives of the residents of both of these institutions are paralleled and eventually intersect, particularly the lives of hal incandenza, 16 year-old tennis whiz and son of the late founder, and don gately, a reformed burglar who's now live-in staff at ennett house. in the opening pages of the novel, hal mentions the name of gately before we even know who he is. (i should mention that the book is not in chronological order; cantilevered would be a better way to describe it.) the book features, literally, a cast of thousands -- precocious tennis aces, grizzled a.a. vets, wheelchair-bound terrorists, transvestite coke-addicts, to name a few -- and all of their lives are intertwined in a search for what is called "the entertainment," a film allegedly made by james incandenza and one that is considered to be lethally entertaining. in a way, it's highly reminiscent of paul thomas anderson's magnolia -- but with enough macabre twists to suggest the film as directed by david lynch -- in which a number of characters find their lives' paths crossing: a line from that film, "we may be through with the past, but the past isn't through with us" is applicable infinite jest, in which everyone's past seems to come back to haunt them. the book, when boiled down to its essence, is about addiction, and particularly america's addiction to its addictions, a country who could very likely be undone by its inability to say "no." in its pages, you'll find people addicted to pot, crack, prescription meds, television, sports, gambling, sex, and much more. as i've said before, it's incredibly ironic that i found myself addicted to this book, taking the unwieldy thing with me onto the subway and into work. it's a very sad novel, but not one that'll make you cry (and i've seen the book get bad reviews because of just that). the characters in infinite jest are, by and large, emotionally spent; they're burnt-out. when you're finished with the book, hopefully, wallace will have conveyed to you the sadness of our current existence and our spiritual emptiness as a nation, which i think is far more profound than manipulating you into crying over a character's death or some such. the set-up is masterful, as with each new page, we discover a new relation between two characters that we never knew existed or a character mentioned very early on in the novel reappears later. wallace exhibits absolute mastery in his ability to make the language bend to his wishes: his vocabulary and structure are incredible, and he comes across as all-knowing in whatever he discusses, be it television, tennis, or mathematics. some might find the endnotes to be pretentious, but they do serve an important function. sure, we could do without some, but it would just clutter the story to place, for example, james incandenza's filmography into the middle of the novel. the philosophy i employed while reading the book can be summed up as, "one page at a time," a paraphrase of one of the a.a. slogans mentioned in the book. if you view it as "1 page down, 1087 to go," you'll drive yourself mad; just enjoy each page as it comes. some might say that no book needs to be 1088 pages long, but very few words here are wasted -- if you got rid of more than, say, 200 pages, it'd be to the book's detriment. and yet, with all of those pages, one can't help but think, once they've finished, that it could stand to be longer, that there's still so much that could be explained like, "what happened in the year or so between the novel's end and its beginning?" there's a part of everyone, i think, that calls out for that, and if you're someone who doesn't like having ends untied and plots unresolved, then infinite jest is not for you. infinite jest becomes a book that exists off of the written page, one that will make you wonder about the lives of its characters long after you've completed the book. too many pieces of art are easily forgotten after one turns off the stereo or leaves the theater or closes its pages, affecting you for the moment but ultimately fading away into the recesses of your mind. infinite jest is a book that will get under your skin if you let it, and it will also reward you greatly when you complete it. and you will: just take it a page at a time.
Rating:
Summary: May drive you crazy, but in a good way.
Review: Good points: Gripping story, readable style, original characters Bad points: Footnotes, bloody footnotes! Book ends too soon This story is set in the not too distant future, and centres on a dysfunctional family. The father set up a tennis academy, and then disappeared, leaving behind him mysterious links to a mysterious video cassette, that no one ever wants to stop watching. The mother runs the tennis academy now. The central character, Hal, is a promising pupil at the academy. His elder brother was a star pupil but left, and became a football player. His ex-girlfriend was very beautiful, but may be no longer - she wears a veil, and is housed at a halfway house for addicts, near the academy. We meet many of the inmates of the halfway house. That is about half of what you will find in this novel - it's long because there is so much in it. All of this is exqusitely arranged, so that although it may seem like War and Peace, it all becomes quite familiar. There are many very annoying footnotes, which have you chopping back and forward from the end of the book to where you are reading, and personally, I lost patience with them in the end. I guess this is the price of postmodernity. Your mileage may vary. Basically though, as a plain old novel, with narrative and ideas, this is a great piece of work. DFW stops early, and doesn't quite explain everything that is going on, but that doesn't matter too much - you enjoy the ride too much, and again, maybe the lack of a conclusion is postmodern, too. Calling your book postmodern is a great excuse to not write a good book that obeys the rules that good books must obey. This book is postmodern, and it obeys the rules, most of the time, except for the footnotes, but those can be ignored, if you want. The other thing that I got out of this book was a brilliant description of addiction and depression - I know depressives, and I understand them a lot better after reading this book, which has improved both my and their lives. Some people may think that you either love or hate this book - I think that most people will both love and hate this book, but it is hard to imagine anyone not finding something to love about it.
Rating:
Summary: As a Matter of Fact I Just Finished this Book a Few Days Ago
Review: This book technically took me 11 months to complete, though the reality (I read at least 15 other books in those same 11 months) of it is that it only took me about 3 months of "actual" reading time to finish. Initially, I read the early sections with Hal, and he goes from being mute or something and then strangely he's VERY talkative and (in the most hirsute way) sometimes obnoxious, and the ETA crew and poor deformed little Mario (who is strangely and amusingly very mobile), and those pair of stange first-person passages written in an Ebonics/ClockworkOrange-hybrid (allusions to which becoming more obvious toward the end), and Hal's father's father's drunken rant to Hal's father about his own father re a fateful Tennis Match (flashbacks within flashbacks within...) which was the first thing I remember reading that really moved me, maybe, a little. There was the Bruce Green and Mildred Bonk preview, the hilarious anxiety attack had by the guy waiting for his pot to show up (500 pages later thinking, "Hey that was Ken Erdeddy!"), Hal's secret fixation on getting grassed in private ("Huh, everyone in this book gets high."), J.O.I.'s filmography that you shouldn't read too thoroughly if you don't want to know what happens in the rest of the book, endnotes both funny and tedious, thinking why are these guys on this mountain and one is in a wheelchair and one is dressed like a woman, what's up with the references to all things "annular", why were there, like, 4 presidents in a five year span. Actually, it was right around this point I finally felt as though I understood where all of these parallel lines were supposed to converge. The subsidized time stuff I felt to be neither cumbersome, nor especially hilarious, and he pretty much gives away what the years are in a footnote and then on page 220-something he comes right out lists them all and one of them even uses the actual Gregorian calendar year in its name anyway. But anyway I finally understood the whole thing with the samizdat and how the Canadians fit in to it but I felt like, "man I feel like I missed, like, everything" and so ,daunted by the thought of re-reading such a dense block of text, yet feeling that I might have missed some fundamental point in the book, I actually quit reading it for most of this year and didn't even pick it up again until September or so, at which point I started completely over, from the beginning, and found, yes, I actually missed quite alot (don't read page 17 either, "it gives it all away", as does the Conversationalist stuff w/r/t Hal and JOI.) The book is involved, it's long, some of it is written in teeny tiny type, it has a lot of characters, some of them have something to do with one another some do not, there are some that are absent for lapses of 600+ pages. A friend once looked at a pair of pages I was reading and said, "there's no punctuation there." Don Gately steps in at some point taking over the rest of the novel ("Hal....are you there?") and I feel surprised reading so few reviews that mention the AA stuff, because there is a LOT of it, all the cliches and whatnot. There is a great fight scene with Gately (Gately's Eschaton if you will, which is another thing, because the ETA Eschaton bit and Otis Lord with the monitor on his head and all I feel is WAY overrated and clearly inferior to Gately's big fight with the 'Nucks) that is definitely one of the most fun things I haver read (and would read again, supposedly) and still not much mention of Hal, but then I start to feel manipulated, I can feel what Wallace is doing, and I start to question myself, feeling manipulated. There is a definite point of which things start to feel very symmetrical, and I get the sneaking suspicion that Wallce is playing with the page numbers and I feel it gets pretty confirmed when I flip back to the mathematical center of the book and see what's there. Wallace is great with the more abstracted mathematics in his literature, by which I mean the symbolism and the fractals and Fourier Transforms, etc, but the more general math finds him lacking, as errors in probability pop-up a couple of times (though I remember the integration bit being dead on, but there seemed to be something fishy re the mean-value-theorem and how it relates to what he's trying to relate it to) but then I start to question whether if that's a bona-fide error or just Hal, because Hal even said he's no good in math (or was that Pemulis in an endnote?) And then a bunch of things never really get resolved in pretty much the way you expected them not to get resolved after reading the first half of the book, and there is some pretty depressing stuff with Gately and now there's at least four distinct possibilities for What Happened to Hal back in the beginning (really the novel's coda) and two pretty distinct possibilities for whats under Joelle vD's veil, and the VERY distinct idea that maybe Wallace wants you to just wonder exactly what happened because the McGuffins can't really be sorted out from the truth because it seems like maybe the book's just one long Hamlet allusion or is that Pynchon homage or really the "Entertainment" itself or just a slice of timeline in some peoples' lives with many events coming to a close as some are just starting to unfold, or ultimately an allergory of addiction (and withdrawl obviously) itself starting slowly and before you know it it's careening out of control and you can feel yourself spiral out of control and somewhere it has to eventually end and of course eventually, and rather abru He uses lots of long run-on sentences, too.... Hal ate the mold.
Rating: 
Summary: D.F.W., F.D.R. F.D.R., D.F.W.
Review: Prose dies now, as supposed "Great Novel," book with pages numbered with zeroes three, subtext of notes with feet, many of: boredoms, longish sentences, plots plodding slowish, andandandndndndndnd: who cares? Pick ye up Mr Jamesish Joyce or Thomish Pynchon for longly novels, or mastery, or fun fun fun. F.D.R. & things dead are inspiration, source of push for D.F.W.
Rating:
Summary: The Year of Most-Bang-for-the-Buck Book
Review: This is one of those books that makes you feel stupid. Either that or you get this suspicious feelings that everyone else is somehow so much smarter than you, even though yourself is not stupid, so to speak. Not understanding anything before or after reading this voluminous work of ... what? genius? I remember one thing: I had fun reading it. Funny, weird, addicting, and if you are a retired, fulltime reader of books, as I am, you might as well read it, or even buy the book. Over 1000 pages for under $18 (softcover). To me, that's a good deal of enjoyable writing for the buck, whether you understand the totality of it or not.
Rating:
Summary: An instant American classic of truly "infinite" proportions
Review: A great big, sprawling romp through post-modern American addiction -- addiction to drugs, fame, money, sex, power and corporate greed. In Wallace's near-future world, everyone is on the take for the personal fix that he or she desperately needs. Even time itself is corporate sponsored! And when a brilliant filmmaker produces a video so utterly compelling and instantly addictive that the viewer, upon the first moment of setting eyes on it, immediately becomes "hooked," unable to shift his or her attention from the screen, eventually expiring in a state of catatonic ecstacy, the international race for the master copy of the video nearly sets off the long-anticipated Canadian civil war! Probably never before in all of English-language literature has a novel been so effectively calculated -- from title page to last entry in the exhaustive footnotes(!) -- to trigger the desired response in the reader. The response being, usually, riotous laughter, but also at times fear, horror, awe and, yes, serious reflection on our out-of-control, compulsive, strung-out society. For all its hilarity (check out the tennis academy's philosophical guru, who dispenses wisdom to the young trainees in exchange for the privelege of licking the sweat from their foreheads), this is a book that makes a pretty serious point about addiction and self-destruction. And ironically, by the end, some 1,200 pages and countless hours after you have begun, you are indeed addicted...to the plot, the characters, the story, and above all to Wallace's exhillarating, expansive, completely over-the-top writing style. I have never read anything like this. It is, quite simply, one of the Great Novels of the past 20 years. Don't be fooled by its rich and abundant and outrageous humor. This is a masterpiece of serious fiction, prose and storytelling. I have thought about this book many, many times since I (reluctantly) turned the last page. Every time I witness another ridiculously named corporate-sponsored sports event (The Citibank Visa Bowl?) or watch another American public official self-destruct from the fruits of his own personal obsession, I realize that Wallace's insane, morbid, fanatical, absurd future world is not that far away. The Year of the Purdue Wonderchicken is nearer than we think!
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