Infinite Jest (original 1996; edition 2006)

The gratuitous "like" and the 2500-word, 700-comma sentence ending on page 85 did it for me. Done.

In a positive note, I have to give Foster props for the concept of the "teleputer" (which sounds similar to a smartphone) in 1996. ( )

Misogynistic, self-indulgent, interminable, pompous, pseudo-intellectual, claptrap.

One day I'll tell you how I really feel. ;)

Let the trolls go to it. ( )

HOLY FUCK!

that's all i've got right now.
how to even begin to review this book?

i feel like this! YEAH I DO!

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Just not right now.

Infinite Jest is about suicide, which gets mentioned 56 times, or about once every 20 pages. So it's tempting, given that - spoiler - Wallace totally demapped himself, to see it as a suicide note. But it's about all this other shit too, right? Addiction, and mothers, and the weight of potential, and assassins in wheelchairs, and tennis. If Wallace had suddenly become a tennis star instead of dead we would look back on this book and be like man...we should have seen that coming. That shit was all about tennis.

It's about everything, as all magnum opi* are. And it's great. Now I'll convince you that it's great.

DFW could write some shit
Check out two similar scenes. In one, Hal & Orin have a long phone call where they tackle a bunch of important family history, and during most of it Pemulis is standing around getting impatient because Hal is supposed to go do something with his friends, and it adds this weird indirect tension that makes the scene pop. In the other, Pemulis goes into this long-ass description of annulation, which is some kind of expository "this happens in the future" shit, and it would be boring but the kid he's talking to is blindfolded and has to pee wicked bad (don't ask) and again there's this palpable tension from the weirdest source. What this is is a magic trick. It's a pretty good one.

Wallace doesn't avoid his pop influences. Dude likes Stephen King. The fight scene featuring Gately - as far as pure plot goes, the climax of the book - is straight up thrilling. Riveting. If Wallace wanted to (and had like a million fewer demons), he could have just been a potboiler writer and sold a million books.

He's a virtuoso and he gets virtuosic sometimes, okay. There's a lengthy scene in the cafeteria, describing things like the way muscles look when they chew, that's just..."Okay bitches, here is some motherfucking writing." He describes basically the entire cafeteria, its social structure, everyone in it, the history of the things on the walls, down to the way chewing...look, I love Eruption, which happened solely because Eddie Van Halen was capable of doing it. Go on with one's bad self, right? You can't do it, so shut up. You're watching something happen here.

No seriously DFW was smart
The math in IJ is generally accurate; here's a rundown of the few mathematical errors in it. Wallace wrote a nonfiction book about [b:infinity|821914|Everything and More A Compact History of Infinity|David Foster Wallace|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1347976723s/821914.jpg|807735] and I guess reviewed a couple of math books; he knew his stuff. And there's the dizzying display of medical expertise on display, which made me suspect he was pre-med at some point. (He was not.) A real old-school polymath here, huh?

And of course he was pretty good at English...here's a Slate piece on his apparently famous syllabi (links to actual PDFs included in article). And here's a list of all the words someone learned from the book, including the note that "my spellchecker is telling me that 129 of these words aren’t real words." Not sure if that number is accurate - spellcheck often misses difficult words - but we can all confirm that he did make words up with impunity.

Infinite Jest is the shit
Ending spoilers: It ends fine, shut up. You know as much as you need to. What, you've never read a book that didn't end with that freeze-frame shit from Animal House?

Okay, I was a little disappointed at Chekhov's Giant Mutant Toddler's failure to appear. Although I guess that was just Gately anyway? Whatever: I wanted a literal Giant Mutant Toddler.

It's as good as it's supposed to be, and with the weight of its reputation that's really good. It's funny and terrifying and Wallace lays himself right open: it's an absolute refusal to be coy or ironic or guarded. It's a rock-you-on-your-heels book. It's the shit.

This is my point:
Infinite Jest took me two full weeks longer to read than fucking Bleak House did, and Bleak House has many more slow parts. This isn't a minor commitment. Some books you get to just fuck and leave; you will have to go down on Infinite Jest. Infinite Jest wants to meet your parents, and it's gonna be awkward because it's got this weird shit about mothers. But it is worth it, man. Make this book a part of your life.

Yeah, I dug it. It was pretty cool.

* Read this book on Kindle. Don't worry about the footnotes. I mean, read them, but don't worry about it being hard on Kindle; it'll be fine. More importantly, Kindle will let you look up all the words you don't know, and if you think you know all the words you are an asshole. And the point is, "opi" is probably not a word but if Wallace can make shit up so can I, which isn't true.
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