Infinite Jest

1860onwards challenge - Book 2 - Infinite Jest (1996)

Each chapter like it's own vignette. The book and the writing feels intimately connected to the author. Really strong and unique feeling as you read. Interesting O.N.A.N. world and the plot, while a macguffin, is very interesting. Footnotes break up the text almost in a deliberately challenging way.

Characters *****

Atmosphere *****

Plot *****

Emotion *****

Style *****

5.0

Man this book...it was a journey. First the end-notes..good god the end notes! As annoying as they were they really helped shape a lot of the anecdotes and characters. Although we didn't really “connect” with the characters, I think they were meant to be a reflection of ourselves in all their myriad faults.

A great novel, and for it's time absolutely legendary. A great reflection on America and the West at the turn of the millennium and oddly prescient about how the world was shaping up for the new one. The most intense introduction to DFW, after years of procrastinating but highly recommended for any true lover of literature. The prose can be a bit much at times, thank god for dictionaries but in the end it probably expanded my own. At the end we're left wondering... what the fuck just happened here! Much like while reading the book, I think I need a little while to gather my thoughts after the long slog (although enjoyable).

This book is so epic, so well-written, and so thought-provoking that it may be the Odyssey of the millennial generation. The rich satire, creatively manufactured vocabulary, and exceptionally obscure but exceptionally human character development is enough to make any English major (or word-lover, book-lover, David Foster Wallace lover) drool. While not for the faint of heart (the book is over 1,000 pages including footnotes, has sentences that stretch over several pages, and a lexicon that would have even the most erudite Harvard professor scratching her head), it is more than a worthy read. It provides a lens straight into the darkest parts of the human psyche and exposes the addict that lives in all of us.

A fascinating commentary on our media-driven society, this book is so strange and fantastic and deeply sad and hilarious and so poignant that I would recommend it to anyone who might consider taking it on. This is definitely a text that will only continue to unveil itself with each reading, so I plan to keep it with me for a lifetime.

I'm both sad and relieved to be done, but already looking forward to the next time in my life I decide to pick this up to re-read, for all else I will uncover.

Note - especially pleasurable if you've ever lived in Boston. The Beantown satire is SPOT ON.

Very thought-provoking and engaging in a way that no other book I've read is. It took me awhile to read it because the prose is complicated and requires undivided attention (a meta-theme of the book). After finishing, I did go back and reread the first chapter (as many blog posts suggested), which really cemented my desire to reread the whole thing (the narrative is chronologically out of order)—but maybe in a year or two. Overall, I'm really, really glad that I finally tackled this book!

Brilliant, exceedingly clever, and achingly poignant - Infinite Jest might be the greatest book I have ever read. While it is definitely super long, it is much more readable than I had been lead to believe. I can't wait to read his other stuff

This book has made me seriously reevaluate the way that I live my life.

This book was just too much damn work! Never knowing what order in which things are happening, collecting the clues that he sprinkles like crumbs in order to follow the plot (is there actually a plot? I still can't tell), and not finding a single character to connect with - it is all just exhausting. I'm reading this for fun during my relaxation time, Mr. Wallace (RIP), and this book is neither the former nor the latter.

I made it to page 371, and now it's time for me and this book to part ways.

I read it on audiobook without the endnotes, so I guess I pissed everyone off. Truth is, I'm too lazy to get my entertainment in any form that isn't force-fed to me. What, you say mimicking the broken pattern of human thought is one of the points? Please. Make me. (or make me, please?) DFW makes a case against it, but he still acknowledges that we do CHOOSE between pressing the brain-stimulating lever and not. ig.

I read a lot of his short works before Infinite Jest, and I'm glad I did. Many of the short ones show an idea related to someone else, or to the real world (in his nonfiction) and rendered in even more intelligible English. Infinite Jest touches on basically everything he'd ever written about, but filtered through Himself, like, at least three times.

Sometimes when I read novels from the 50s or so, they seem really short and self-contained. A prime example of the novel format. Laser-focused, trimmed of all the fat. This book is like that in the sense that it's self-contained (self-absorbed, too). But of course it's extremely long. Everything DFW ever chose to talk about and nothing more. But everything done at A level without fail. Not A+, not A-. It's odd to read a 1000+ page book and feel like it's been wrapped up nicely.

4 stars because DFW never got to write about the (mature) internet age, and I don't know of any artist who can treat the internet as well as DFW did to television. And because I don't have the emotional firepower to believe what he says at the deepest level.

SO good. I was a little worried about reading this book, since it's always SO highly-acclaimed, and since I had read Broom of the System and not been bowled over by it. But there's a reason Infinite Jest gets talked about way more than Broom of the System, and it's because it's better. It really is That Good. I really want to read some critical analyses of the book, though. As much as I liked it and puzzled over it and read all the footnotes I still feel like there's more I can dig out of this. But still, so fun and bizarrely wise.

This book is impossible to categorize, summarize or write a simple description of, but I'll try anyway.
Infinite Jest takes place in in a dystopian near future. A future where to help alleviate budget shortfalls, the naming rights to every year are up for auction to the highest bidder. The story mostly takes place in “The Year of Depend Adult Undergarment” (YDAU) at a tennis academy. But the story isn't really about tennis, or the new political structure of the Organization of North American States, or film theory or any of the other wide ranging topics that the book covers. It seems to mostly about horrible, substance addicted broken people not really getting by, just kinda dragged along the road of life, leaving a bloody trail as they go.

Infinite Jest is wonderfully written but horrible. It's very funny and funk inducing. Very much worth the read if you can bear it.

Some people straight up REFUSE to give this one a chance because of its intimidating yet lauded history. You cannot just choose on a whim to start reading IJ, you must dedicate yourself to it. It is funny, personal, tragic, odd, satirical but not in a way that makes you roll your eyes, and intensely genuine. I think people misread the silliness and think it's pretentious. DFW knew exactly what he was doing.

Do I understand the timeline? No. Did I need to to enjoy it? No. Do I want to play Eschaton? Yes.

I have no idea how to rate this book. Or how to even write a review.

Never before did I go through a roller coster ride in a book like this.

At the beginning I wanted to throw this book out of the window (or rather delete it from my Kindle), burn it (delete from my computer) and write the most horrible review possible about this unreadable dreck.

Well, then after about 200 pages in it suddenly started to grew on me, the writing style, the stories that started to interact and I was really looking forward to the outcome.

And then it ended and I am like, so that was it? I felt a bit unsatisfactory. Like you can almost come during, sex, but right before ... it ends.

So, if someone looks for advice if this book is readable, I honestly can't. On one side I say, it was sure not worth the long time I read this book (good three months) and the amount of concentration you have to out into it. You just can't open that book and read it, you really need to concentrate on it. This is really hard work. But it can be really nice to read, and really interesting, but then it ends like this ...

And the footnotes. Good 400 footnotes. Oh and some of the footnotes have footnotes too. And then some of the footnotes footnotes have footnotes. Never before have I seen that in any book I ever read. And some of those footnotes are like full chapters long. You really need to read them. Reading them post the book is kind of awkward (that is what I did).

After all this, I just give it three stars. The first 200 would have been 1, then I would have given it 4, but at the end I will settle with three. Three is good. Neither bad nor outstanding. Good. “Befriedigend” as the german would get in school. Let's leave it at that.

More of a series of thoughts I want to go back over after a second read than an actual review.

- The goodreads 5 star system is terrible, I feel bad giving 3 stars, but don't feel it deserves 4. I would give it a 7 out of 10 or even 75 out of 100, but don't feel it deserves a 8 (or 80) that 4 stars would reflect.

- This book is long. It is too long. I realize the length is part of the experience, but there is a lot of rambling and filler that really adds nothing other than total page count.

- I was honestly disappointed. There is a ton of hype surrounding this book, and I felt while it was good, it just wasn't that outstandingly good. I came into it fully buying into the hype and expecting greatness, and it just did not deliver. It's different and special and brilliant in its own way, but I would hesitate to call it a “classic” or rank it among the best books ever written.

- The next longest book that I have read was Moby Dick, and it is unfair to Infinite Jest to compare the two, but comparing the experience of reading the books, when I was finished with Moby Dick I felt rewarded, it was a long tough read, but well worth it, there was a feeling of accomplishment, of reading something truly great that I was happy to have experienced in my life (the same could be said for Blood Meridian which I also loved). I didn't get that from Infinite Jest. I realize that is a high bar to set, but finishing IJ I felt tired, worn down and just relieved it was over.

- I am not sure if the book lost steam at the end, it was just me, or a combination of the two. To me the E.T.A. and the Incandenza family were the most interesting parts of book, followed by Steeply and Marathe, with Kate Gompert playing a smaller role, but probably ending up as my favorite character in the book. As I neared the end the book seems to focus more towards Gately, who I felt was the least interesting main character.

- The Wraith really through me off, not in an “I don't get it” kind of way, more in a “I read 800+ plus pages and you are going to just throw a ghost at me now?” kind of way. I get the Hamlet references and all that, but it felt weird and out of place, like DFW didn't know what to do at that point, so “here is a ghost that does stuff”.

- One thing really bugs me. I get a feel that DFW is in part JOI. The book seems like a kind of anti-entertainment. It's long and tough and crushing and in parts boring and you need to really put effort in to finish it, and there is little reward, no end, no real resolution. When you get the end, it basically says “you missed a whole bunch of stuff and you need to read it again”. The whole thing reminded me in a way of the “Found Drama” and the JOI non-film “The Joke”. In all the interviews with Wallace he seems worried about creating something like that, a book that is long for the sake of being long and punishing the audience/reader, and to me that is in part at least what Infinite Jest is and does.

- When it is good it is brilliant, there is not denying that. The Kate Gompert sections are amazing and painful and beautiful. The Marathe/Steeply conversations in the desert are great. There is just too much other stuff that seems like it takes 10 pages to set up a joke that is not worth 10 pages.

- I will read it again, not soon though. There were points in the book when I wanted to read something else, just take a break and come back, but that would have been a bad idea, I would not have come back, and I felt I needed to finish this.

I hope that all didn't seem overly negative, it is a good book, and like I said above “It's different and special and brilliant in its own way”, and while I did enjoy the book on a whole, in my opinion, it is somewhat flawed, and for a very specific audience that I am probably just on the fringe of belonging to.

Picked it up again to reread with Infinite Summer http://infinitesummer.org/ which was an incredible way to approach the novel. It's such a loopy, dense book - heavily endnoted in that Wallace style - it just lends itself to group interpretation. The site still exists so when you do pick it up to read you have to dive in online as well.

“NNYC's harbor's Liberty Island's gigantic Lady has the sun for a crown and holds what looks like a huge photo album under one iron arm, and the other arm holds aloft a product. The product is changed each 1 Jan. by brave men with pitons and cranes.”

“We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately – the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way.”