Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace

Apr 2009 · Sold by Back Bay Books

About this ebook

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America 

Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human — and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.

With a foreword by Tom Bisell. 

"The next step in fiction...Edgy, accurate, and darkly witty...Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis. Think." —Sven Birkerts, The Atlantic

 

Ratings and reviews

I was reading an old interview by The Architectural Digest with Jon Krackauer, they had asked Jon what reading material he had carried on his climb up Everest, and the answer, awaited with tension, was" Infinite Jest". I had seen photos of Wallace, thought Jon would maybe read poetry on his rest stops on his total climb of 25,000 feet, in presence of very thin air, possibly Whitman. The interview was read early morning in the quiet and the book and Wallace appeared, again now at end of day, an omen to grab it in the morning, first thing!

Obviously, based on the large number of very favourable reviews, I am in a vanishingly small minority who find "Infinite Jest" unsatisfying. For me, it's not that the book is difficult, it's that it's boring, and its characters are paper thin and uninteresting, and its humour is weak. Writers whom I enjoy accomplish that which Joseph Conrad laid out: "My task, which I am trying to achieve, is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel -- it is, before all, to make you *see*. If I succeed you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm -- all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."

This work I've heard described as both impenetrable and genius. I think it's in need of editing. There are some passages that are interesting and the imagery is sometimes beginning to verge on compelling, a different and intricate voice attempting to develop, but it reads as a first draft. A lot of things are written in a way that some, I think, mistake for deliberately confusing but seems to me like the kinds of narrative mistakes editors were invented to avoid.

About the author

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a masters of fine arts from University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011.