infinite jest

Posted on | February 20, 2009 | Comments Off

started reading infinite jest, my first novel by david foster wallace. this is what Jay McInerny had to say about wallace when reviewing the book :

If Mr. Wallace were less talented, you would be inclined to shoot him — or possibly yourself — somewhere right around page 480 of ”Infinite Jest.” In fact, you might anyway.

he goes on :

[...] this skeleton of satire is fleshed out with several domestically scaled narratives and masses of hyperrealistic quotidian detail. The overall effect is something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola. [...]

sounds enticing. more extracts from the review:

[...] These plot lines eventually converge, although as a narrator Mr. Wallace reminds me of his character Lateral Alice: his momentum tends to be sideways rather than forward, with chapters often seeming interchangeable with the almost 400 footnotes, some a dozen pages long. As the title — a nod to Hamlet’s Yorick — indicates, the emergent theme is that we as a nation are amusing ourselves to death.

[...]What makes all this almost plausible, and often pleasurable, is Mr. Wallace’s talent — as a stylist, a satirist and a mimic — as well as his erudition, which ranges from the world of street crime to higher mathematics.

[...] It’s as if Mr. Wallace started with the Glass family whiz-kid plot and then got more interested in the gritty church-basement world of A.A. But, in the end, it is the dogged attempt of the recovering addict Don Gately to reclaim the simple pleasures of everyday life that overshadows the athletic, intellectual and onanistic pyrotechnics of the Incandenzas — and makes this novel something more than an interminable joke.

full review here

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