By most accounts, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest should be damned-near unreadable. The book, including its footnotes, is over a thousand pages long. Flip through it and you'll find blocks of text, densely-spaced, and paragraphs stretching for pages. It's written in a variety of styles and has no singular narrator or, even after two hundred pages, a unified plotline. What is Infinite Jest really about? Tennis? Drug addicts? Terrorism? Television? (I know: it's about all these things, but none of it really coalesces. Yet.) It's certainly unconventional and (understandably) infuriating.

Despite having almost no idea what's going on (still), Infinite Jest is weirdly fulfilling--if you have the patience for it. It's not a book that reveals itself from the outset (example: it wasn't until almost two hundred pages in that I realized the book is probably set in the future)--it's both detailed and vague, filled with seemingly-pointless digressions. And that's just the main text; the endnotes are another matter entirely, composed mostly of exasperating, made-up trivia. (I've been tempted, on several occasions, to skip the endnotes altogether.) But there's something to be said for difficult books--more than anything, they demand a reader's confidence in the author.

With Infinite Jest's case, though, Wallace is stretching the author-reader relationship to its absolute limit. At times, he's in complete control, easily navigating us through his dark outlook; at others, he seems to be shooting wildly, without counting his bullets. Sometimes, we get the sense that something's going to happen, that it's all going to come together. Then there are times where the book reads as though it was cobbled together from Wallace's bar napkin musings. But I get the sense that it's all intentional and that, above all, he's having great fun. After all, Infinite Jest is among the funniest books I've ever read.

Comments

[robot books]

Sounds like the perfect book for me. :)