Infinite Jest

6.00

I did it. This book is over 1100 pages. About an 1/8 of those pages are miniscule little footnotes, and I read every one. I confess to fearing I would miss something if I skipped the footnotes, and literary know-it-alls would not consider my completion of this book valid. Valid, Schmalid, I now say. About 80 pages to the end, I started to realize that the plot lines (best revealed by their settings...a tennis academy, a halfway house for recovering addicts, and an Arizona mountainside where two secret agents discuss the recovery of the entertainment cartidge "Infinite Jest", which renders any viewer dumbstruck and unable to stop watching until they die) were not coming together for a swift and savvy reconciliation. So it's one of those books where the structure, the length, the execution all impart in the meaning. 80 pages till the end of a book I had spent my whole summer hefting around, I couldn't give a crap about narrative structure.
David Foster Wallace is a good writer. His ability to engage a reader with the most miniscule of carefully explained subjects is amazing (My only previous knowledge of his work was a short story carefully recounting the most tiresome facts of a focus group...It was also very long, and yet somehow I was completely transfixed...hmmm...come to think of it, that story didn't end satisfyingly either..but it's alot easier to take when you've only committed to 40 pages) Point being, I should have read on of his shorter works.
But I did it. It leaves me feeling like I am now a member of a club whose members can laugh heartily at Infinite Jest humor and understand erudite references on salon table talk. Whatever that means.