Infinite Jest 1996 Literature

David Foster Wallace

This¹ book² is³ good⁴ lol⁵ ¹okay. where do I begin. uh. Infinite Jest might be the most important novel of the 80s-90s. Man this thing is good. Wallace's vision of postmodernism is absolutely wonderful, Infinite Jest is technically a very dark book, however it's not transgressive or evil or edgy or over-the-top, no, it feels closer to a tragicomedy than the black comedy label it's typically given. ²One of my favorite sections in all of literature comes from this book, it's the part where DFW just lists out things you might learn in rehab. One of the most beautiful, funny, sad, touching, and brilliant things I've ever read. ³This book is a thousand pages, so if I have any complaints, it's that there are a lot of things you'll have to be on board with in order to enjoy it fully. Like, I personally really did not care about the ONAN stuff or the parts of the ending that discuss Gately's personal history (although I did like reading about Gately himself). This book also ends with more than a couple loose ends that aren't exactly fully resolved, but I think with a book that's supposed to kind of have a slice-of-life appeal to it, I can let it slide for the most part. ⁴Infinite Jest is kind of structureless. However, unlike a book like Confederacy of Dunces where all of the loose ends culminate in the ending, this book's biggest event is in like the 600s and the book never really gets more intense than that other than the hal stuff at the very end. ⁵After reading, I think I fully understand why people are so obsessed with this book and why poser hipsters all pretended to have read it back in the 2000s. I guess now I'll be reading Broom of the SYstem and the Pale King lol