For those unaware, Infinite Jest is a novel by David Foster Wallace from 1996 whose 1100+ pages contain a story notorious for being willfully difficult in a postmodern sort of way (this novel comes with nearly 400 endnotes, some of which run for ten or so pages and have their own endnotes). It's long been though of as "that big book that some people put on their shelves just so they look smart." I've started and given up on it multiple times, but I've finally slayed this beast of a novel.
Reading this book is not unlike eating a cinderblock. It's an original experience that doesn't relent in its challenge, and the first bite goes down pretty much like the last bite. The story takes place mostly in Boston, specifically an upscale tennis academy/boarding school and a nearby halfway house for drug addicts of various kinds. The two locales are eventually linked in the narrative by the search, conducted by triple- and quadruple-agents for a film made by the former headmaster of the tennis academy that is apparently so compelling that it will render a viewer hopelessly, fatally addicted. However, the chronology is a purposeful mess, and many of the scenes of expository action are present only in semi-occluded references, which means that figuring out what's really going on is a puzzle of fairly tall order.
Since Wallace is very interested in being (maddeningly) detailed, you will, over the course of this novel, learn way more than you ever wanted to know about competitive junior's tennis and drug addiction, not to mention fictional US/Canadian relations, optics, and whatever else Wallace decides to include, often at very little prompting. The obsessive detail leads to the very real fact that a reader of this novel will need to be able to confront more than three pages in a row with nary a single paragraph break on a regular basis without cracking. It makes an already very long book even longer as it forces your brain to render all that data into a coherent scene.
The story takes place in the near future, which means the near future from a 1996 perspective, which actually means approximately now-ish. As such, he's included speculative elements about the course the nation could take; some fantastical, some all too possible. It provides him a way to sneak even more commentary into the book, a tendency that he indulges on basically every page. For example, there's a great twenty+ page scene that finds the high-schoolers at the academy playing "Eschaton," a game of their own invention that sits at the intersection of tennis, international diplomacy, and thermonuclear war.
Very few will attempt this novel, fewer will make it through, and fewer still will understand just what happened, but those who do will be rewarded, if rewarded is the correct word, with images and scenes that are totally indelible. It's a book of great density and Byzantine structure that will necessarily change how a person views both fiction and human observation, but whether or not it's worth it is entirely up to the reader, as is the decision as to whether the nested references to Hamlet and other such brain-intensive exercises are actually genius or merely overwrought. For my own part, I'm immensely glad I got to see the view from the top of this word-mountain, but it's unlikely I'll climb it again.
