"Infinite Jest is probably a novel that more people have heard of than have actually read. The 1,000 page-plus opus - that oscillates between a tennis academy, a halfway house, and the hunt for a lethally entertaining videotape, all with a dizzying number of footnotes for good measure - has, in the three decades since it was first published, become something of a meme; a shorthand for the kind of book that everybody talks about and that nobody has read."
"Wallace was a man who wrote obsessively about his obsessions, whether in short stories like The Depressed Person, or his final novel, the posthumous and unfinished The Pale King, about boredom and beauty for characters working for the IRS in Peoria, Illinois in 1985 (the book even contains experimental cameo by the man himself in the fourth-wall-breaking, tongue-in-cheek Author's Foreword - a foreword that doesn't appear until over 60 pages into the book)."
Infinite Jest is a 1,000-page novel alternating among a tennis academy, a halfway house, and the hunt for a lethally entertaining videotape, featuring a dizzying number of footnotes. The book became a cultural shorthand for daunting, widely talked-about literature and cast a large shadow over David Foster Wallace. Wallace wrote obsessively about psychological and social obsessions and experimented with form and voice, evident in The Pale King's unfinished portrayal of boredom and beauty among IRS employees. His nonfiction applied meticulous wonder to subjects like cruise ships, tennis, dictionaries, and David Lynch. Infinite Jest presciently imagined 21st-century media technologies and corporate time-subsidies, centering on an irresistible filmed Entertainment.
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