Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Nearly a decade after its first publication, David Foster Wallace's novel "Infinite Jest" remains a literary ink-blot test. With its 1,079 pages (including nearly 400 footnotes), and its fondness for gags, drugs, cultural theory, recent US popular culture, scientific minutae, and latinate vocabulary, the novel invariably divides readers on matters of literary technique and the question of Wallace's literary talent. I tend to believe the author's stylistic pyrotechnics are not bright enough to hide the comparatively dull substance of his writing; but I can't dismiss Wallace as a literary artist. "Infinite Jest" is neither the Next Big Thing (except for the size of the tome itself), nor does it signal the beginning of the end of American letters, as Dale Peck et al seem to believe. The novel's tragic flaw is its lack of emotion depth. Wallace seems more interested in inventing acronyms and an "apres" filmography than in rendering human beings. And while his drawing adolescent tennis phenoms in the terms of popular psychology and millenial technological frenzy rings true, his doing so with the mostly lower-class urbanite residents of a halfway house does not. Focusing on such young, shallow characters violates what might be the only rule for compelling fiction: there has to be something at stake in the story. You may not forget Hal Incandenza, the teenage tennis and linguistic prodigy who is as close to a protagonist as this novel offers; but it is this implausibly combination of natural gifts, not Wallace's rendering of character or of his story itself, that make the eiditic Hal memorable. Hal's lower-class counterpart, a thirtyish petty thug named Don Gately, recovering in a Boston-area halfway house, is more intriguing for the difficulty of his situation. But Wallace presents Gately as lacking self-awareness to a degree that kills whatever sympathy readers might otherwise hold for him. Wallace's experimental style does not disguise the essential weakness of his writing here either. Few of the narratives coalesce, and it is often difficult to imagine why editors did not simply send certain passages off to the exosphere. The apparently arbitrary chronology works against any sort of pace Wallace might have established. And, though the novel wisely ends on an ambiguous note, this note is frustratingly oblique. It's difficult to imagine why a writer of Wallace's blinding intellectual gifts and erudition would offer up a cheap metafictional trick as the denoument of his magnum opus. "Infinte Jest" feels like it should have ended at least 500 pages earlier, and yet it hasn't earned an ending. Wallace should be commended for his attempt to add intellectual depth to modern American fiction without sacrificing the traditional literary devices of characterization and narrative, and to dramatize the effects on the consciousness, and the conscience, of our hydra-headed consumerism. But the gap between a laundry list of social maladies and a compelling novel is all but infinite.