Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book is wandering, self-indulgent, overwritten, and gives ample evidence that the academics and literati are captivated by the deranged workings of a damaged mind (Wallace struggled with addictions and mental illness and killed himself a couple years after Infinite Jest was published). The author is highly imitative of Pynchon's Gravitiy's Rainbow without demonstrating any of the structured discipline that went into GR's creation (the internal references to Hamlet are more or less ad hoc and not followed through). The author himself admitted to a friend that IJ didn't really have a conclusion. So if you manage to finish all 1100 pages of what I can only term "closet writing", the jest is certainly on you. The only virtue possed by this sham "novel", which is amply spiced with both homophobia and misogyny, is that it provides well nigh "infinite" fodder for tenure-producing critical essays and pat-oneself-on-the-back literary reviews. It's telling that the critics who originally panned the work have since followed the stampede toward literary canonization of the book: they know their buttered side from the dry. Possibly the most damning aspect of the book is the disrespect the author shows the reader. He was obvoiusly of the opinion that he could write anything, and with the help of a lexically dazzled publisher and an intensive PR campaign, produce a "classic". It's a classic, all right. But not the kind the author (perhaps I should best term him a "typist"), critics, and English professors would have you believe it is.