Product Description

Somewhere in the not-so-distant future the residents of Ennet House, a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts, and students at the nearby Enfield Tennis Academy are ensnared in the search for the master copy of INFINITE JEST, a movie said to be so dangerously entertaining its viewers become entranced and expire in a state of catatonic bliss ...'Wallace's exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight, and he has deep things to say about the hollowness of contemporary American pleasure ...sentences and whole pages are marvels of cosmic concentration ...Wallace is a superb comedian of culture' James Wood, GUARDIAN

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6688 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1104 pages

Review
'A writer of virtuostic talents who can seemingly do anything' NEW YORK TIMES 'Wallace is a superb comedian of culture . . . his exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight' James Woods, GUARDIAN 'He induces the kind of laughter which, when read in bed with a sleeping partner, wakes said sleeping partner up . . . He's damn good' Nicholas Lezard, GUARDIAN 'One of the best books about addiction and recovery to appear in recent memory.' SUNDAY TIMES 'Funny, smart and perceptively written.' OBSERVER REVIEW 'Hugely ambitious... There are scenes of gruesome hilarity and some of genuine tragedy... The most relevant portrayal of American culture to appear in recent years, INFINITE JEST is fascinating, ridiculous and excrutiating.' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY '[A] remarkable satire on American entertainment and addiction... the book's mixture of maniacal inventiveness and comic brio gradually becomes quite an addiction itself... Foster Wallace has already won comparison with post-modern giants like Pynchon and Gaddis- he has even been tagged "the slacker's Proust"- but I think we can say, in hope as much as in praise that INFINITE JEST is a one-off.' DAILY TELEGRAPH

About the Author
David Foster Wallace is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Paris Review's Aga Kahn Prize and John Train Prize for Humour, and the O. Henry Award. He died in 2008.

Customer Reviews

fabulous
The proverbial Book-That-All-The-Fuss-Is-About in America, Infinite Jest hasn't made a big splash in England for some reason. Set in the near-future, the story zips back and forth between a dope-addicted teenage lexical genius in a Tennis academy in the suburbs of Boston, a recovering demerol addict at a half-way house down the road, a gang of murderous Quebec separatist terrorists in wheel chairs, and a film that is so addictively entertaining that once you've been exposed to it you lose all will to do anything else in life except watch it again and again until you die. You also get the experialist evil of ONANism (referring here to the Organization of North American Nations), the death of the TV industry at the hand of tongue-scraper ads, giant feral rats in New England, hyper-obsequious mothers, filmakers killing themselves by putting their heads in a microwave and a girl so devastatingly beautiful she's forced to wear a veil at all times. What's not to like?

But never fear: beneath all the whimsical plot-digressions and flippant deployment of words you don't understand, DFW has a big heart, and IJ never degenerates into the standard I'm-so-postmodern-I-can-just-sneer-and-not-care posture that makes so much contemporary prose detestable.

If the book has a theme, it's addiction...in the broad sense...not just to various drugs but also to entertainment, to sport, to sex, to nationalism. The neat thing is that the book itself is addictive...although it's not a plot-driven page turner in any traditional sense, once you get into it it's hard to put down.

You should know the book is very very long, has 200+ pages worth of bizarre footnotes, 3 dozen subplots, and a whole lot of generally fascinating characters. The pace can be sloooooooow, but you won't mind. Like I said, it became VERY trendy in America a few years back...it's now required reading for the terminally hip 20/30something intelligentsia. For once, the hype was warranted...if you trudge through the (admittedly impenetrable) first 200 pages, you'll be hooked.

Oh and, I don't care how lexically gifted you think you are, you have to read IJ with a dictionary at your side.

Like wading through champagne jelly
Cor! I would like to tell you that this book is all the things that these other reviewers say it is - amazing, brilliant, flabergasting etc. Well, it is. However, after pushing through David Foster Wallace's interminable digressions and massively complex clauses, sub clauses, sub sub clauses etc, the brilliance could be said to have been dulled somewhat. Nevertheless, It's still a top-notch piece of boundary-pushing fiction, a brain-pulsingly engaging read, and a mad piece of food for thought. It would've got five stars if I could have persuaded any of my friends to read it too. Those slackers!

Read it. It'll do your brain good.

Reading... démodé?
I'm sitting in front of the computer trying to tell people that if they like not only reading but also being surprised, appalled, flabbergasted, astonished, stunned, intrigued, shocked, forever-amazed,novelicized, anti-stultified, dictionary-bound, positively carried-away, mentally refreshed, intellectually provoked, immensely challenged, highly stimulated, and sturdinesslessly motivated, this is THE book for them. Thanks, David