Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace: ***3/4

Massive, fascinating, brilliant. I loved this book. It reminded me of Carl Hiaasen's novels, but it's significantly more intellectual. There are tons of well fleshed-out characters (not hard considering the 1100 pages), maybe 30 or more that are given significant detail. Like a lot of books, this one follows multiple storylines for different characters (as it would have to for this many people), but somehow Wallace makes sense of it all. With its size, scope, hijinks, etc., the book is really an impressive achievement, but that's not why it's so enjoyable. Ultimately, the characters and the situations are simply fascinating, and the satire of American culture is hysterical and right on.

I'm having a hard time thinking about what to say without giving away the experience of reading it. And really, the book is the reading experience. It's not just a collection of stories and facts and characters and situations. In and of itself this book is American culture, hysterically. It doesn't just talk about it. Somehow the book embodies exactly the ideas Wallace presents. And the experience of reading this behemoth is the point. It has to be this big to work. It has to have more than 180 pages of ridiculous footnotes. It has to have pages and pages that list seemingly worthless facts in these footnotes. And I had to read these lists. I needed to reference the footnotes to really experience it. This probably doens't make a lot of sense, but it was for me wonderful, and will more than anything else remind me of the fall of 1999, when I had just moved to Buffalo and was beginning the Ph.D. program in composition there. I read for a couple of hours a day and most of saturday and sunday for a whole month. And I loved it.

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the composer John Cage, who said: "Unless we go to extremes, we won't get anywhere." Wallace goes to extremes in this book. From the situations to the characters to the realization of the book itself, I can't think of any thing that is more extreme, and that's in large part what he's saying about American culture. It's so much more than worth the effort.
(fall 1999)

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