Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest • David Foster Wallace

⭑ 7.7 Stars

Not surprisingly, this was an incredibly challenging book for me to rate. As Dave Eggers so poignantly articulates in the prelude, I fall neatly into the category of individual that has attempted and failed to get through this mind-numbingly long novel on multiple occasions throughout my twenties, only to finally accomplish the task after several years apart and with an odd inspiration to do so in my thirties. Regardless of how he successfully summarized the archetype of the reader, I did in fact make another attempt and was finally successful in completing this 1,400+ page behemoth, which has been reviewed more times than the number of individual words in it, so instead of sharing my thoughts on the plot itself, I'll share with you how I'm feeling now that I've finally closed the back cover.

Perhaps with intention, I left the book feeling a sense of loss. Because it’s so long, I systematically created a sort of rhythm to my digestion of the dense narrative, consuming reasonable portions at a time, creating a habit that has left me with an odd desire, albeit small, to simply continue the practice, despite my completing the book. It's as if Foster Wallace intentionally wrote Infinite Jest in a manner that he knew would create such a feeling. In reading, I found myself almost entranced by the artistic balance of prose - enduring periods of excruciating detail, because at climaxing moments of pure mental exhaustion, a pleasurable scene of succinct plot progression would rope me back in. The ebb and flow of this pattern was often so well timed that the novel itself mirrors the primary arch within it, itself an ode to the very title on the cover - I feel programmed to continue reading, repetitively ad infinitum.