I adore compression and spareness, and Infinite Jest, finished at 7:29PM on 11-16-25, is bloated and prolix. It tells you something that it’s a novel with footnotes. Hundreds of them. During the periods when I ground my teeth, it tracked as a firehose of garrulity, by turns prissy, numbing, assaultive, revolting. Other times darkly and truly funny. (Humor cures lots of ills.) The novel can touch, amuse and grip when it chooses.
David Foster Wallace had (the past tense saddens me) the phrase-making inventiveness and fecundity of a god. His lexicon is cavernous, his wit, um, infinite. A perennially intoxicated woman is termed a “sexual papoose.” A minor character looks “as if his hair had grown his head.”
There are jaunty, jocose, sardonic, devilishly dark set pieces around chemical dependency — demonically detailed deep dives into the arcana and experiential murk of the thing, soaked in clinical savvy and street jargon, conveyed in the voicings of characters that are drawn and overdrawn with cellular exactitude, machined to screamingly minute, reiterative, recursive tolerances.
Approaching the end, after days of intermittent listening, sometimes distractedly, I had a sense that a general modifier applicable to the novel could be the term “joyless.” For all the brilliance and vivacity and brute spunk and hip ennui that it flaunts and flashes, I detected little if any joie de vivre. Which is a stupid thing to say, because who contends that novels are meant to be bowls of cherries? What do I even mean?
Maybe Jest is a gargantuan poem, showing rather than telling. What’s it about? comes easily to poetry.
I’m just a reader, but Dwight Garner is a critic. I stumbled last night upon his review of David Szalay’s novel Flesh, the new Booker winner. His conclusion about Flesh captures a large part of how I feel about Infinite Jest:
I admired this book from front to back without ever quite liking it, without ever quite giving in to it. Sometimes those are the ones you itch to read again. Sometimes once is more than enough.
***
Postscript: On the open road I received a speeding ticket while listening to Jest on my noise-canceling headphones. The officer clocked me at 90, speed limit 70. I didn’t pull over toot sweet, to his chagrin. He had run his siren and I didn’t hear it, he said. “You were distracted, sir,” he said.
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
infinite jest has been on my radar, i hope to give it a closer look someday. as of late ive been immersed in danielewski’s recent “tom’s crossing”. its real good. literature’s so sick
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Thanks for dropping by. I read a review of “Tom’s Crossing,” and it looks like another big novel with lots to offer. Your comment about literature is interesting. Say more? I’ve been out of touch with fiction, hoping Audible will help me reconnect. Best regards.
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mm, gladly ^^ ive been fascinated by danielewski’s work ever since i checked out “house of leaves”, really excellent bit of ergodic horror and metafiction. his physical works are pretty gargantuan and best read rather than listened to i think – he plays around with typography a lot to create some really memorable & powerful effects; it cant really be conveyed with audio. if youd want a taste without committing to a 800-or-1200ish word novel i would recommend the digital offerings from his website! “love is not a flame” comes to mind, its brief but very stunning and special
i might not be the best person to ask about contemporary fiction as ive been exploring various classics and foundational works to get a better understanding of what gets made today.. hoping to get into pynchon soon! and joyce! ulysses is staring at me from my shelf… some melville and dostoyevsky and gogol too… my backlog grows more than it shrinks :p
older stuff aside though i can also say that laszlo krasznohorkai writes some good stuff, won the nobel prize this year if i recall correctly, though id heard about him prior. “satantango” is very cool from what id heard and ive been meaning to sit down with the ebook sometime. “melancholy of resistance” is another intriguing work. im pretty sure many of his books have been turned into films by hungarian director bela tarr; if my memory serves me right the satantango one is over 7 hours long, i definitely want to check it out at some point -w-
i hope you find something useful in this answer. appreciate the reply; best regards to you as well!
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Great answer! Your backlog is impressive. We coincide on Pynchon, among others. “Gravity’s Rainbow” is my likely next big target on Audible, when I get a new credit for purchasing. I read “Ulysses” years back, would read it again willingly. I have a pentup appetite for some major works, both classic (Melville, James) and contemporary. Maybe especially the latter. I concede listening isn’t an ideal way to read, but it’s better than nothing. Studious reading consumes most of my bandwidth for looking at print. When I’m doing manual things it seems the listening part of my brain is available to story telling. It’s an experiment in progress. I’m hoping that a collateral gain might be the sharpening of my listening skills.
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I am not sure if I am up for Infinite Jest but I have learned a lot from your post and I reckon your drawing beautifully captures your response to it.
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Thanks, Sue. Cheers and regards!
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