You know that you're committing to something big and important when you decide to read IJ. I'm doing it for the Infinite Summer 2009 along with hundreds of others around the world. It helps to have a community of people to read this amazing book with. It's a daunting task, but worth it. I'm not even half way in, but I know it'll be worth the time and sore arms (cause it weighs a few pounds). It's a work of genius that should not be skipped- how many of those exist from the past 20 years?

I've read non-conventional fiction for years. This is the first time that I have felt that the author was giving me the finger and snickering because I was naive enough to think that Infinite Jest was a serious literary effort

Jim Icard

I'm maybe a third of the way through Infinite Jest. This is the first time, as a fiction reader, that I've needed two bookmarks: One for the text, and one for the footnotes. I don't mind, because reading IJ is an exercise in some new kind of body fiction, where I don't lose myself in the book, even during the best parts. I stay aware of myself. To wit: In one voluminous footnote (detailing the details of a phone conversation between two brothers), the poet Emily Dickinson's meter is mentioned. And then, as is DFW's style, maximalized, massaged, and obsessed upon. As I began to read this Dickinson tangent, I remarked silently and almost subconsciously to myself that I had visited the Dickinson homestead in Amherst a few weeks ago, and learned that many of her poems can be spoken/sung to the rhythm of "The Yellow Rose of Texas."
A few paragraphs later, the text of Infinite Jest observed the same thing. Huh!
That said, Infinite Jest can best be described as a story about a tennis academy, the family that runs said academy, and the people who live in and around the academy. Which happens to be just west of Boston in a possibly fictional hamlet (Enfield) that would be near the unfictional Allston, Watertown, and/or Newton. If you know this area -- DFW apparently did -- and the Amherst of Dickinson and Amherst College (the latter being DFW's alma mater), then you already are in Infinite Jest.
DFW describes boredom and drug overdosing/withdrawal -- two very maximal experiences -- with humor and precision.
Glad I'm in this one.

To read Infinite Jest (IJ) is to wander lost, but transfixed in a sprawling metropolis of characters, history and events. It is a complicated novel, its footnotes have footnotes. I was hooked -- the right word in a novel in which addiction plays a prominent role - in the opening scene. In that scene, Hal Incandenza is being interviewed by Deans and assorted university administrators, justifiably curious about a gifted tennis player, attending and residing at the Enfield Tennis Academy, who, among other attributes, has "verbal scores that are just quite a bit closer to zero than we're comfortable with..." "I am," Hal notes, "surrounded by heads and bodies." Fittingly, nearly 1,000 pages later, Don Gately, a character increasingly important as the novel draws to a close, has the feeling that he is less "high than disembodied...His head left his shoulders."

Finding in this massive novel a single, dominant lesson or message or theme or what have you is at once too much and too little to hope for. In IJ, David Foster Wallace (DFW) distorts time by having it subsidized by corporations (Year of the Whopper); alters geo-political space by merging North America into a single entity; twists matter through an array of physically and/or psychologically distorted characters. The principal characters, and a colorful array of lesser characters in IJ, whether addicted or in recovery, are fundamentally insecure about identity and insatiable in their pursuit of it. After all, time now has identity, why shouldn't they? And how do they know when they are there? "We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe." That dangling Hamlet-like doubt -- that "maybe" -- calls into question not the quest per se, but its effects -- the consequences of surrendering oneself, of being swept away that await the wandering souls at the end of their journey. This is why the film Infinite Jest, also known as "the Entertainment," created by the family founder, a Deity of sorts in this novel, James Incandenza [I.J. reversed] is so sought after. The effect of that film is to leave its viewers dead, or what amounts to the same thing in IJ, wanting for nothing else. You find identity by losing yourself.

This novel consumes the most voracious of readers. Don't expect a neat, linear sequence of events. Don't expect terms to be defined before they are employed. Take this novel one page at a time, not unlike the AA mantra, itself a prominent subject addressed in this book. At last, a game that's worth the candle.

forget what you read about an "irresistible movie" or other plot synopses. This book is about addiction. period. I did enjoy reading it, although at times I think Wallace is quite cruel in his depictions of people. Reading it now, in 2009, post-his suicide, I may read more pain in to it than was there when he wrote it; but to me his depression and issues are clearly there on the page.

But basically, it's about addiction...

Anne Brock