Reader Score
71%
71% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 11 reviews on
Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.
Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.
"The next step in fiction...Edgy, accurate, and darkly witty...Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis. Think." --Sven Birkerts, The Atlantic
"That’s probably my favorite book I’ve ever read. There’s a problem with adapting it now, which is that the book was, so it came out in ’96, he wrote it over the eight years prior, and the book imagines a very near future. It’s almost a little Black Mirror-y, if you’ve seen that show."
Writer/Film critic: @ebertvoices, @filmcomment, @criterion, NY Times | @NYFCC | TCB!
It's David Foster Wallace's birthday. Back in the day when I had a biweekly column at @FilmComment (RIP), I wrote about the dad's drunken bitter admiring monologue about Marlon Brando in INFINITE JEST. Sooo illuminating. https://t.co/ou33jn1iQH