I'd been looking forward to reading Infinite Jest for a while, and the recent India trip seemed a perfect opportunity to finally get stuck in. Perhaps the most striking thing about the novel (after the obvious fact of its massive length) is its generosity - in its abundance of ideas and connections (and words), in its willingness to reiterate and return to connections and linkages in case they were missed when first mentioned, in the many brands of humour that are sprinkled throughout, in the breadth of its thematic coverage, and in the way that it treats its characters and respects their essential humanity in a way that DeLillo and Pynchon, two obvious points of reference for DFW, often don't.
Some of the book's funniest passages involve two characters ostensibly having a conversation but in fact barely if at all engaging with each other, so that what instead emerges is effectively two fragmented, almost surreally juxtaposed monologues; as with many, or indeed perhaps all, of the book's comic devices, it also serves a deeper purpose, dramatising the failures of connection and communication that litter Wallace's post-contemporary America. A satire, a serious-minded examination of modern cultures of addiction, entertainment and (over-)achievement, a remarkably disciplined sprawl, paradoxically highly readable while deliberately self-disruptive, itself a consummate entertainment with innumerable stings in the tail, Infinite Jest is really something.
