Infinite Jest
A tennis academy, a halfway house, and a lethally entertaining film. Wallace published it in 1996: 1,079 pages including 388 endnotes. The novel of addiction, entertainment, and loneliness that defined a generation of American readers. Whether it rewards the commitment is still debated. The commitment itself became the point.
"The footnotes have footnotes." That is a factual report, not a joke, and it is where the trouble starts: hold three bookmarks for a thousand pages in which almost nothing resolves, plotlines building for hundreds of pages and simply stopping. "My heart began to sink from the very first page," one reader says; bailouts cluster in the first fifty. The prose reads to detractors as "trying way too hard to be funny," vocabulary performed rather than used, and "the lack of character development" is the structural complaint underneath: people stay sealed in their own heads for a decade of story without one relationship maturing. "IJ is a dogs breakfast," says one review, and the casual slurs and cartoonish sexual violence have aged worst of all.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
