Infinite Jest

⚖The case for it

"I have read it a total of seven times," one reader opens, which is the strangest and truest praise this book gets: people finish a thousand pages and start over. The anchor is Gately; "I need more Don Gately" is a recurring refrain, a burglar turned halfway-house staffer carrying the most moving material in nineties fiction. The comedy holds up its half: "there is something hysterical on nearly every page," and the Eschaton war game, teenagers running a nuclear exchange with tennis balls and a hand-computed strike map, is routinely named a hands-down favorite. The addiction writing is precise and unglamorous, from someone who plainly sat in the rooms. The endnotes force two reading planes at once. The reputation says forbidding; the rereaders keep saying funny, profoundly moving, and for many, life-altering.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

"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 honest librarian

22h

honest hours

31

sittings