Infinite Jest – the kind of book that, when it is mentioned, creates a hushed silence of mingled awe and fear in the room.
A brick of a tome of a journey of a boy and his harried growth in spurts of tennis-fueled tragedy. An obsessive, compulsively readable, unreadable contradiction. A hyperbolic time chamber of thrilling literary filibusters. Read it, sink into the groove of D. F. Wallace’s intricately patterned brain. The most addictive textbook you will ever encounter, and a world unto itself. Slide into conundrums of gorgeous prose, wander insensate through grungy halls of psychological torment. Love and hate it, and be healed.
Truly, Wallace performs heroic feats of coddling, pampering our desensitized temperaments, spoon-feeding our barely discernible IQs with his intellectual manna. A challenging, riotous, quietly menacing book, this is, and haunted as I am by its immense fortitude and undying spirit, I crack open the covers again and again, because no semblance of life, scrawled on paper, nudging aside other swan songs, has ever etched its penumbra on my psyche so deeply. What is the cherished meaning at its heart? What does it say, with a voice so loud, that our blasted ears frequently must mishear?
Discoveries abound within the wall-to-wall text prison of this book, hemming you in like the dripping bathroom stall. A search for sanity always starts beneath layers of hypocrisy, doubt and denial. It is a carnival of tortured souls inside a kaleidoscope of condensed American dreams. Are we, in fact, peering inside the unquestionably troubled author’s mentality, perceiving untrammeled vistas of psychological sewage, or is the vision skewed by infinite strata of posture, mimesis, synecdoche, and [insert 438 literary devices here]?
It is the hopeless descent into oblivion of a perpetual motion automaton, excavating the amorphous entertainments, unhallowed relationships, and self-deceptions which proliferate in every id.
The desiderata of our questing bodies, unmoored from familial bulwarks, magnetize us toward the nightmares we dread. Jest with me, you hideous Gargantua, infect me with your awful questions, delve out with speculative pick my slumbering and half-hidden dementia. Keep on commenting on the commentary of the narrative of the dream of the tennis match, which is simply a symbol, a corrupt government, an impotent conspiracy of avant-garde slackers, and a recursive, molten war memorial against the interior civil unrest we were all born with.
Read it, form an opinion, and if it still calls you, read it again, because it is worth your time, your patience and your money. For me, it is one of the endpoints of literature. For, what more do you need?
L. S. Popovich 
Agreed. But you might have commented on the 2021 look-backs re minorities, male white worldview, women, lgbt++,
handicapped persons et al….Maybe another time?
I will re-read this book, but so much has already been written about it, I don’t think I’ll enlarge my review, which was simply my impression.