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"Infinite Jest"

By David Foster Wallace

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Reviews, Articles, & Miscellany

• Sven Birkerts's review from the February 1996 issue of the Atlantic Monthly was one of the earliest appraisals of Infinite Jest and it created quite a bit of excitement for the novel. Birkerts slings around alot of faux postmodern academic lingo, and the review has an overheated and breathless quality about it, but it is essential reading.
  
  
• Rather ecstatic Newsweek review (2.12.96 ) by David Gates. Includes a brief interview with Wallace. (Gates is himself an accomplished novelist. Jernigan (1991), a dark comic take on male mid-life dissolution, is well worth a look.)
  
  
• Oft-quoted Newsday review (2.12.96) by Dan Cryer.
  
  
• Very astute review from the online BookPage site, written by Erich Strom (2.96).
  
  
• Michiko Kakutani's review from the New York Times (2.13.96). Reserved in its praise, but also more than a little awe-struck. The attempt at a plot-summary is hilarious in its own right. (See the Salon interview below for Wallace's remarks regarding the "very charming Japanese lady from the New York Times....")
  
  
• So-so review by Time magazine's R.Z. Sheppard (2.19.96), who finds Wallace's jokes tiresome. Actually, the sidebar story about Wallace proofreading his galleys is more interesting than the review itself.
  
  
• Entertaining Chicago Tribune author profile (2.23.96) by Mark Caro. Discusses buzz surrounding the novel, and includes quotes from Wallace, as well as from faculty & associates at ISU.
  
  
• Poorly written review by has-been Jay McInerney in the New York Times Book Review (3.6.96). McInerney apparently feels the need to piss all over Wallace, probably in a misguided attempt to defuse the hype-sters who are labelling Wallace as the "next McInerney." Sadly, Mr. Bright Lights doesn't seem to "get" Wallace's novel.
  
  
• Enthusiastic review in The Boston Phoenix (Mar. 21-28 issue) by Anne Marie Donahue. Contains yet another tongue-tied attempt at a plot summary.
  
  
• Boston Phoenix interview with Wallace, also by Anne Marie Donahue, and from the same Mar 21-28 issue as her review of Infinite Jest. Wallace is eloquent on the topics of mainstream vs. avant-garde fiction, and reader expectations vis-à-vis narrative "resolution." Helps point up the literary intolerance of reviewers like Jacob Levich. (See two bullets down.)
  
  
• Entertainment Weekly "critic" Lisa Schwarzbaum was so intimidated by the book's sheer heft that she refused to even read it! Her "review" is essentially an attack on the hype and the marketing.
  
  
• Odd little review by Jacob Levich, who was so unhappy with what he perceived as the novel's lack of a satisfying resolution that he brands it a case of "literary coitus interruptus." The review is from the online TV Guide Entertainment Network. 'Nuf said.
  
  
• Standard-issue New York Times Magazine (3.24.96) "kultur" piece on Wallace and how he's handling sudden success. Journalist Frank Bruni's tone is off-putting and smug, but the article does its job in unnearthing wonderfully odd biographical details about Wallace. (The weirdest aside is Bruni's discovery of the teeth-whitener toothpaste and the acne medicine in Wallace's bathroom medicine cabinet.)
  
  
• Interesting and irreverent piece from Hungrey Mind Review by Michael Tortorello (early 96). Distinctive for Tortorello's noting specific similarities between Wallace's work and the novels of Don DiLillo.
  
  
• Outstanding interview with Wallace conducted by Laura Miller for Salon online journal in March, 1996. Wallace talks about the novel's editing. He also is generous in discussing literary influences and his contemporaries.
  
  
• Review by Kathleen Scheiner from the University of Iowa's student newspaper The Daily Iowan (3.27.96). Positive in tone, with a better-than-average attempt at a plot summary. Favorite overwrought and impenetrable sentence: "Wallace eviscerates the most despicable, and at times hilarious, parts of our current culture and drapes a future world with vaguely recognizable glimmers of its decoration."
  
  
• Review by Rob Fellman from the College Hill Independent (4.11.96) published by Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. This is another smart and breezy appraisal from a smart and breezy college student, who seems equally at home with Umberto Eco or Stephen King. Favorite passage from the review: "Wallace waxes Romantic (that's Romantic with a capital 'R') about AA at times, which can be a bit disturbing since it made me vaguely want to become an alcoholic just so I could come back from the brink. Maybe I'm just impressionable; I wanted to become a drunk after seeing Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas."
  
  
• Pretty good interview with Wallace conducted by Valerie Stivers for Stim online journal, which was apparently posted in May, 96. Of particular interest are Wallace's refutations concerning aspects of Sven Birkerts's Atlantic Monthly review.
  
  
• Stim's online site has three RealAudio recordings of Wallace reading from Infinite Jest at a New York bookstore, totaling about 35 minutes.
  
  
• Funny and charming online chat with Wallace sponsored by WORD e-zine on May 17, 1996. Showcases a playful and relaxed DFW, no doubt due to his feeling more at ease with a computer keyboard than a face-to-face interview. The questions and online exchanges between the participants are equally entertaining.
  
  
• Awed review by a fellow fiction writer, David McLean, in the Boston Book Review.
  
  
• QPB talks to David Foster Wallace (September, 1996). True miscellany, this is a brief, nearly inane "interview" with Wallace to hype the Quality Paperback Bookclub's edition of the novel, which they are trumpeting as "coolest book of the year."
  
  
• Review by Daley Haggar from the Fall '96 issue of the Harvard Advocate. Haggar is a fearless name-dropper -- Eco, Jameson, Lacan -- but somehow the lingo never seems gratuitous. Really one of the more intelligent assessments of the novel.
  
  
• In November of '96, Wallace was awarded $50,000 from the Lannan Foundation, primarily for his work on "Infinite Jest," which the foundation noted had been "praised for its brilliance, humor, ambition and imaginative daring."
  
  
• Michiko Kakutani's review (2.4.97) of DFW's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a marvelous and idiosyncratic collection of previously published essays and magazine articles. Many of the pieces were expanded for the book edition, in what Wallace has described as a "director's cut." Kakutani's review reflects the now accepted mainstream critical approach to DFW, praising his literary gifts, and then scolding: "...like Infinite Jest, the book is sorely in need of some editing..."
  
  
• DFW began a second tour in February, 1997, to promote his book of essays. (Published simultaneously with a trade paperback edition of Infinite Jest.) He read at Canterbury Booksellers in Madison, Wisconsin on Feb. 13. The week before the reading, music/literary critic Tom Laskin interviewed Wallace by telephone for Madison's Isthmus, a city weekly.
  
  
• The Wisconsin State Journal dispatched their religion writer & spy-novel reviewer William R. Wineke to Madison's Sheraton Inn to interview DFW. Wineke mentions Wallace as the author of Infinite Jest and "other novels" [sic]. A ridiculous article, which is nothing out of the ordinary for the State Journal. Also makes for the third time I've heard Wallace tell his anecdote beginning, "I told my publisher I wouldn't do a paperback tour....."
  
  
• There are many reasons to boycott the crass and commercial website Little, Brown & Company has concocted around their Infinite Jest juggernaut [http://www.infinitejest.com/], not the least of which is its tacky design and content. For me, personally, it's the "download an Infinite Jest screensaver" come-on that completely ignores Macintosh users in favor of Win-Doze plodders. That said, the website does contain the very funny mini-essay, "David Foster Wallace talks about writing Infinite Jest."
  
  
• Journalist David Wiley's interview with DFW (2.27.97) during the St. Paul, MN leg of the Supposedly Fun Thing tour. Simply one of the best Wallace interviews in print. He takes a couple of pot-shots at Pynchon, directed in particular at Vineland.
  
  
• Interesting article by David Wiley that accompanies the above interview in the Minnesota Daily.
  
  
• Zachary Chouteau's interview with Wallace for the American Booksellers Association (3.97). Lots of interesting small talk here, including DFW's favorite bookstore in the U.S. (Elliott Bay in Seattle), the Pynchon business ("The Pynchon thing really annoys me...I get tired of it, pissed off by it."), and this great childhood memory: "...my parents really like to read, and a lot of my memories of growing up are lying around with opera on the stereo and reading."
  
  
• Novelist Richard Stern's very positive and strong review of Supposedly Fun Thing for the Chicago Tribune (3.9.97). Stern finds common ground between Wallace's Illinois State Fair piece and a Saul Bellow essay from 1957, which is a beautiful cross-generational literary compliment. Also, Stern praises DFW's essay on tennis player Michael Joyce as "the best essay I've read on professional tennis."
  
  
• Laura Miller's review of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again from the New York Times Book Review (3.16.97). As her above Salon interview with Wallace demonstrates, Laura Miller can be a perceptive critic. Here, however, she suggests that the essays in Supposedly Fun Thing succeed more effectively than Infinite Jest in presenting DFW's "ardent and sincere side." I'm not convinced that's true, but even if it were, so what? More troubling is Salon's questionable affiliation with Little, Brown & Company's DFW website. The website's only link to an outside page is to Salon's DFW interview conducted by....Laura Miller.
  
  
• Wallace's appearance on PBS television's Charlie Rose Show (3.27.97) is not without interest. DFW is clearly uncomfortable with the medium, however, and you can sense him trying to edit and rewrite his remarks while he's talking. Charlie Rose is a pretty good, if scatter-shot interviewer. I thought there was far too much talk about David Lynch. Also, Wallace here makes a couple of sexist remarks that one hopes are mere momentary lapses of reason, to wit: [in regards to Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven] "I don't know a single female who likes the film....[F]emales think, 'Western? It stinks'"; and this totally out-of-nowhere zinger: "Feminists are always saying this. Feminists are saying white males say, 'Okay, I'm going to sit down and write this enormous book and impose my phallus on the consciousness of the world.'"
  
  
• Michael Feldman's comedy-quiz radio program Whad'ya Know? (4.5.97) would seem at first a most unlikely venue for a David Foster Wallace interview. But, in fact, Feldman's witty smartypants patter brings out the jokester and the one-upsmanship in Wallace. DFW is very sly and funny here. Biggest revelation: Wallace has finally seen Lynch's Lost Highway, which he dismisses as "kind of a dink."
  
  
• Interview and profile from Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail (4.29.97), by journalist Doug Saunders. This piece is very well crafted, with a priceless and hilarious description of Wallace chewing tobacco during the interview and hawking into a teacup at the Founder's Club in Toronto's SkyDome stadium. (Thanks to Saunders for posting a copy of the article online at Wallace-l@waste.org.)
  
  
• Michael Silverblatt interviewed Wallace on KCRW-FM in Santa Monica (5.15.97) for the radio program Bookworm. This is an outstanding interview. Silverblatt's questions are sharp and Wallace seems more relaxed and at ease than in most of these forums. Also contains some interesting conversation pertaining to David Markson's near-classic novel Wittgenstein's Mistress, which is much admired by both Wallace and Silverblatt.
  
  
• A brief and none-too-illuminating profile of Wallace was broadcast on NPR's Weekend Sunday program (5.18.97). Perhaps its most distinguishing aspect is the opportunity to witness DFW growing ever more ill-tempered over the Pynchon comparisons: "The P- guy comes into mind -- I won't even say his name -- whom I was very interested in in college, but am just not that interested in anymore." (Thanks to K. J. Turner for obtaining the transcript and sharing it with the wallace-l@waste.org discussion group, where I snagged a copy.)
  
  
• Wallace was awarded a prestigious $230,000 "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation on June 16, 1997. He was one of 23 recipients, with individual grants ranging from $190,000 to $375,000, on which basis Wallace would classify as only a "low mid-range" genius.
  
  
• Wallace's scorched-earth attack on John Updike's latest, Toward the End of Time, in the October 13, 1997 edition of the New York Observer is pure agitprop, signaling Wallace's arrival as a Maileresque pugilist in the dumbed-down lit-crit mainstream. Of Updike's protagonist, Wallace remarks: "But it never once occurs to him that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole." This isn't critical thinking; it's merely dyspeptic blurbism. The Observer gleefully sought to keep the bitches brew a' boiling, however, with a similar article by DFW lapdog Sven Birkerts -- who bludgeons Updike's contemporaries Bellow, Mailer, and Roth. Finally, Anne Roiphe is brought in to cool things down as a sort of deus ex maternal scold: "What we really have here is the primitive competitiveness of males who want to urinate on the books placed on the front tables of Barnes & Noble in order to signify territorial ownership."
  
  
• My own review of Infinite Jest from the Cambridge Book Review, winter '97 - '98.
  
  
• Back on another book tour, this time for the paperback release of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Wallace was interviewed by Tom Scocca of the Boston Phoenix (February 19 - 26, 1998 issue). DFW is more seasoned and relaxed than during his previous Phoenix interview two years ago for Infinite Jest. In fact, he's a regular schmoozer these days, and there are some wonderful anecdotes here, including this great pre-Infinite Jest tale: "I remember giving a reading at a bookstore in Harvard Square. It was December '91, and Harper's had this whole idea that they were going to put on these readings. The Harper's PR person came to Boston, and I came and I gave a reading, and nobody showed up. There was a snowstorm, but the basic point is, nobody showed up. So me and the PR guy went out and ate, like, three pieces of cake each and apologized to each other for three hours."
  
  
• Continuing his paperback tour for A Supposedly Fun Thing... Wallace is interviewed by Chris O'Connor and Rob Elder in the March '98 issue of the Oregon Voice, a publication of the University of Oregon. Particularly interesting for Wallace's remarks on the uneasy alliance between authors & publishers, and authors & media.
  
  
• Melpomene Whitehead's remarkable essay of eroticized hagiography explains why David Foster Wallace is "the only author who can strum my magic twanger." Part hilarious homage to Wallace's footnoted writing style, the essay also offers up funny/scary autobiographical shards from Whitehead's life. Appears in E-rupture webzine.
  
  
• Check out the David Foster Wallace website created by Nick Maniatis in Australia. The site is beautifully designed and the information is frequently updated. Nick offers a considerable amount of substantive and original material concerning Wallace and his work. I also owe Nick a big thanks for the numerous links he provides to my own DFW page.
  
  
• A very useful IJ textual tool is offered by Steve Russillo on his Infinite Jest page -- an Endnote Tag Finder. Anyone who has spent time with the novel's endnotes at the back of the book has quickly discovered that there's no easy way of using the index to refer back to the text: you can't discover from the endnote itself where in the novel the endnote reference is. Russillo solves this problem for all of us by referencing the index. Extremely helpful.
  
  
• At long last a wiki for Infinite Jest, courtesy of Tim Ware.

The DFW Archive

• Michiko Kakutani's review of The Broom of the System (12.27.86) from the New York Times. Yes, here she is ten years ago predictably sprinkling Wallace with equal parts praise and damnation. But in the end: "The problem is that pretension often substitutes for real intelligence, wordiness for eloquence."
  
  
• Caryn James's review of The Broom of the System (3.1.87) from the New York Times Book Review. More insightful than Kakutani, James points up the Wittgenstein connection and seems to "get" the jokes. Also includes a brief excerpt from the novel showcasing the "Hi, Bob!" drinking game.
  
  
• Novelist Jenifer Levin's review of Girl With Curious Hair (11.5.89) from the New York Times Book Review. Levin's enthusiasm for Wallace shows why fellow fictioneers find him so captivating to read.

Photo Gallery

• This photo of Wallace appears on the dust-jacket of the 1989 Norton hardback edition of his short-story collection, Girl With Curious Hair.
  
  
  
  
• Infinite Jest makeover -- minus ubiquitous bandanna -- circa March, 1996, from the New York Times Magazine.
  
  
  
  
• Photo appearing as of February, 1998 in ads and on the back cover of the paperback edition of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
  
  
  
  
• Photo appearing above the author bio in the July 1998 Esquire magazine, which features Wallace's short story "Adult World."
  
  

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Life Imitates Jest

• Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, James Incandenza's exploitation flick given a loving plot synopsis in the latter pages of Infinite Jest, has perhaps met its real-life match in a series of comic books chronicling the adventures of Sister Shannon Masters, the Warrior Nun. An article in USA Today (5.5.97) has all the goofy details.