INFINITE JEST by David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is no better in the $10 tenth anniversary edition than it was in the hardcover I bought remaindered a decade ago for $6.95. To correct a couple of the critical hyperboles of the mid-90's: the book is no Ulysses; nor is it a Gravity's Rainbow, however much it tries to be. No, it's just a big, bloated, unsurprising hodgepodge of elements very much like things we've read before in Pynchon, DeLillo, Nabokov, etc. The biggest problem is Wallace's lazy prose, a language typed rather than written, a prose so weak and, like, hiply inarticulate and, like, condescending to the point of, like, insult, you know... A little of this faux-demotic goes a long, long way. Listening to DFW 'talk cool' is like watching John Kerry drink beer--vaguely painful. After reading 100 pages (a tenth of its length) I've returned IJ to the shelf convinced that I'm not missing much, that the book hasn't aged well (its technology has already been superseded by the internet and DVDs), and that a week spent reading it would be a wasted week... And yet, all other things being equal, if DFW could write like Nabokov I'd read his damned book, no problem, even if it were longer than Proust. And if he were as talented as Vlad the Inscriber and as outrageously funny as Jonathan Swift or Philip Roth, then IJ would be a great book, but DFW sets his sights lower, aiming toward the second-rate academic comedians (sic) of the Seventies: Profs. Barth, Barthelme, Coover--writers no one off-campus ever reads...