David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest

 

This difficult, quintessentially American, thousand-page novel is replete with academic-style footnotes that offer backstory and tons of detail about a boarding school-tennis dynasty, corporate ubiquity, a conspiracy, an elusive truth, and a lot of drug use. What I found most masterful in this novel is Wallace’s patchwork of voices, each with a unique lexicon and syntax offering insights into the characters’ backgrounds and states of mind. The book is truly an infinite jest—it’s a tragicomedy about the randomness of the universe as well as a joke on the reader who dares to read to the end, dizzied and disoriented. But don’t get me wrong—the novel’s zany genius will keep you wide-eyed with delight to the very last page.​