I feel like I am supposed to be a philistine for not loving David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. I am not going to explain my lack of enthusiasm here - that is for your future and my past - except to say it was a lot of cleverness that left me feeling unmoved. I much preferred his essay collection Consider the Lobster - my notes for that are also in your future - for its humor and outright wit. Still, I know he is respected and touted and I had to check him out.
The Modern Novel site provides a good argument for reading Infinite Jest and aligning Wallace with Pynchon may explain my own failing with Wallace. Pynchon is another who gets all kinds of praise and when I read hin I get the feeling of technical brilliance that leaves me wondering to what purpose is the brilliance being expended.
But I think I would have liked the guy - another depressive but better at suicide - Which may explain why I liked his essays. I do like the person who comes through in the interview The Jester Holds Court,
He certainly was smarter than me, and maybe our interests overlap enough underlies my preference for the ideas expressed in his essays rather than the story of Infinite Jest, but I got to say I like the attitude of The New Yorker for his novel.
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