OK, I think I have had long enough to digest this one now, so I had better get the review down before the next thread starts:
13 Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
So. I started this more as a challenge to myself than with any real expectation of enjoying it, but in fact I did end up getting sucked in, carried along, and even laughing out loud at certain points, despite the heft of the book, the tiny font, and the distraction of constantly flipping back and forth to the pages and pages of footnotes, some of which were actually main pieces of narrative, and some of which were long enough to have their own subsidiary footnotes.
This is in many ways a huge baggy mess of a novel. I can imagine that if a determined and skilled editor had been let loose on it, it could have been a very different and rather more digestible book, but I have to assume that all the extraneous details about types of legal and illegal drugs and their precise effects, or descriptions of a long and pointless game of intercontinental nuclear warfare played out by pre-teens on tennis courts in the snow, or repeated excerpts from a rambling all-night conversation on desert hillside between an American secret service operative in drag, and a Quebecois separatist terrorist in a wheelchair, and the like were all part of Wallace's grand plan.
I came out of it not knowing what had actually happened (I immediately turned back to the start to try to work it out, but that only helped to a certain extent), and from subsequent googling and reading of reviews it sounds like no one is really meant to know what happened - there are loose ends, unanswered questions and unexplained events all over the place. I also came out of it knowing an awful lot more about tennis, film-making, drugs, depression, rehabilitation centres and AA-type 12-step programs than I ever expected.
Some of the writing about pain and depression and drugs is visceral and hard to read, and you can't help being aware of the fact that the author killed himself a decade or so after the book was published. A lot of the time while reading I was too caught up in trying to get my head around everything that was being crammed into it to appreciate the quality of the writing, the way he inhabited different characters and assumed their voices, the precision of the descriptions, and the embrace of humanity in its imperfection and chaos.
I went through a Thomas Pynchon phase in my late teens, and this reminded me of some of those books (Gravity's Rainbow etc) more than anything I have read more recently. It suffers to my mind from the same blokish-ness as Pynchon and similar Great American Authors (female characters always seem somehow lacking in substance compared to the more central male ones, for example) but that goes with the territory of so many male authors.
In a previous comment I think I referred to reading Infinite Jest as a kind of stationary pilgrimage. It could be thought of as a tough journey in which you are following in the footsteps of many others, occasionally (or often) tempted to give up or take a diversion, but in the end completing the challenge and feeling like you have got to know yourself and your limits a little better.
I am glad I did it, and later this year I may tackle another one of the Big Books which I have so far avoided or dropped part way through, maybe Ulysses, or The Tale of Genji, or more likely the 3-volume set of The Man Without Qualities (Musil), which I started about 30 years ago in the wake of a literary love affair with Canetti, Kafka and central Europe in the early 20th century, but found myself bogged down within a few chapters.
In the meantime, I have been refreshing my palate with some lighter reads...