I've decided to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest finally. For whatever reason the book seems to have replaced Ulysses as the book that an intelligent person is supposed to have read, and it now seems to be the go-to indicator for young people who came of age with social media to determine whether someone is a serious reader. I have enjoyed other internet era touchstones like 2666 and I am a shallow person so I decided it is time that I had to read it.
My initial impression 100 pages in is surprise at how terrible it is. It seems begging on its knees desperate to be Pynchon, but Wallace is just a terrible writer sentence-by-sentence (some of the sentances are eye-raisingly bad without ever being funny), the tone is leaden and tiresome, and the only thing interesting about the ideas and setting is that Wallace considered them interesting. The purpose of the footnotes seems to be to give academics something in the book's form to discuss. But mostly it is that cringing humiliating derivative relationship to Pynchon (similar to e.g. Neal Stephenson ripping off William Gibson's classics) is really distracting for me. I can only assume that it is famous because it is long; has encyclopedic pretentions (well, foot notes); because the main character fits the internet archetype of the gifted kid dropout; and because the people reading it confuse an inability to write with complexity.
It feels.at this stage like it is going to be a long 981 pages, so if I am missing anything let me know. I'm always willing to be correct. Perhaps the book is plot driven or picks up as it goes.
Macdonald can have a lot of plotting issues (the opposite of Agatha Christie's: everyone just confesses immediately upon being confirmed and in sequential order), but when his books are good they are very good and among my favourites of their type.