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David Foster Wallace's Infinite jest: a reader's guide Stephen Burn
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group

It certainly doesn't stack up to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged or Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, but this fall's voter's guide in San Francisco will certainly help prop open just about any door. Since their publication in 1993, David Foster Wallace's essay, “E Unibus Pluram”, and his subsequent interview with Larry McCaffery have served as the interpretive lenses through which to read the rest of Wallace's body of work. Many of Wallace's characters – particularly Hal Incandenza and Don Gately from Infinite Jest – struggle with some form of drug addiction, which proves to be merely a thin veil for their self-constructed cages and prisons. Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest [Greg Carlisle] on Amazon.com. ~cross-posted at Catching Days. I had a variant of this conversation with a friend yesterday after a class in which the professor claimed that "David Foster Wallace" was the moral position she would like to claim as her own. And I'm not just talking about the brick-like girth and serious heft of Infinite Jest. Its structure is a gesture of at best, indifference to, and at worst, hostility towards the reader, which is an attitude that I find troublesome. David Foster Wallace is probably not the best literary companion for fieldwork in the Amazon. On page 203: “Your jitters are starting to rub off on me. Infinite Jest - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide. Elegant Complexity is the first critical work to provide detailed and thorough commentary on each of the 192 sections of David Foster Wallace's masterful Infinite Jest Carlisle explains the novel's complex plot threads (and discrepancies) with expert insight and re: it being relatively spoiler-free: is it designed in the style of a guide to the text, a reader's companion sort of thing? My friend, the redoubtable Massey, has asked me to share some of my erstwhile thoughts about Infinite Jest, the David Foster Wallace behemoth that I started last month. While we didn't refer back to In the linked example, Greg Carlisle describes his experience of reading Infinite Jest as the cause of his writing Elegant Complexity, a guide to Infinite Jest, and to his further reading of Vollmann, Barth, Gaddis, and Pynchon. I guess I had expected it would be more difficult--difficult in the way of Ulysses, I mean, where you almost can't read it, the first time through, without a guide. If the characters aren't enough of a brilliant mess for you, David Foster Wallace adds another layer of confusion with a slew of locations that would send any GPS spinning. I've got the fucking fantods, man.” >>>David Foster Wallace throughout Infinite Jest.