because it has more footnotes than book text and was written for the over educated white crowd

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It's the ultimate pseudointellectual book. It's over 1000 pages, with a maximalist, excessive style along with a false understanding of math and physics.

I kind of like it tbh it's unique and enjoyable sometimes. Obviously I didn't finish it but I enjoyed the descriptions of the tennis academy and the descriptions of being high on weed it's extremely accurate.

It's honestly a good piece of work the problem is that the motivation to read it is derived entirely from pretentiousness and pseudointellectualism.

God only knows. There is also a "podcast" where Chris Wade gets the book read to him by his wife called Infinite Cast - more like an episodic audio book with a little commentary. Worth listen to, if you ever wanted to get into the book at a pleasant pace.

Are you asking why one would read it or why this site and everyone else has it on a "coolness blacklist?" All I know is, if I ever read it I will take that fact to the grave

It's a really terrible book with moronic characters who do not grow nor even attempt to - they simply rot -, DFW's ear for dialogue is atrocious and as if he never heard a half-intelligent person speak, his powers for predicting the future & slang were terrible, and his pseudo-intellectual wisdoms are at theevek of things like "the AA meeting cliches work", "wow people can be interested in things", and whatever this is:

He had nothing in the way of a like God-concept, and at that point maybe even less than nothing in terms of interest in the whole thing; he treated prayer like setting an over-temp according to a box's direction. Thinking of it as talking to the ceiling was somehow preferable to imagining talking to Nothing. And he found it embarrassing to get down on his knees in his underwear, and like the other guys in the room he always pretended his sneakers were like way under the bed and he had to stay down there a while to find them and get them out, when he prayed, but he did it….

Like many PoMo writers, he's also unwilling to engage in ideas of depth and prefers to praddle around self-consciously & ironically, then project his own neuroses on to the audiences he manifestly views as idiots by asking them to stand such crap as this:

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me, that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately- the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly.

This has more in common with Oprah or Deepak Choprah than it does the working of a great mind. Even ignoring the cliches, the idea stated is simply: wow, people can care about things and dedicate themselves to things like religion.

Now, to be charitable, the type of conveniently-true stereotype who loves DFW/Infinite Jest sometimes does have a genuine passion for knowledge (vs. the appearance of such); one of my friends who now despises the book also admits similarly that if he, as a lonely 20y/o man, had come across DFW -- well. I myself have the tendency to despise past versions of myself too much.

Still, it's like the scoliost on the street corner, who seems wise when you're young because he pontificates on a great number of tpics with confidence, but once you've grown older and challenge him on one subject, he quickly darts to another so as to not risk exposing himself.

But some, I assume, are good people. this famous line just sucks, though: "The truth will set you free. But not before it finishes having its way with you." Again, more Oprah than a great mind. Insular Tahini this is not.

The text's indeterminacy and self-consciousness mark it as a very typical academic text, in which vague pseudo-intellectual conclusions that sound smart are preferred to putting one's dick on the chopping block. Brand names and references to obscure philosophers abound, along with the book's infamous footnotes, but nothing is done with it: it's simply a tool to preen his learnedness at you.

In the whole of Infinite Jest there is not even a single paragraph, not a single sentence, nor even a single image nor turn of phrase that shows anything resembling a facility for wordplay. It isn't even funny. "When I get in a taxi, I say: 'To the library, and step on it.'" Wallace was worse than a hack, who merely writes dully - he had no writing ability, period.

Ah, shit, I got weird. Well, I don't really hate it more than I hate any other bad-but-lauded book; it's like a primordial matter to where, just as the universe can only be composed only of this same matter, wearing many ages & skins, Infinite Jest spawned a number of other progeny, all equally destitute, who sometimes go by names like Dave Eggers, Rick Moody, and William Vollman.

God damn, that book sucks. I didn't even get in to just how terribly written it is on the sentence-level - excess modifiers, excess descriptions, excess adjectives, never once realizing that all details given must impart something, for every useless word devalues every other word.

I wish I knew. The only book I haven't read but react to with the same sort of mouth foaming weirdness that people who haven't read Infinite Jest do is Atlas Shrugged, the book the guardsperson was actually reading in the original photo. Maybe I'm just ~ ~ ~ way too intellectual ~ ~ ~ but it sure feels like the joke is going over a lot of peoples heads here lol.