Infinite Jest in Atlantic Monthly

[English, Darrin]

Sven Birkerts reviews David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest in the newest 
Atlantic Monthly, and it, of course, contains the obligatory Pychon 
comparisons.  For example:

"His latest offering...has been moving toward us like an ocean disturbance, 
pushing increasingly hyberbolic rumors before it:  that the author could not 
stop writing; that the publisher was begging for cuts of hundreds of pages; 
that it was, qua novel, a strang piece of business altogether.  Now it's 
here and, yes, it  _is_ strange, not just in its radically cantilevered plot 
conception but also in its size...:  this, mind you, in an era when 
publishers express very real doubts about whether the younger 
generation--presumably a good part of Wallace's target audience--reads at 
all."  (Okay, so not a direct reference to TRP, but it reads like some GR 
reviews.)

"Wallace is scrabbling along the high-terrain paths earlier explored by 
Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis.  Indeed, not only does he share with both 
a mordantly black view of modern and late-modern experience, but he also has 
a penchant for weaving long braids from enticingly antiphonal plots, each of 
which is differently absorbing, if not for its characterizations or 
imaginative brio then for the sharp snap of its thought, the obsessiveness 
of its informational reference...and the incandescence of the writing."

"Whatever aestetics we espouse, we are all closet traditionalists in our 
expectations--and these must be shelved.  Wallace rebuts the prime-time 
formula.  Think Beckett, think Pynchon, this Gaddis.  Think."  (Are we all 
really closet traditionalists?  Do we have the same expectations from TRP's 
novels that we have from, I don't know, Gore Vidal?  Or do we expect/demand 
something untraditional?)

"He is carrying on the Pynchonian celebration of the renegrade spirit in a 
world gone as flat as a circuit board; he is tailoring that richly comic 
idiom for its new millennial uses."  (Or a world gone as flat and 
two-dimensional as my computer monitor?)

So...what do you think?

Darrin English