Isn't Infinite Jest just a witty expansion of 'Entropy,'...

[Spencer T. Campbell]

You could correlate the two, and it'd be interesting, but I hope it's
too reductive to call it an 'expansion.'  Though, given entropy as a
theme, the larger, later work IS more chaotic...

DFW seems to shrug off Pynchon comparisons quite aggressively, which
I'd imagine is largely because he's thrown so many...but still, I'd be
hesitant to put the two authors too easily in the same camp. It seems
to me that Wallace is a lot more interested in interrogating
late-century American psychology / the existential self.  Pynchon, on
the other hand--ideas, social groups, power relations, and how those
react *upon* individuals.

Just a theory...

On 8/28/06, David Kipen <kipend at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ...with the tennis camp and the halfway house standing in for the effete and
> bacchanalian apartments, respectively?
>
> Just a theory,
> David
>
>
> On 8/28/06, Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks for that, hadn't read it. Just started Infinite Jest this weekend.
> > I'm about 100 pages in and I don't know whether I'm going to (a) race
> > through the rest of the book, love it, recommend it to whoever will
> listen,
> > or (b) drop-kick it over the hedge into my least favourite neighbour's
> > greenhouse. The interview produces the same ambivalence, the whole thing
> > reads like one of his interminable footnotes, a sort of arch parody of
> > lit-crit pretentiousness. And if he used the term 'recursion' just one
> more
> > time I think I'd have to track him down and give him a slap.
> >
> >
> >
>
>