AtD mention in IJ article

[Ya Sam]

Ten Years Beyond Infinite
Revolutionary or unreadable? The long, strange afterlife of David Foster 
Wallace's Infinite Jest
By LEV GROSSMAN

"Wallace's publisher is celebrating the anniversary with a special $10 
paperback edition and a series of "Jest Fest" readings and panels. But it 
might be just as appropriate to deliver a eulogy for Infinite Jest--not to 
praise it but to bury it. After all, it did not win (nor was it a runner-up 
for) the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize or any other major award. 
It was hailed as the Novel of the Future, and in fact it kicked off a 
temporary revival of the maxi-novel, books like Cryptonomicon and The 
Corrections and Underworld and White Teeth. For a moment there, it felt as 
though novels simply had to get longer and longer to encompass the world's 
galloping complexity and interconnectedness. Then the fad faded. Now Thomas 
Pynchon's Against the Day (1,085 pages) just seems self-indulgent and 
stuntish.

But it's a mistake to lump Infinite Jest in with its successors. Think of it 
instead in terms of its forebears. Think of it as a Dickens novel. It's a 
book about two socially disparate groups--the tennis players and the drug 
addicts--and the various plot strands that bind them together. Granted, 
Wallace's plot strands are way more confusing than Dickens', and Wallace 
leaves his story lines dangling in a way that Dickens never did. But Dickens 
was a synthesizer, writing in an attempt to knit the world together. 
Infinite Jest holds up a mirror to the world's brokenness."


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1562956,00.html

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