![]() ![]() What is it, and where has it come from? Let me try the second question first. Now it’s here and, yes, it is strange, not just in its radically cantilevered plot conception but also in its size (more than a thousand pages, one-tenth of that bulk taking the form of endnotes): 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. ![]() His latest offering, Infinite Jest, has been moving toward us like an ocean disturbance, pushing increasingly hyperbolic 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 very strange piece of business altogether. He has also done some hard schooling in halfway houses and recovery programs (a fact not irrelevant to the novel under review). ![]() A fictioneer and former Harvard philosophy student, Wallace is the author of The Broom of the System, a novel Girl With Curious Hair, an envelope-stretching book of stories and, with Mark Costello, a nonfiction work, Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present. Among writers of the younger-which these days means under forty-generation, David Foster Wallace has a reputation as a wild-card savant. ![]()
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