Infinite Jest feels like a dungeon crawler of a book. New characters are new items, plot points (being as scarce as they are) are upgrades to equipment, and each new scene is just like entering a new area. At the least, new areas are beginning to feel fewer an fewer. Also, the importance of the plot points is starting to pick up.
But then, there are the endnotes. Oh, the endnotes. Endnote #45 directs you to another note further in, and it's one of the chapters that Wallace hid at the back of the book. Reading books in regular chunks is usually only difficult if you feel compelled to read more and more, not because you might come to an endnote that leads to another chunk.
In this way, Infinite Jest, for all of its reliance on chemical names for drugs and such that may now be irrelevant or outmoded seems locked into its original publication year of 1996. The characters are as compelling as ever 100 pages in (and new ones continue to trickle in), and the world is a fascinating thing seen only in glimpses between characters and smatterings of plot, like a scene viewed through parted Venetian blinds.
But, the structure of the book itself is one that demands a lot of attention. It's one thing to read a 1000 page novel (like any of the later books in A Song of Ice and Fire). But those books are only time consuming because of the density of the relationships and interactions found within. Infinite Jest offers a density that can only be penetrated if you have time to sit down and drill into it.
Like a dungeon crawler without a save feature, Infinite Jest is ill-suited to quick jaunts.
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