ABSTRACT
The challenge that reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest poses is that there are so many words for which to find a use. Dave Eggers complained in his early 1996 review that the novel’s “sentences run as long as 800 words. Paragraph breaks are rare. … Things like tennis matches and math problems are described in excruciating detail.”1 As with Gravity’s Rainbow, books like this aren’t just big, they also demand we expand our abilities as readers. Ed Finn’s analysis of the habits of Wallace’s readers suggests that many tackle the novel to achieve a “workout for the brain,”2 and the novel’s original marketing campaign exploited a sense of competitiveness, taunting readers with a dare: “are you reader enough for this book?”3
