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in his post at http://www.islandfour.org, Nathan Bitner wrote: "...the most recent novel finished, _Infinite Jest_. You want to know more about Island Four - read that one!" i read that book last summer, here's a bit of a synopsis if you're interested. please feel free to take issue with me if you think i've got something wrong (though i don't doubt that you would anyway ;) 'cause as i said, it's been a while.
"Infinite Jest" is a very postmodern novel by David Foster Wallace. It is hysterical and impenetrable, weighing in at about 1,088 pages (the last 225 or so of which are composed entirely of fine-print endnotes; that may give you a clue as to Wallace's extrordinarly, elegantly compacted style. It's DENSE.) In the broad strokes, it deals with a movie made by a recently-dead (suicided, actually) amateur. The movie is so comforting that whoever watches it slips into an ultimately lethal coma of bliss. Two sentences, of course, are a wholly inadequate description. Among the other main plots are the filmmaker's tennis-prodigy son and his rather dysfunctional life at a Tennis Academy (founded by his father) outside of Boston, and a reforming drug addict living in a treatment center next door to the Academy. The comforting-movie itself is being sought both by the government (a synthesis of the American and Canadian governments known as the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N., which allows for countless 'onanism' jokes) and a group of radical Quebecois seperatist terrorists.
Infinite Jest is wickedly funny, and much of the humor comes from a sense that the author himself is laughing at the reader simply for trying to decode the prose (this, in my opinion, sheds some light on the book's title). If Island Four makes computer games as sophisticated, witty, and intelligent as "Infinite Jest," they have at least one customer for life.
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