Word: jesting
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...PAGE NOVEL THAT CONcludes with 100 pages of annotation and calls itself Infinite Jest (Little, Brown; $29.95) is doubly intimidating. First, there is its length, which promises an ordeal like driving across Texas without cruise control. Second, the title itself hints that the joke may be on the reader. By definition, infinite means no punch line...
...year 2014, Infinite Jest projects the U.S. as a grotesquely extrapolated present. Entertainment and commercialism have reached a climax. Everything is product. Numbered years have been replaced by sponsors' names. There is the Year of Glad, the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The technology of pleasure has driven people deeper into themselves. There is a new political structure known as the Organization of North American Nations whose acronym is ONAN...
...Incandenza clan, a family of high achievers. Mother Avril is a professor of language structure, and father James made a fortune inventing optical instruments, retiring to produce avant-garde films with cheeky titles such as The American Century as Seen Through a Brick, Dial C. for Concupiscence and Infinite Jest, a feature described as "lethally entertaining...
...page novel that calls itself 'Infinite Jest' (Little, Brown; $29.95) is doubly intimidating. First there is its length. Second, the title itself hints that the joke may be on the reader. By definition, infinite means no punchline. Yet David Foster Wallace's send-up is worth the effort, says TIME's R.Z. Sheppard. "There is generous intelligence and authentic passion on every page, even the overwritten ones where the author seems to have had a fit of graphomania. Characters and events are propelled by a distinctive prose that frequently mixes teenage trash talk and intellectual abstraction, a Bevis-and-Egghead...
...sent out the letter proposing this idea to every campus publication. The response? Only a single reply, in jest, from The Crimson's arch-nemesis, the Lampoon...