Word: jestingly
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...player--at 14 he was ranked 17th in the Midwest. He studied philosophy at Amherst College and then Harvard, and when he was only 24, he published his first novel, The Broom of the System. In 1996 he vaulted into the upper ranks of the literary world with Infinite Jest, his 1,079-page (and 388-footnote) meta-epic of tennis, drug addiction, art, terrorism and loneliness set in a future when each year is known by the name of its corporate sponsor (e.g., the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar). Infinite Jest was the quintessence of 1990s literary...
...weeks ago, I reread the beginning of Infinite Jest, and stupidly cursed right out loud its author, David Foster Wallace, out of jealousy, because I will never write - or even think - like he does in just the first few pages of what is the best novel written since I've been old enough to read. It's a circular 1,079-page book about the impossibility of communication that is so wondrously complex that when I got to meet with its editor, Michael Pietsch, and ask him a basic question about the plot, he couldn't even tell...
...might be remembered as the guy who brought footnotes back (his fiction is full of them), or the person who magnified Thomas Pynchon's reader-reaction paranoia into post-modern mega-epic. He did do those things. But Wallace was also the greatest horror novelist ever. In Infinite Jest a corporation-run unified North America of the near-future (dates have been replaced by sponsor names, such as the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar) is being decimated by a videotape so entertaining that people watch it on a loop, mesmerized until they die of dehydration or starvation...
...book party for Infinite Jest, I sat, for a moment, next to him. He wasn't talking to anyone and seemed pretty uncomfortable for a guy who was having a party thrown for him. Years later, I reviewed his collection of short stories Oblivion, and foolishly, jealously wrote this: "David Foster Wallace writes so beautifully, is so show-offishly smart and understands the intricacies of human emotion so keenly that a reasonable person can only hope he is terribly unhappy. Which, if this collection of short stories is any indication, he is." For a far better, less embittered, summation...
...healthy anger with almost as many teeth as Jaws. Not a bad attribute for a for a man who wants to exchange wet fantasies for dry humor. As Johnson (Samuel, not Lyndon) once observed, ''Of all the griefs that harass the distrest,/ Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest...