All this makes it seem as if the critical success of Infinite Jest were predetermined. True, the book appeared at a moment in which critics were looking for big novels, for some way of summing up the world at the turn of the millennium, but Infinite Jest did not seem immediately what they wanted. It was too difficult, felt too headlong, its calculated casualness confused. The prepublication notices straddled the fence between admiring and wondering whether the reviewer wasn’t being had. Publishers Weekly called the work a “brilliant but somewhat bloated dirigible of a second novel,” while Kirkus was slightly warmer, admiring what was “almost certainly the biggest and boldest novel we’ll see this year and, flaws and all, probably one of the best.” Predictably, most reviews emphasized the dimensions of the book, both literal and metaphorical. Sven Birkerts captured this amazement in the Atlantic, where he noted that Infinite Jest had “mov[ed] toward us like an ocean disturbance, pushing increasingly hyperbolic rumors before it: that the author could not stop writing; that the publisher was begging for cuts of hundreds of pages; that it was, qua novel, a very strange piece of business altogether.” Library Journal warned its readership that Infinite Jest was “not for the faint-hearted or the weak-wristed.”
Most reviewers who wrote about the book liked it, but there was an undertone of obedience to their writing, of being relieved they could answer in the affirmative the dare Little, Brown had laid down. “Challenging and provocative,” wrote the Orlando Sentinel. The Chicago Tribune called the novel “brashly funny and genuinely moving…worth the long haul.” The novelist Jonathan Dee in the Voice Literary Supplement praised Wallace as “the funniest writer of his generation.” All agreed Infinite Jest was significant — or, at least, a novel others would think was significant, so their readers should know about it. Walter Kirn, a mischievous novelist who reviewed it for New York, sped the plow: “Next year’s book awards have been decided. The plaques and citations can now be put in escrow. The competition,” he wrote, “has been obliterated. It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on ‘Jeopardy!’ The novel is that colossally disruptive. And that spectacularly good.” Esquire praised the book but criticized the publicity campaign. (Wallace, who happened to be in New York when the piece came out, in a note to Markson called it “that sneery thing in Esquire about the so-called ‘Hype of the Huge.’”) All these developments were positive from the publisher’s point of view. “I’m very happy with the launch so far,” Michael Pietsch wrote to Bonnie Nadell, “all our drum beating seems to have been heard.”
The book began selling well, especially given its size, and the publisher quickly went back for several small reprints. Yet the novel was certainly not sweeping everything away in its path. Jay McInerney reviewed the book for the New York Times Book Review with little enthusiasm. He missed the inventiveness of Girl with Curious Hair and found Wallace’s sentences more interesting than his plot. In the end he was not convinced that Wallace had successfully yoked two different kinds of books: “The overall effect is something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola,” he objected.
The most significant negative note came from Michiko Kakutani of the daily Times, who had expressed qualified affection for Broom. Faced with a behemoth in which narrative strands consume hundreds of pages and then fade away for several hundred more, in which the two principal plots of the story don’t clearly intertwine until more than six hundred pages into the book, in which the reader is consistently distracted by the need to thumb the back for endnotes that often offer information no reader seems to really need, in which digressions, playlets, urban legends, quasi-science, and pseudo-history break up the narrative, she found herself skeptical that she had read a masterpiece: “The book seems to have been written and edited (or not edited),” she wrote, “on the principle that bigger is better, more means more important, and this results in a big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, soliloquies, reminiscences and footnotes, uproarious and mind-boggling, but also arbitrary and self-indulgent.” The end or non-end of the book particularly bothered her:
At the end, that word machine is simply turned off, leaving the reader — at least the old-fashioned reader who harbors the vaguest expectations of narrative connections and beginnings, middles and ends — suspended in midair and reeling from the random muchness of detail and incident that is Infinite Jest.19
But such reviews did not dampen the impression, especially among the sort of critic interested in the dialogue among modernism, postmodernism, and whatever was coming after, that something new was being communicated. Birkerts in the Atlantic, who had welcomed Girl with Curious Hair as the first book truly to absorb the schizogenic vision of the writer writing in the media-saturated age, saw Infinite Jest as a brilliant extension of that preoccupation into the era of the Internet, with its manifold, overwhelming sources of image and information. So what others considered incoherence or sloppiness was to him a sign of a talent struggling to absorb the news:
To say that the novel does not obey traditional norms is to miss the point. Wallace’s narrative structure should be seen instead as a response to an altered cultural sensibility. The book mimes, in its movements as well as in its dense loads of referential data, the distributed systems that are the new paradigm in communications. The book is not about electronic culture, but it has internalized some of the decentering energies that computer technologies have released into our midst.
These comments came at just the moment when the importance of computer-based communication was exploding. Indeed, in the eight or nine years from the inception of Infinite Jest to its publication, the Internet had gone from a tool primarily for academics and the technologically adept to something approaching the limitless repository of information it is today. Few novelists or cultural critics had had time yet to think about what this transformation meant, least of all Wallace, and he was surprised to learn he had written a cybernovel. Asked by the Chicago Tribune whether his book was meant to reflect life as it was experienced in the computer age, he demurred. “This is sort of what it’s like to be alive…. You don’t have to be on the Internet for life to feel this way,” adding that he had never been. (He was wise enough to see a snare in it for an addict like himself. He felt, he told a friend, that he had already been exposed to enough ads for one lifetime and saw it as another insistent bleat creating the modern atmosphere of information overload, the state of affairs he would later call “Total Noise.”) Of course, “what it’s like to be alive” felt different for Wallace than it did for most people. Beset by anxiety and whipped by consciousness, his was a mind more drawn to the flat bright outlines of personhood than the nebulous contours of personality; it would be too simple to say that life for Wallace looked even more like the Internet than it did like television, but there is truth to it. In any event, the Internet Age was a gift that the post-millennial world gave to Wallace as a writer in search of readers. Collage and pastiche were gaining currency, and caricature and portrait were drawing closer together in people’s minds. Wallace’s characters — modern in their very sketchiness — felt realer to many readers than what realists were writing. As the culture collapsed into the anecdote and sound bite, Infinite Jest was one of the few books that seemed to anticipate the change and even prepare the reader for it. It suggested that literary sense might emerge from the coming cultural shifts, possibly even meanings too diffused to see before.