Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wallace, David Foster - David Kipen (review date 11 February 1996)

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David Kipen (review date 11 February 1996)

SOURCE: "Terminal Entertainment," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 11, 1996, pp. 1, 9.

[In the following review of Wallace's second novel, Infinite Jest, Kipen invokes the legacy of Thomas Pynchon to note Wallace's similarity and superiority to that legendary figure.]

It takes a special kind of nerve to write a book with roughly the mass of a medicine ball and then end it so abruptly and unsatisfactorily that the poor reader perversely finds himself wishing it longer. But David Foster Wallace's coda disappoints only because the preceding 3 1/2 inches of Infinite Jest have succeeded so well at projecting a world of brain-scalding complexity.

Wallace has given us a meditation on addiction—the addiction of a tennis prodigy to organic narcotics, of a paroled second-story man to inorganic ones, of the terrorist to his cause, of the couch potato to mindless pleasures...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Kirkus Reviews (review date 15 November 1986)
   2. Madison Smartt Bell (review date 6 August 1989)
   3. Jenifer Levin (review date 5 November 1989)
   4. Douglas Siebold (review date 21 January 1990)
   5. Sven Birkerts (essay date 1992)
   6. Larry McCaffery (interview date Summer 1993)
   7. David Kipen (review date 11 February 1996)
   8. R. Z. Sheppard (review date 19 February 1996)
   9. Jay McInerney (review date 3 March 1996)
   10. Rick Perlstein (review date 4 March 1996)
   11. Steven Moore (review date Spring 1996)
   12. Tom LeClair (essay date Fall 1996)
   13. Richard Stern (review date 9 March 1997)
   14. Laura Miller (review date 16 March 1997)
   15. Alexander Star (review date 30 June 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright