[In the review below, Perlstein calls Infinite Jest "a daring and brilliant exercise" but one that ultimately fails because the novelist's compulsion overwhelms his art.]

Jazz apocrypha has it that Miles Davis once asked his sideman John Coltrane to play shorter solos. Coltrane, who could never reach a satisfying conclusion, asked how, and Miles, ever laconic, replied: "Take the horn out of your mouth." Coltrane never did take Miles's advice. Until he explored every harmonic implication of every chord, or couldn't physically play anymore, Coltrane's horn stayed in his mouth. For a while, this made for a gorgeous noise indeed. But soon enough Coltrane was stretching his fantasies into half-hour, then hourlong clots of solipsistic caterwauling. His longtime sidemen left him; his last albums became unlistenable. Although he aimed at transcendence, his compulsion overwhelmed his art.

Call it the Reefer Madness Effect. Satisfaction is always fugitive: It ups its own stakes as the effects of each pleasure achieved wear off and compel you to new heights of risk for ever grander pleasure, until you can't enjoy yourself at all for your very compulsion. In his new cinder block of a book, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace spies this menace everywhere. We are doubly fallen creatures because our every move toward redemption takes us farther from our goal.

Staggering and audacious, Infinite Jest covers 1,079 pages and features 388 footnotes, some themselves featuring footnotes. Like Coltrane at his bleary worst, the book ends in sheer exhaustion. Characters struggle for peace of mind and careen ever farther from it, until their story lines are simply broken off. Art, love, altruism, entertainment, politics, family: All possible roads to transcending the self become gateway drugs to a junkie-like abyss. The harder you try to pull yourself out, the deeper you dig yourself in. Wallace calls the concept "annularity"—which means ringlike, the infinite downward spiral toward shame, alienation and abjection—and it's the novel's skeleton key.

Not that knowing this will make the book any more manageable. Wallace has set himself the daunting task of conjuring up a fabulist, sci-fi America a decade hence, in a worm's-eye concatenation of details—while allowing himself none of the perspectival tricks authors use to make imaginary worlds act real. It opens in medias res: Hal Incandenza, an 18-year-old tennis star who has memorized the entire Oxford English Dictionary, is being interviewed for an athletic scholarship to the University of Arizona after graduating from his parents' tennis academy—or more accurately his mother and half-uncle's tennis academy, his father, James, having committed suicide by hacking open a hole in a microwave door, sealing it around his head with duct tape and making like a bag of Orville Redenbacher. The Enfield Tennis Academy is a Nick Bollettieri-like gulag where adolescents slave at Zen and the Art of Groundstrokes under the tutelage of a sadistic old German and an Indian guru who takes his spiritual sustenance from licking the sweat off the lads' foreheads. Hal writes papers like "Tertiary Symbolism in Justinian Erotica" and "The Emergence of Heroic Stasis in Broadcast Entertainment." He is, in other words, a Prodigy, that annular species that lives to please parents who never will be; an affectless wreck, he also smokes a lot of pot.

Across the road from the E.T.A. is Ennet House, a halfway facility for recovering drug addicts. One of them, Joelle van Dyne, is the former lover of Hal's brother Orin, late a junior tennis star, now a professional football punter (lobs were always his specialty). But what really links drug addicts to success addicts—and to avant-garde artists, and overbearing mothers, and everyone else in this desk reference of self-loathing—is their overwhelming victimization at the hand of their own desires.

Ambition is especially self-destructive. During his meeting with the Arizona officials, Hal Incandenza loses his mind. In a scene reminiscent of "The Metamorphosis," everyone who sees him recoils in horror, to his uncomprehending consternation. Hal, like Gregor Samsa, flushed with the stress of paying off his father's debts—in junior tennis, Hal says, "reaching at least the round you're supposed to is known at tournaments as 'justifying your seed'"—is rendered anti-human. It happens in the midst of showing off his skill at reeling off the O.E.D. There will be no redemption in precociousness, which is just another compulsion that overwhelms healing.

Fatal ambition runs in the family. Before his unseemly run-in with the microwave, the distant, brooding father, James Orin Incandenza, a former junior tennis star and a retired physicist who pioneered cold fusion by harnessing the dark power of—you guessed it—annularity, founded the Enfield Tennis Academy, and then took up a career as an "apresgarde" filmmaker. He is much loved by academic film theorists for projects like installing a hidden camera in the front of an art-house theater audience and projecting the crowd of espresso-sippers to themselves in real time, until the last gullible trendies figure out the ruse. "The New Yorker guy, the film guy who replaced the guy who replaced Rafferty," said that Incandenza's "anti-confluential" films "were like the planet's most psychotic psyche working out its shit right there on the screen and asking you to pay to watch him." Joelle begins to act in these films not long before she and Orin break up. Orin goes annular, seducing as many women as possible in annular downward spiral of vindictive shame.

Here is where the wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatist terrorists come in and things get a little nutty. Due to a nuclear chain reaction whose provenance is left obscure, several Northeastern states have been rendered uninhabitable. What's more, the countries in the Northern Hemisphere have united into the Organization of North American Nations (the acronym is one of this rather masturbatory novel's self-deprecating winks). America rids itself of the tainted land by giving it outright to Canada.

A gang of French Canadian thugs called les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents—assassins in wheelchairs, naturally—decide to exploit the situation. A harebrained scheme is launched to force ONAN to surrender Quebec by attaining a master copy of Infinite Jest, an unreleased Incandenza production starring Joelle van Dyne. Soon wheelchair-bound people with funny accents and suspicious alibis start poking around both the tennis academy and Ennet House looking for Infinite Jest. Why? Because it is an entertainment so perfectly realized that to watch it is to never want to stop watching it until you die. He who controls Infinite Jest controls the world. It is the pleasure that, finally, has the power to satisfy. Which means that it is death.

The A.F.R. terrorists want to set into motion the mother of all annularizations, but it's really the same game as everyone else's: They just want to be happy, but they always end up sad. Pleasure is fugitive; it ups its own stakes, infinitely. Maybe conquering the world will break the spell.

Readers who stay with the novel until the pages thin will come to realize that Wallace has no intention of revealing whether les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents succeed or fail in their quest. Nor whether Don Gately of Ennet House stays sober; whether Orin will master his awful desires; whether Madame Psychosis will ever return to the airwaves; or whether Hal Incandenza will sacrifice himself to the Oedipal grail. Readers will turn the last page, in other words, without learning anything they need to know to secure narrative succor. Like the characters, the farther they press on, the less they will be satisfied. They will say to themselves: I Have Just Read an Avant-Garde Novel.

I wonder if it was intentional on Wallace's part that the criticisms in the book that people make of Incandenza's avant-garde film apply so aptly to Wallace's avant-garde novel:

Technically gorgeous … [but] oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness—no narrative movement towards a real story; no emotional movement towards an audience. Like conversing with a prisoner through that plastic screen using phones … cold, allusive, inbent, hostile; the only feeling for the audience one of contempt.

These comments raise the right questions about whether this long-awaited and much-hyped novel ultimately matters or not. Wallace takes drug addiction—the sine qua non of annularity—as his model for the lives he renders, the world he renders them in and the narrative form in which these are simultaneously explained and obscured. He suggests it is the model for our own benumbed, repressively tolerant world as well. His is a familiar pursuit in art and social criticism: to anatomize, then point out a way to transcend, the various opiates of the people—a sort of annular quest in itself. Dreamers plot redemptive schemes like class struggle and psychoanalysis, but redemption remains fugitive (we are fallen creatures); and so Wallace joins the likes of Marcuse and Foucault in a race to the bottom to find ever more intractable sops to our redemption—humanism itself is the problem!—until compulsion overwhelms criticism (or art), and criticism (or art) becomes solipsistic caterwauling.

Wallace is painfully aware of this dilemma, musing about "why so much aesthetically ambitious film was so boring and why so much shitty reductive commercial entertainment was so much fun." He is both the author and the enemy of this jeremiad, because Infinite Jest is ambitious, boring and too clinical besides to carry through its own ethical insights. The jokes fall flat, though some may take pleasure in Wallace's language. He writes sentences like the one I'm writing right now pretty much, with these endless, oozing can-you-remember-where-this-started switchback clauses, and if you like this, the sentence you're reading right now, and can imagine more or less 1,000 pages of them, then you'll like this novel, prose-wise.

His precious style abuts his airless nihilism uncomfortably. At least the nihilism, though, is not unremitting. Wallace intimates the possibility of redemption across the street from the Enfield Tennis Academy, in the 12-step recovery culture at Ennet House. There, addicts have their substances taken away from them, lose their minds and find them again through radical withdrawal from enslaving ambition of any sort: a guerrilla assault on annularity, life by homily. "One day at a time." "Grass grows by inches but it dies by feet." People care for one another in this utopia of the anti-utopian. It is, Wallace seems to suggest, a way out, for all of us who feel, who are all addicted.

But Wallace doesn't make it feel like a way out. Amid all his formal experimentation, he wants to render the genuine human pain of addiction and the miracle of its transcendence. But turn again to the criticism of Incandenza's avant-garde film: "Where he dropped the technical fireworks and tried to make the characters move," one "began to see little flashes of something … but he wanted to get them by as quickly and unstudyably as possible, as if they compromised him somehow."

In a telling scene near the novel's end, one character dares another to dress up as a bum to see if anyone will touch him. The guy dutifully avoids bathing for a few weeks, then hits the streets. "Touch me, just touch me, please," he says. Confused passers-by drop change into his hand, thinking this is some new beggar slang. But the more he begs to be touched, the more money people give him. Other beggars on the street catch on: They, too, start saying, "Touch me, just touch me, please."

Infinite jest: Each new beggar who takes up the cry makes it harder for the first guy to convince people that, in fact, he wants to be touched. Exhausted, he loses his bet, no satisfying resolution achieved—until he becomes a bum himself. That failure is also Wallace's. He tries to touch us by showing us how hard it is to touch, and how each failure to touch redoubles our alienation and ill resolve. It's a daring and brilliant exercise. But its compulsion overwhelms its art.