Will’s Reviews > Infinite Jest > Status Update
Will
is on page 135 of 1079
Mario’s first remotely romantic experience: brilliant, although I probably feel this bc i find the isolation of both Mario and Millicent relatable… the dialogue is amazing, DFW really captures the talking-past-each-other thing. the section manages somehow to not feel too cruel to either character, or really to make us feel sympathetic to the their experience of cruelty.
— Apr 09, 2026 07:11AM
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Will
is on page 228 of 1079
It occurs to me that ‘Madam Psychosis’ is probably a pun off ‘metempsychosis’ and a reference to Ulysses?
— Apr 20, 2026 08:59AM
Will
is on page 209 of 1079
The book makes you laugh, and then makes you feel bad for laughing. This interrogation of one’s own laughter is one of the ways, I think, that a joke can be a serious argument.
Makes me think of Nabokov’s ideas about cruel laughter in Kafka and Cervantes, although the connection is still nascent.
Reminds me also of Joyce’s rhetorical use of jokes in Ulysses?
— Apr 16, 2026 08:10AM
Makes me think of Nabokov’s ideas about cruel laughter in Kafka and Cervantes, although the connection is still nascent.
Reminds me also of Joyce’s rhetorical use of jokes in Ulysses?
Will
is on page 143 of 1079
using the feather boa to connect Poor Tony across different sections with different narrative voice is cool
— Apr 09, 2026 10:26AM
Will
is on page 95 of 1079
It manages somehow to be both really good and really not very good at all….
— Apr 07, 2026 06:58AM
Will
is on page 54 of 1079
The section about Fenton the schizophrenic is unbelievable. (It’s also all two sentences.) Must’ve read it 4 or 5 times at first, then I dreamt of it, then i immediately picked up the book and reread it when i awoke.
Wallace’s brand of linguistics parody takes some getting used to, especially his pension for redundancy [eg “the late Dr. James … (now deceased”)] and oxymoron (“and but” appears a lot)
— Apr 04, 2026 05:59AM
Wallace’s brand of linguistics parody takes some getting used to, especially his pension for redundancy [eg “the late Dr. James … (now deceased”)] and oxymoron (“and but” appears a lot)
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Apr 09, 2026 07:13AM
and i’ll admit it, the some of the stranger humor is starting to grow on me, the ‘murated nation’ part being itself walled off (and being added retrospectively bc Marathe does not, in fact, have eidetic memory) is pretty good :p
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no idea what to make of the oiled guru section honestly, although i do remember DFW being made to read it during an interview i listened to
also who is the “I” wishing he could be like the oiled guru?
the yrstruly section had a lot of random bits that felt kinda extraneous (like all the out&about and 2Bdenied [not that either of these are bad {i’ve actually experimented with the X&Y construction a fair bit myself} but i just didn’t really understand their function]) but the slang language DFW develops in the section is really cool honestly, esp how he mixes it with real slang. he does an excellent job of introducing the words with just not quite enough context to know what they mean, but giving us a really obvious sentence once we need to know
The phone convo between hal and orin in the next section also does the talking-past-each-other thing really well, each has a direction they pulling the convo toward
pg 139, Dwayne Glynn shoulda taken the oiled guru’s advice lol, was that section just for this one joke??
