In December 2013 John McGowan asked Ethos readers, What Am I Missing?: Infinite Jest and Its Cult Following. He had finally finished Infinite Jest, but did not experience the pleasure that many readers experience while reading the novel. It's interesting in that it is such a different reading to mine. I keep finding things to love about it after all these years (and that's not because I've refused to read anything by any other author... far from it!). There are a few detailed, passionate and articulate responses in the comments at the end. Have a look.
Three months later David Andrew Tow has responded with, Missing the Point is Part of It: An Apologia for Infinite Jest:
[...]Recently on Ethos, John McGowan wrote a fair and well-reasoned indictment of Wallace’s opus. In sum, it is an overwrought, hostile, meandering, self-serious, and deliberately disorganized novel whose “pieces,” McGowan writes, “are far more than the whole.” These complaints, and the half-dozen others often leveled at Wallace, hold water. Infinite Jest has problems. And yet, despite these objections and criticisms, Infinite Jest is still a work of art, functions as one, and does so because of, not despite, its problems.
[...]
I just don't see that the complaints in McGowan's piece are problems in the first place.
Continue reading over at Ethos, What Am I Missing?: Infinite Jest and Its Cult Following and Missing the Point is Part of It: An Apologia for Infinite Jest.
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