12-step fear and loathing.

In his new cinder block of a book, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace spies this menace everywhere. Staggering and audacious, Infinite Jest covers 1,079 pages and features 388 footnotes, some themselves featuring footnotes. Characters struggle for peace of mind and careen ever farther from it, until their story lines are simply broken off. 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.