It only feels infinite...

Infinite Jest: an endless, infuriating, fascinating, exhaustive book, ultimately done in by its refusal to use one word when 10 sentences would do. And I say this as someone who likes long books! I typically like digressions and following thoughts down fascinating rabbit holes (I am a Steve Kilby fan, after all...)

I'm 500 pages in (only halfway!) and I’ve been alternately impressed, interested, and bored. The book is divided into multiple sections, most of which share continuing story lines, including
1) life in a tennis prep-school academy (boring)
2) a midnight-oil philosophical discussion between a government operative and a double (or is it triple?)-agent in the hills above Tuscon, AZ (interesting)
3) the life of drug addicts and AA members in the Boston-area (impressive)
The setting is the not-so-distant future where some very intriguing events have changed the face of America as you know it, and the description and analysis of these events is insightful and compelling. But all of this is undercut by his verbose prose that keeps circling around upon itself, Ouroboros–like, to repeat itself over and over as he ponderously plods his way towards whatever point he’s making. While at times this approach works, as when he’s detailing the effects of withdrawal, most often, like when describing a supposedly-hysterical game about the end of the world or digressing on tennis, it's just boring. In short, the very definition of hit-or-miss.
DFW actually described the effect of the writing in this book the best when he wrote about a Marijuana-anonymous meeting: "...the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety — the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy – the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch..." p. 503