Well, duh

source

TL;DR

The famous 1996 pan — Dale Peck's London Review of Books demolition, the hostile-dissent pole of Infinite Jest's contemporaneous reception. Peck reads the novel as derivative Pynchon ("Wallace out-Pynchons Pynchon") and "in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous, and – perhaps especially – uncontrolled." Two arguments give the review lasting interest beyond the invective: (1) a genuine critique of the book's central thesis — that its "conflation of entertainment with drug addiction" is "fundamentally flawed" because entertainment is chosen (free will), not compelled; and (2) an anticipation, twenty-plus years early, of the gender/representation charge later reception would foreground, faulting the "almost exclusively white-male text" for its "exoticised African-Americans, women and homosexuals". Peck also concedes real merit ("sentence by sentence, David Foster Wallace is a very good writer indeed"; "a pretty good novel lurking there"), which keeps the piece a serious dissent rather than a mere hatchet job.

Key claims

The Pynchon-imitation frame. Peck divides the US literary world into those who think Pynchon "a very clever guy" and those who also think him "a great writer" (he is of the former); Wallace "moves beyond admiration to adulation – if not, to put it more plainly, outright imitation." "Wallace out-Pynchons Pynchon," and IJ "may well be the first novel to out- Gravity’s Rainbow Gravity’s Rainbow" (the title doubled by the raw's italics).
The overall verdict. "the success of Infinite Jest is proof that the Great American Hype Machine can still work wonders, in terms of sales" — it "moved some 60,000 copies" — but the book is "in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous, and – perhaps especially – uncontrolled."
The catalogue of resented excess. He resents "the five weeks of my life I gave over to it": "the ten-page riff on why video telephones are unviable," "the dozen pages on the teenager who won all his tennis games by playing with a pistol held to his head," the "pharmaceutical trivia", and "the 96 pages of tinily typed and deliberately pointless endnotes and ‘errata’, 388 in total, which make the novel a two-bookmark experience."
The Broom of the System parallel. Both novels are set in an imagined US, both "revolve around an emotionally disturbed family full of geniuses, cripples and money", both feature "a manmade wasteland which becomes central to the national imagination" (Great Ohio Desert → Great Concavity), and both "work up an elaborate – and elaborately digressive – plot which deliberately ends as unsatisfactorily as possible."
The plot, reduced. Three single-character plots (Hal, Gately, Rémy Marathe, who "spends the first two-thirds of the novel having a conversation with another spy – that’s a 700-page conversation, folks – and then kills a couple of people"). "That’s the plot of the entire novel." Another reviewer's phrase, which Peck calls the more accurate one: "a ‘rudimentary three-stroke engine’".
The world-building as pretext for an acronym. "revenue-enhancing subsidised time" (‘Year of the Whopper’ etc.), the list withheld "until page 223"; the Organisation of North American Nations formed "for, apparently, no other reason than the chance to use the acronym Onan."
The Entertainment premise (cite-as-written). The film is "so compulsively ‘entertaining’" that viewers "become completely and permanently transfixed"; Marathe's organization found subjects would "cut off their own fingers – without anaesthesia" to watch. Herein, Peck says, is the book's "major theme: the United States has become a culture addicted to entertainment, and like all addicts we pursue that entertainment to our detriment."
The thesis critique (the review's real argument). The thesis is "more than a little problematic": the book's "conflation of entertainment with drug addiction" is "fundamentally flawed", because "The really insidious thing about the US entertainment fetish is not that it’s forced on us, but that we choose to give over so much of our lives to this crap". "For Wallace to suggest that free will is involved in the culture of entertainment would essentially eradicate his novel’s raison d’être."
Concessions of craft. "sentence by sentence, David Foster Wallace is a very good writer indeed"; "If Pynchon’s prose is tentacular, Wallace’s could be called carnivorous."; the important aesthetic is "the freedom to be bad", which "has more to do with punk than Pynchon, which is why I like his prose". And: "there’s a pretty good novel lurking there, but it’s lost inside about 800 pages of junk."
The gender/representation charge. Via Wallace's Dostoevsky essay (Voice Literary Supplement) and the DFW-to-Franzen letter quoted in Franzen's Harper's piece, Peck reads "a (sadly) fashionably anti-pc complaint about the loss of straight white-male privilege", and charges "cultural colonialism in the peppering of his almost exclusively white-male text with exoticised African-Americans, women and homosexuals". The review closes on the drag-ball pun of its title: "you too have just been read".

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The novel's equation of entertainment with addiction is fundamentally flawed — real entertainment is chosen, not compelled, so the "lethal film" analogy to drug addiction does not hold

Crux: entertainment-lethality
Stance: rejects
Evidence:
- [inference] "What’s meant to distinguish Infinite Jest (the book) from various artefacts that precede it is the conflation of entertainment with drug addiction, and this notion is, I think, fundamentally flawed." [¶ thesis]
- [inference] "The really insidious thing about the US entertainment fetish is not that it’s forced on us, but that we choose to give over so much of our lives to this crap" — unlike 1984's compelled two-minute hate. [¶ thesis]
- [inference] "For Wallace to suggest that free will is involved in the culture of entertainment would essentially eradicate his novel’s raison d’être." [¶ thesis]
Notes: Peck rejects the continuity axis of entertainment-lethality (the film as ordinary addictive entertainment carried to its extreme) on free-will grounds — the sharpest contemporaneous attack on the book's core premise. He restates the film's kill mechanism cite-as-written (permanent transfixion, self-mutilation to keep watching) but disputes its social analogy. In-review counterweight: he grants that great books can be "built around flawed or at any rate contestable social theories", so the flaw is not, for him, the book's disqualifying problem.

THEORY: Infinite Jest's deliberately unsatisfying non-ending is a failed choice — a good novel lost inside 800 pages of junk, not a triumph of design

Crux: designed-holes
Stance: rejects
Evidence:
- [inference] Like Broom, IJ works up "an elaborate – and elaborately digressive – plot which deliberately ends as unsatisfactorily as possible." [¶ Broom]
- [inference] "there’s a pretty good novel lurking there, but it’s lost inside about 800 pages of junk." [¶ aesthetics]
- [inference] The endnotes are "deliberately pointless"; the digressions are "intentionally unbalancing" — deliberate, and for Peck, self-defeating. [¶ excess]
Notes: Peck GRANTS the non-closure is deliberate (repeatedly: "deliberately," "intentionally") but rejects it as a value — the failure pole of designed-holes that nonetheless concedes authorial intent, distinct from Kakutani's "(or not edited)" framing (which reads the same non-closure as a lapse of control). The two 1996 reviews thus split on whether the withholding is intended: Peck says yes-but-bad, Kakutani says unedited.

THEORY: Infinite Jest is an almost exclusively white-male text that exoticises its minority, female, and gay characters — a symptom of anxiety over lost straight-white-male privilege

Crux: ij-boys-book
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [secondary] "cultural colonialism in the peppering of his almost exclusively white-male text with exoticised African-Americans, women and homosexuals". [¶ close]
- [author] The DFW-to-Franzen letter (quoted via Franzen's Harper's essay): "it’s not an accident that so many of the writers ‘in the shadows’ are straight white males" … "White males are the mainstream culture." (the two sentences are non-contiguous in the letter) — which Peck reads as "a (sadly) fashionably anti-pc complaint about the loss of straight white-male privilege". [¶ Franzen]
- [author] Wallace's Dostoevsky essay (VLS) on writers no longer "allowed" "passion, conviction and engagement" — read by Peck as a novelist projecting "his own anxieties to such self-detriment". [¶ Dostoevsky]
Notes: A 1996 anticipation of the representational/gender critique that 30th-anniversary reception (Hoby) would foreground — Peck faults the TEXT's representation and Wallace's stated cultural politics, not (as later readers do) Wallace's biographical conduct. Peck himself hedges ("If I cared about such things – and, in general, I do not"), recorded as the in-source qualification.

Themes

Reception and hype (the "Great American Hype Machine", 60,000 copies, the glowing reviews Peck writes against); influence and imitation (Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, DeLillo, Toole — the anxiety-of-influence frame); entertainment and addiction (the book's central thesis and Peck's free-will rebuttal); form and non-closure (the plot that "deliberately ends as unsatisfactorily as possible", the "800 pages of junk", the 96 pages of endnotes); gender and representation (the "white-male text", "exoticised" others, the straight-white-male-privilege charge); prose and aesthetics (the "carnivorous" style, "the freedom to be bad", more "punk than Pynchon").

Cross-references

The hostile pole of the archive's 1996 reception layer, paired with Michiko Kakutani's NYT flagship review: both fault the bloat and both invoke the Broom-of-the-System parallel and the Pynchon comparison, but Kakutani calls the talent "big" and sees "a splendid novel" trapped inside, where Peck calls it "terrible." They split on whether the non-closure is deliberate (Peck: yes-but-bad) or unedited (Kakutani).
Peck's free-will critique of the entertainment-addiction thesis is the earliest dated dissent on the death-by-pleasure premise's social analogy — a foil to the addiction-serious readings elsewhere in the archive.
The representational/gender charge Peck makes in 1996 anticipates the reckoning centered in Hermione Hoby's New Yorker anniversary piece and answered by Michelle Zauner's foreword.
The Wallace Dostoevsky essay Peck quotes is held as ctl-frank-dostoevsky; the Broom parallel connects to the Broom note.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the review (Peck's own prose unless marked; curly quotes and en-dashes preserved).

"Wallace out-Pynchons Pynchon, and his third book, Infinite Jest, may well be the first novel to out- Gravity’s Rainbow Gravity’s Rainbow." (title doubled by the raw's italic rendering)
"the success of Infinite Jest is proof that the Great American Hype Machine can still work wonders, in terms of sales."
"it is, in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous, and – perhaps especially – uncontrolled."
"that’s a 700-page conversation, folks" … "That’s the plot of the entire novel."
On the thesis: "the conflation of entertainment with drug addiction, and this notion is, I think, fundamentally flawed."
"For Wallace to suggest that free will is involved in the culture of entertainment would essentially eradicate his novel’s raison d’être."
The concession: "sentence by sentence, David Foster Wallace is a very good writer indeed".
"there’s a pretty good novel lurking there, but it’s lost inside about 800 pages of junk."
The gender charge: "exoticised African-Americans, women and homosexuals"; the drag-ball close, "David Foster Wallace, you can now sleep easy, because you too have just been read."