But you have no idea what's going on in the book for the first 300 pages or so. It takes until around 500 pages in before you're immersed in the story, and then reading it becomes kind of an addiction. And once you're done, you feel an intense need to start it over again, knowing what you do now.
I only really got the theme of it on the second reading. I actually put it down for a few months the first time I tried to read it because I was confused. But it's worth it...oh man, is it worth it.
In any case, I've just bought a copy of Infinite Jest, so pretty soon I'll be finding out whether I've treated it too harshly or not harshly enough.
I do wish to note that, when I wrote the comment to which you reply, I hadn't yet read far enough into the thread to encounter the many people saying "Oh, you just have to power through the first {100,300,...} pages, and then it gets amazing!" Such claims for Infinite Jest are new to me, and it's an argument to which I'm not without sympathy; I'm forced to consider the possibility that I've judged the book too harshly, and that this may be a case where I'd be well served to suspend the usual criteria by which I decide that an author is wasting my time.
(And I have to say, that cruise review piece you linked is doing a good job winning me over, too. Thanks for that!)
But so anyways, by all means write exactly as you feel like writing. I'm a huge fan of DFW, for example, precisely because he is all fancy and colloquial at the same time, which happens to tickle my fancy quite a bunch. I just wanted to point it out.
Either you don't give a shit about 'them' and write as pretentiously as you desire, or, like myself, you adjust your style to distance yourself from 'them' because you dislike the association.
As it is, it's rather confusing to me because I can't tell the difference between you and the 'Eng lit academia' you seem to wish to avoid.
All that said: I don't think you write like a pretentious ass and I feel anyone should communicate however they want as long as the message comes across. And personally I like your style. So rock on, I guess :). But it's essentially what DFW is doing too, I think.
Having not looked closely before now into Infinite Jest, I think I better understand why it serves as such a pons asinorum for literary fiction in general. It takes a more than ordinarily diligent and accommodating person to get through it at all without her eyes glazing over, much less to come out the other end with any sense of what actually happened between front cover and back.
(Oh, also: "ghastlily"? Really? Far be it from me to speak ill of the dead, but...)