Also String Theory (which is a collection of essays about Tennis).

Also, is there a fad of hating him? Do his books have controversial content (like Ayn Rand, for example, who divides people)?

Infinite Jest is pushed in everyones face as an example of what a novel "should" be / best book ever written (yea right) and he has an evercrooning group of adorers who make Pynchon fans look reasonable and sane.

Personally I find it him to be turgid and overwrought but I get why people enjoy him and come back. His essays are entertaining but I've never gleaned any great insight or inspiration from him.

It's people who look at a book that's 1100 pages long (1600 if you use standard font/page sizes), and call it pretentious.

Is it? Sure, but that doesn't make it any less of an absolutely insane/enjoyable journey. There are parts of this novel that absolutely shook me (the parts on addiction/suicide, and the "that if..." part on the halfway home), while others had me in tears laughing (the parts on the insurance claim for the brick layer, the part about the camera phones, the "heart thief"... etc).

Thanks for replying! After I asked here I googled around and saw DFW had some mental issues resulting in odd behavior. I then wondered if that is why there was a hating fad.

About pages, one of my childhood experiences was a popular girl getting everyone to laugh when I checked out one of Asimov's foundation trilogy books from the school library. Unfortunately she and I are close friends today so there is no "what goes around comes around" story to report :)

If there's a fad, it's a small one. My sense is that people have been more critical than they were immediately after his death, but that's not really hating, just retrospection.

"Besides frequently losing itself in superfluous and wildly tangential flights of lexical diarrhea, the book suffers under the sheer burden of its incredible length."

http://www.edrants.com/the-infinite-jest-review-that-dave-eg...

The depth of the tangents and jargon in IJ are an aesthetic DFW adopted to counter the clever minimalism so popular in commercial speech of the late 90s. He called it maximalism.

The burden is to some extent intentionally constructed; the reader must flip back between 2 bookmarks to read it at all since there are over >10% of the 1000 pages are footnotes located at the end of the book. It seems to be a meta-satire of two voices always present in late 90s US anti-depressant ads and the fine print that was always read quickly at the end. This burden forces the reader to constantly consider the "fine print" reality of the authors voice behind the fictional nonlinear narrative he is presenting you through the voice of other characters.

The form of the novel reflects the content of the message it presents, this is feature not a flaw.

The paragraph after the one you quote reads... "if you can come to terms with his dense and labored style, the rewards are often tremendous. There’s no doubt that Wallace’s talent is immense and his imagination limitless. When he backs off and gives his narrative some breathing room, he emerges as a consistently innovative, sensitive and intelligent writer."

Wait, what fad of hating him?

Like any other subculture / virtue signal which gains in popularity, there's a strong group for DFW and a strong backlash against from both sides. One side rejects the signal due to its popularity ("only dilettante freshman losers love DFW, REAL enthusiasts love REAL lit") and the other rejects the signal due to its accessibility ("these hipsters think they're cool just because they've read something, anyone could buy the book and do that!").

We see it in programming, too - "only newbie idiots love Ruby, Rust 4ever" plus "this damn hipster Rust brigade is ruining programming, Java is still just fine!"

Don't forget the hate from the positivist-minded STEM crowd and right-wingers, who both have a reflexive dislike of anything with a whiff of postmodernism about it.

Apparently it's too soon for criticism? I'm not sure what fads have to do with it, other than fads being convenient to minimize or dismiss; this piece of elegant sandpaper is for example six years old:

http://exiledonline.com/david-foster-wallace-portrait-of-an-...

Well, before my latest attempt to quit Twitter, it seemed like a widespread opinion among kool kids from both the left & right that liking DFW was middlebrow posing. Just my definitely skewed impression.

Well, there was the movie about him that came out a year or two ago. I'm sure that contibuted to the spike, but honestly 95% of the people I've seen reading Infinite Jest in public are somewhere in the first 20 pages, and that's been the case since the mid 2000s. I don't think reading literary fiction to look cool is anything new.

“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?”

I've heard a few people say that everyone has this on their bookshelf but hasn't read it. It always sounds like people think it's on the bookshelf to look impressive. I read it and it was probably the funniest book I've ever read.

He was like essential hip college freshman reading, which often comes with being hated for being popular, weird, abstract, etc. I havn't actually read the book, but I've certainly heard about it.