SOURCE: "Terminal Entertainment," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 11, 1996, pp. 1, 9.

In the following review of Wallace's second novel, Infinite Jest, Kipen invokes the legacy of Thomas Pynchon to note Wallace's similarity and superiority to that legendary figure.

It takes a special kind of nerve to write a book with roughly the mass of a medicine ball and then end it so abruptly and unsatisfactorily that the poor reader perversely finds himself wishing it longer. But David Foster Wallace's coda disappoints only because the preceding 3 1/2 inches of Infinite Jest have succeeded so well at projecting a world of brain-scalding complexity.

Wallace has given us a meditation on addiction—the addiction of a tennis prodigy to organic narcotics, of a paroled second-story man to inorganic ones, of the terrorist to his cause, of the couch potato to mindless pleasures and, ultimately, the unkickable addiction of readers to all those...