What a disappointing book! It took me 4 years of picking it up, putting it down for extended periods, and then picking it up again to finally finish. The first 300 pages were slow, but I found myself getting increasingly hooked as I went along. By about the 600th page, I could barely put it down. The many plotlines were coming together slowly but surely, and it looked like it would reach a convoluted but amazing conclusion. So what went wrong? I dunno what was in Wallace's head, but he seems to have decided to cast aside this book's potential for greatness and just end it on a soft note. What a shame. Some elements of the book were great... the wry humor, the many exquisitely crafted plotlines, the zany future that Wallace's imagination cooked up (monstrous feral hamsters, lounge singer presidents, etc), and so on. But other parts were something of a turn off. The tennis academy narrative did not match the quality of the other plotlines, and Wallace's egomania concerning his own writing ability was a bit much. If an author is a genius, it will show subtly in his work (Mikhail Lermontov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, etc)... Wallace's brute force approach of beating the reader over the head with complex words and sentence structures is NOT the mark of genius. See especially the 200 pages of footnotes... the idea was cute, but when some of the individual footnotes are 10 to 20 pages each, you know he's gone too far. Anyway, I'm digressing from my main point, which is: this is a well written and entertaining book, but prepare to be let down considerably by the lack of a satisfactory conclusion... I must say that the "look, I didn't put an ending in!" trick is SOOOO cliche in post-modern literature, and the fact that Wallace thought the reader would see the lack of ending as somehow clever or original does not speak well for him. 1100 pages is too much to have to sit through for this kind of disappointment.
