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I liked it immediately, beginning with the one-line second paragraph: "I am in here."

Ah, but this is a rarefied literary game, I chuckled to myself knowingly, the author "appropriating" the perspective of a helpless prisoner to introduce a fictional megalith comprising more than 1,000 pages of small type, annotated by 388 logorrheic endnotes in even smaller type. See how deftly, using four simple words, he invokes the scream-out-loud claustrophobia that consumes his hero in the opening pages, the one caught "in here," right alongside trembling would-be readers.

The feeling is palpable.

Thus the jests begin - and well might one imagine, facing the next 1,078 pages, that they will never end. But Infinite Jest , the late David Foster Wallace's monumental masterwork, is no joke. It is like some sea monster of legend known only to the best-connected literary cartographers: Here be the ultimate novel, they murmur, the novel to end all novels, the novel finally to redeem the whole tawdry business of writing novels. The never-read must-read of hoary lore.

So when four intrepid amateurs announced their decision to read Infinite Jest this summer, inviting others to join them online, the news went around the world. Thanks to the unruly miracle of social networking, thousands of ordinary readers have joined the baggage train - cleverly dubbed Infinite Summer - dutifully trudging through 75 pages a week amid gales of puzzled, amused, earnest and amazed chatter about the monster whose leathery flanks they swarm.

Owing in no small part to the suicide of the novel's incandescent author last fall, reading Infinite Jest this summer - more than a decade after its publication - has become the strangest literary phenomenon, transforming the quaint notion of the book club into a Wallacesque MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) as wild and overflowing as the great book itself.

Like pilgrims on bleeding knees, we are true believers who have eschewed the easy passes of the Oprah-approved route to literary enlightenment. We scorn so-called "summer reading" as a second-rate substitute for the television that, as yet, doesn't work on the beach. We are working as a team, determined and relentless. But why we are doing it - if indeed "we" exist in any meaningful sense - is another matter.

Is it because it's great, or just because it's there?

Twitter, meet Escher

For Matthew Baldwin of Seattle, the technical writer, blogger and board-game maven who invented Infinite Summer, the reasons were fairly simple. "I thought, 'If I'm going to read a 1,000-page book, I'm going to rope some more people into it,' " he said in an interview. He and a few online buddies had already group-read Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita over previous summers. The thought of tackling the recent suicide's forbidding masterpiece bounced around irresolutely until, one day this spring, the words "infinite summer" came together in his mind.

"I honestly don't think I would have gone to all this trouble if I hadn't come up with that super-catchy phrase," Baldwin confessed.

Wallace, who set his novel in a near future measured by Subsidized Time - Year of the Whopper followed by Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, culminating with Year of Glad - would have loved the irony of the branding. But it worked. There are more than 4,000 people in the Infinite Summer Facebook group with their own reasons for mounting the assault, more than 3,000 Twittering about it, and untold thousands more hitting Infinitesummer.org every day. The site's forums already contain more than 2,000 posts, suggesting their own infinity. If that's not enough, there are such offshoots as Infinite Zombies, "a group blog about the group reading of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ."

Twitter is currently consumed with the question of whether the critical Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar refers to soap or ice cream. To get a sense of the madness, try Googling the phrase "Byzantine erotica." Your computer will be overwhelmed by chat about David Foster Wallace, who buried a passing reference to that apparently non-existent phenomenon somewhere within the first 200,000 words of Infinite Jest .

There are as many reasons to read the book as there are keyboards in cyberspace. But the best, says katrinaruth on Infinitesummer.org, is "because all the cool people are doing it this summer."

My main motive for joining is penitential, having lost my taste for modern fiction some years ago, and perhaps having complained too often about how useless I found most of it. It tickled my prejudice when Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, who has never published a single useless word, declared the novel "over" a few years back. I nodded along with venerable editor Diana Athill - Naipaul's editor - when she confessed in her most recent memoir, Somewhere Towards the End , to being "bored by a large proportion of available fiction."

Hearing such words from the top of the mountain made me feel less lonely in my exile from the self-satisfied cult of so-called book lovers - lotus-eaters, novel readers.

Athill laments the absence of modern equivalents to such masters as Eliot, Tolstoy, Dickens and Proust. "They are so rare because they are a different kind of person, just as a musical genius is: They have an imaginative energy of a kind so extraordinary that it is hardly too much to describe it as uncanny." The contemporary novel is a poor substitute. But then she makes an exception for Infinite Jest and David Foster Wallace, "exhausting though he can be."

And inescapable, it would seem. So here we go.

An indispensable chaos

I said I liked it immediately, but I might as well have said I rather admire the Pacific Ocean. One does not dip one's toes into Infinite Jest. One falls helplessly into a vast and teeming alternate reality. One senses immediately that Wallace understood the crisis gripping his trade, and responded with a novel that would establish new frontiers in the extension of a single human imagination. If it were technology, the masses would swoon at its power. As a novel, it blasts the rickety foundations of the old form to smithereens.

How to reduce such an awesome thing to a phrase? Given its illicit-substance-soaked content, I toy with "Nabokov on ecstasy." Nabokov naked and wailing, with blood in his eyes. But funny, so outrageously funny. I am disturbing the sleep of my children with the yelps, gasps and guffaws that emit from my bedroom at night. More quietly, I am shuddering and crying. Reading Infinite Jest is like trying to swallow a goat and discovering it is the most stimulating experience imaginable.

But once you finish, you are unlikely ever to try again. My new motive for finishing Infinite Jest is to support a growing suspicion this masterpiece of a spectacular genius may indeed be the last 498,000 words to be said on the matter. Just as an ancient tradition of epic poetry died with Paradise Lost, Infinite Jest immolates the artistic form it boldly perfects. Knowing the author killed himself while struggling to complete his next novel rather emphasizes the point.

In an oft-cited public-radio interview conducted shortly after the book's publication, the author acknowledged his huge book is structured in the form a "very primitive fractal" called a "Sierpinski gasket," albeit a slightly lopsided one. "It looks basically like a pyramid on acid," he said.

Before he became a writer, Wallace was both a skilled mathematician and a published philosopher. Among mathematicians, making Sierpinski gaskets out of random drawings is known as "the chaos game." Others have described the sprawling novel's structure as resembling a sheet of shattered glass. Each shard gleams intensely and somehow fits into a perfect whole. Amazingly for a novel so dense, convoluted and ferociously non-linear, none seems extraneous.

"We'd agreed early on that my role was to subject every section of the book to the brutal question: Can the book possibly live without this?" wrote Wallace's editor, Michael Pietsch of Little, Brown, in an early post on Infinitesummer.org. "Knowing how much time Infinite Jest would demand of readers, and how easy it would be to put it down or never pick it up simply because of its size, David agreed that many passages could come out, no matter how beautiful, funny, brilliant or fascinating they were of themselves, simply because the novel did not absolutely require them."

Having reached the 300-page mark, I am ready to say I want them back. Nobody willing even to look sideways at a 1,079-page book is going to be put off by another few hundred. I suspect there are many readers already dreading the moment, scheduled for Sept. 21, when we finish.

Calling all FLQ operators

At the beginning, it seemed that everybody was complaining about the endnotes that puncture and parse the crazy-quilt fabric of Infinite Jest. I like to think Wallace included them to fend off the pap-preferring "book lovers." If he had written nothing other than Note 24, "James O. Incandenza: a Filmography," he would have earned a place in the pantheon. Sample plot summaries from the meticulously catalogued 75-film oeuvre:

"Sadistic penal authorities place a blind convict and a deaf-mute convict together in 'solitary confinement,' and the two men attempt to devise ways of communicating with each other."

"Mobile holograms of two visually lethal mythological females duel with reflective surfaces onstage while a live crowd of spectators turns to stone."

"God and Satan play poker with Tarot cards for the soul of an alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman obsessed with Bernini's The Ecstasy of St. Teresa."

"A cellular phone operator, mistaken by a Québécois terrorist for another cellular phone operator the FLQ had mistakenly tried to assassinate, mistakes his mistaken attempts to apologize as attempts to assassinate her and flees to a bizarre Islamic religious community whose members communicate with each other by means of semaphore flags, where she falls in love with an armless Near Eastern medical attaché."

It might seem merely showy if none of it fit together, but miraculously, it does. Note 24 is as much a key to the book as the long-awaited list, on page 223, showing the actual sequence of the Subsidized Time the book's many interlocking plots scrupulously observe.

Structure hardly matters, Wallace said in the interview. "The real intellectual adventure is to try to find patterns and meanings."

His horror, he added, was that readers might see his apparently chaotic juggling of innumerable characters, in and out of just as many Hydra-headed plotlines, as merely gratuitous: more clever-clever po-mo games of the sort he mastered as a young writer - and had since come to disdain. "I sort of think all the way down to my butt hole I was a different person coming up with this book than I was with my earlier stuff," he said.

"Whatever is hard about the book is in service to something that, at least for me, is good and important," he added, apologizing for being "cheesy" - daring to bring such a commanding moral vision to light in the diminished world of avant-garde fiction, "to write a book this long, designed to be read more than once."

So it is infinite after all - but in a good way. Infinite Summer's organizers doubt that anybody who has reached page 300 could stop if they wanted to. But none of us do, so the point is moot. Because it's there, and because it's great. You must read it.

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