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It's a floor wax and a dessert topping! (UPDATED!)

Was Dave E----- against Infinite Jest before he was for it?  Selections from DE's 1996 review of IJ:

[Infinite Jest] is more about David Foster Wallace than anything else. It's an extravagantly self-indulgent novel, and, page-by-page, it's often difficult to navigate. Sentences run as long as 800 words. Paragraph breaks are rare. Aside from being incredibly verbose, Wallace has an exhausting penchant for jargon, nicknames and obscure references, particularly about things highly technical, medical or drug-related.

When people talk, they "interface." When they think hard, they "wrack their RAM." Things like tennis matches and math problems are described in excruciating detail. He has a fussy way with his adjectives and adverbs, while some -- such as "ghastly," which is used much too often -- have that disingenous [sic] feel that renders the narrative around them impotent.

Besides frequently losing itself in superfluous and wildly tangential flights of lexical diarrhea, the book suffers under the sheer burden of its incredible length. (That includes the 96 pages of only sporadically worthwhile endnotes, including one that clocks in at 17 pages.) At almost 1,100 pages, it feels more like 3,000.

Like, say, Rising Up and Rising Down?  Anyway, fair enough.  I'm sensing a "but":

Still, 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. In particular, while inhabiting the tortured, drowning minds of the addicts, he is devastating. Too often, however, "Infinite Jest" buckles under the weight of its own excess.

OK.  Now the big finish:

"Infinite Jest" also ends abruptly, leaving as many questions unanswered as does Jim's suicide. Like his alter ego's experimental films, the book seems like an exercise in what one gifted artist can produce without the hindrance of an editor. Subsequently, it's also an exercise in whether or not such a work can sustain a reader's interest for more than 1,000 pages and thus find an audience outside academia. Wallace's take on that can be found in the book's apt title. It's an endless joke on somebody.

(We will leave aside the hilarity of Mr. E----- making an oblique dig at someone for operating without the "hindrance of an editor," as much as it pains me.)

Anyway, let's take a look at that brand spankin'  new foreword again, as Mr. E----- (ca. 2006) returns ten years later to praise Infinite Jest to the high heavens.

Hmm:

David Foster Wallace has long straddled the worlds of difficult and not-as-difficult, with most readers agreeing that his essays are easier to read than his fiction, and his journalism most accessible of all. But while much of his work is challenging, his tone, in whatever form he’s exploring, is rigorously unpretentious.

Well, "rigorously unpretentious" (2006) isn't exactly the same thing as being full of "superfluous and wildly tangential flights of lexical diarrhea" (1996), now is it? But let's keep going:

The book is 1,067 pages long and there is not one lazy sentence. The book is drum-tight and relentlessly smart and, though it does not wear its heart on its sleeve, it’s deeply felt and incredibly moving.

Should I even bother pulling a quote out here?  Just glance upstairs again.  Now we have all that "lexical diarrhea" to go with "extravagantly self-indulgent" and "incredibly verbose" and "exhausting...jargon" and "excess" (1996) up against "unpretentious" and "not one lazy sentence" and "drum-tight" and "relentlessly smart" (2006).

Wait, I also see "no discernible flaws" and, Jesus, "Marcel Proust"!  As in:

...Wallace is a different sort of madman, one in full control of his tools, one who instead of teetering on the edge of this precipace or that, under the influence of drugs or alcohol, seems to be heading ever-inward, into the depths of memory and the relentless conjuring of a certain time and place in a way that evokes — it seems so wrong to type this name but then again, so right! — Marcel Proust. There is the same sort of obsessiveness, the same incredible precision and focus, and the same sense that the writer wanted (and arguably succeeds at) nailing the consciousness of an age.

So