I’ll say “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace.

It’s 1,079 pages long, has 388 endnotes, some of which have footnotes added.

Someone has made the following diagram to display how the book characters are somehow related, what part of the book’s world looks like, and how time is segmented:

The above isn’t really the tricky part; actually, I feel the above is merely blather. The tough part for me, is delving into how DFW has written the characters by using his very high level of intelligence while being the geek that he was.

Infinite Jest proved that he could write a very complex book without making it complicated; all of the endnotes had meaning, at least somehow, as you had to move hundreds of pages from one side of the book to the other, to and fro, to read them. Have you ever read a thousand-page book while commuting? That’s difficult, at least it was for my wrists.

Much like reading Marcel Proust and also Alan Moore’s “Jerusalem”, the language of the book flows like a gentle wave of water that slowly envelops you, provides a deep-seated lull which creates a world of its own; DFW wasn’t bound by regular book-writing rules. Folks like Barthes, Faulkner, Delillo, Franzen, and Saramago have attempted to create similar stuff, but “Infinite Jest” is, to me, in a class of its own. That’s just based on how I feel about this stuff as I’m not a literary scholar in any way or form.

Part of DFW’s genius always displayed in how his empathic genius wrote characters and their movements. It’s some really tough shit to get through, as there’s so much substrata to be found. DFW was a lingual genius as well, which just adds to it all. There’s the philosophy of his work that he really pushed, perhaps best together in competition with his peer and friend Jonathan Franzen, and solely excelled at; there’s so much to understand from all of what goes on in this book, that it’s worthy of re-reading, even though it’s monolithic.

Also, it’s flawed. I could go bored out of my mind at times, irritated at DFW’s language and his innate geeky intelligence which just made me want to go listen to the Ramones and not have to think so much. And there’s passages in the book that allow you to get loose, but if you’re not constantly awake, there’s a sense of “blink and you miss it” throughout. But really not. But there is.

It’ll probably take me a lifetime to get the gist of this palaver, but overall, it’s not the minutiae that’s overwhelming: it’s the universe of it. While most books are pretty much start->character description->hardship->overcoming it->end, this is so much stuff going on at the same time… There are flowcharts available on the Internet, that describe the parallel events that go on throughout the book, from personal disintegrations to Quebec terrorism, to videos that’ll drive you insane, family situations, halfway house rehab mishaps, to… It’s a lot. But at the same time, you pick and choose.

It’s also insanely interesting as DFW foresaw our future by being able to succinctly see what was happening, and simply forecasting an ultra-medial world where the Internet is available to us at all times, but we end up watching The Kardashians.

So, get in here, at your own peril.