Coincidentally, I'm about 800 pages into Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" -- which means I only have another 200 or so to go :-)

I struggle like crazy with DFW's fiction, and generally enjoy his non-fiction. Matter of fact, his entire fiction oeuvre -- Broom of the System; and Infinite Jest -- remains in my incomplete stack.

Mind you, I did enjoy a few of the short stories in DFW's Girl with Curious Hair, so I have finished and liked some of his fiction. I just find his discursive, polymath-run-amok style exhausting in long fiction, where it's much more fun in non-fiction.

As synchronicity would have it, my two favorite DFW essays came out precisely a decade ago: "The String Theory". Esquire. July, 1996; and "Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise". Harper's Magazine. January 1996.

The former is also about tennis, while the latter is a wonderfully muscular bit of prose, with some of the best stuff Wallace has written. For example, there is a passage describing the Caribbean sunlight as being "exfoliating", a metaphor that I have gleefully ripped from DFW a number of times. It also has a section about cruise ship toilets that still makes me nervous every time I enter an airline lavatory.

I would definitely have to agree with the discursive, polymath part. I compared his writing style recently to a really good prog-rock band like Yes or Pink Floyd -- excellent technique and amazing proficiency with the instruments and so forth, but also really loooooong guitar solos and songs that take half an hour. I think a teacher may have written "show your work" on one of Dave's assignments at school, and he started applying it to everything.