After seeing the infinite jest pop up a few times, I hope there is a follower who has read the book who can explain this to me

gentlemantiger:

Is it actually as much of ‘toss videodrome in with a cast of stock Important Literary Characters’ as the Wikipedia article implies?

No – there is a whole lot more to the plot than that, including a bunch of stuff about recovering from addiction, the stress of being a competitive tennis player, and Quebecois separatists.

There are basically three main threads – one at a halfway house for recovering addicts, one at an elite tennis academy, and one about Quebecois separatists.  The latter is mostly where the lethally entertaining videotape comes in, but it also gets the least “screen time” (page count?) of any of the threads.

ETA: even in the sections about the videotape, it isn’t really that much like Videodrome, except in the sense that “there is an unusual videotape that does weird disturbing things.”

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