The perfect ace

Why bother writing a review of a book that's been out for 15 years?

Why write a review when you suspect that very few readers will be persuaded to buy the book and to read its 1000 small-printed, narrow-margined pages and its 200 pages of absurdly tiny footnotes, some of which run on for 10 pages?

Why write it when the book is nearly impossible to find in South Africa anyway?

I have no answer to these questions except to say that I decided not so long ago that if I were to read David Foster Wallace's recently released posthumous novel, The Pale King, I would first have to read his supposed masterpiece from the mid-1990s, Infinite Jest.

The book is pretty bleak, its main themes revolving around drug addiction, tennis, man's quest for meaning, the meaninglessness of man's quest for meaning and about how addiction to tennis is a kind of meaning, as good as any.

We are our addictions, Wallace seems to be saying, and, pointless as they are, if you take them away, there is nothing left.

The first time I read about Wallace was immediately after he committed suicide in 2008, when obituaries on the world's book pages painted a doubtful picture of a brilliant writer with a cult following.

Then, some time last year, I happened on what purported to be a list of the 50 most well-thought-of or well-read articles on the internet.

Two of the top five were by Wallace. Third on the list was a piece about the Maine Lobster Festival that he wrote for Gourmet magazine, deploying sophisticated biological and moral reasoning to argue that only a brute would eat a lobster if he knew it was cooked alive.

The other was an account of the 2006 Federer-Nadal final at Wimbledon that Wallace wrote for the New York Times's magazine, called"Federer as religious experience".

I was blown away: written in a style so unpretentious as to seem the speech of a hyper-intelligent teenager, it was also precisely tuned and thoughtful. Consider, for example, his throw-away remark about Wimbledon's insistence that players wear all white. It is, Wallace says, something that the club "enjoys getting away with still requiring".

Think about the complexity and precision of the thought and the simplicity of its expression. It's something another writer might take two paragraphs to convey.

Wallace's was the most informed piece of tennis writing I had ever encountered. Not that I care much for tennis. The article proved the adage that there's no such thing as a boring subject, only boring writing.

There is little point in trying to convey a sense of Infinite Jest's numerous plots and characters. The book is too big and sprawling to do either justice. Suffice it to say that it is very funny, very sad and full of insight.

Big and sprawling though it is, Infinite Jest is also as tight as a drum that was once head prefect at drum-tightening school. Its size and its tightness mean it is a book of the richest possible rewards. So much so that, 450 pages from the end, I began to regret that I was already 450 pages from the end.

Apart from the originality of the writing, the vividness of the characters and the control Wallace has over all of it, the most striking thing about Infinite Jest is that the narrative arc curves back so completely as to form a perfect circle. You could start the book at any point and then read all the way round back to where you began and have, essentially, the same experience as a reader who started anywhere else in the text.

That might sound completely artificial and contrived. But it is contrived and artificial only in comparison with the more rigid structure of almost every other book you'll ever read. Compared with real life, however, Infinite Jest , in which every character is trapped in some cycle of addiction and repetition out of which they cannot break except by entering a new one, seems much less contrived than anything you'll find in more traditional works.

Get it and book yourself into a hotel room for a week. It'll change the way you read.

• Altbeker is the author of 'Fruit of a Poisoned Tree: A True Story of Murder and the Miscarriage of Justice'. 'Infinite Jest' is published by Little Brown, R137

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