''Infinite Jest''

----------------------------------------------------------------- "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace Little, Brown, $29.95 -----------------------------------------------------------------

A single word best describes David Foster Wallace's new novel: excessive. A 1,079-page brick, "Infinite Jest" is that rare literary feat - a grandly ambitious, wickedly comic epic on a par with such great, sprawling novels of the 20th century as "Ulysses," "The Recognitions" and "Gravity's Rainbow."

It is, in other words, brilliantly excessive, a work of genius that overshadows its advance hype.

Described as a novel about a movie so entertaining that no one can stop watching it, "Infinite Jest" isn't really about anything; rather, it traces characters with damaged lives, following stories-within-stories that are comic or as serious as a heart attack. Wallace links them all by a single theme: our bizarrely funny and frightening high-tech culture, a society addicted to addiction, obsessed with obsession, whatever the form. Set in a not-too-distant future, the novel depicts a world in which "teleputers" have replaced broadcast TV, and America refers to years not by numbers but by titles like "The Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad."

Wallace focuses on three organizations, the first being Boston's Enfield Tennis Academy, an elite private school for prodigiously talented adolescent tennis pros. The star is Hal Incandenza, a marijuana-dependent genius memorizing the Oxford English Dictionary whose late father was an obsessed filmmaker responsible for movies such as "Blood Sister: One Tough Nun."

The Incandenzas are the quintessential dysfunctional family. Hal was damaged for years by discovering his father's suicide - though less disturbing than the sight of his dad's head in the microwave was Hal's first thought on entering the house: "Something smells delicious!"

The second organization, across the street from the academy, is an AA halfway house for recovering substance abusers such as Steepley, whose father was addicted to "M # A # S # H," and Randy Lenz, who still dips into cocaine and can't shake an obsession with asphyxiating stray cats in Hefty bags. Randy also is involved with the third organization, a violent Quebecois separatist group, AFR (an acronym for a French name roughly translating as "Assassins in Wheelchairs"), led by a legless Quebecer and an American transvestite.

Written in exuberant, serpentine prose, "Infinite Jest" runs the gamut, from knee-slapping irony to bleak grotesquerie. There is, for example, an emotionally warped student whose father, a novelty manufacturer, surprises his mother at Christmas with a can of macadamia nuts containing a spring-loaded snake; it causes the woman to drop dead on the spot. The increasingly crazed father finally loads a case of trick cigars with lethal explosives, decapitating "a V.F.W., three Rotarians, and 24 Shriners."

With a sophisticated lexicon and mesmerizing syntax reminiscent of William Gaddis ("J.R.," "The Recognitions") and William T. Vollman, "Infinite Jest" is our most thorough dissection of America's addiction to about everything, including treatment itself. Though it occasionally borders on preciousness, it is a wild, surprisingly readable tour de force, a high-energy satire of '90s America in the savagely funny tradition of Swift and Sterne.

After his first two novels, "The Broom of the System" and "Girl With Curious Hair," serious readers anticipated that David Foster Wallace would become one of our most gifted novelists. "Infinite Jest" proves them right. Greg Burkman is a Seattle book and visual-arts reviewer who contributes to Booklist, ARTIFACT and Reflex.