I’ll have a longer post about the first 63 pages later — I’m working this afternoon — but my snap observation is that the opening reminds me a lot of the opening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” (1999).
I first noticed it in the section about the burglary victim with the head cold; that whole bit had the tragi-comic efficiency and off-kilter feel of the opening scene of “Magnolia,” in which the narrator tells a series of stories with neat, ironic outcomes — the first of which was a robbery-cum-murder by three vagrants. And then it occurred to me that the beginnings of both “Magnolia” and Infinite Jest set up a series of narratives that do not obviously interlock but that you expect will over time, and both introduce an exceptional, troubled boy.
Anderson’s film followed Infinite Jest by two years, so I wonder if he had read the book.