A good fiction writer can transport you to a different time and place, making you forget about your day-to-day life for a little while. A really good fiction writer can transport you to a different time and place, making you forget about your daily life for several days in a row. And a really, really good fiction writer can burden you with over 1,000 pages of frequently non-linear storytelling, augmented by copious endnotes that may or may not be directly related to the plot, all of which takes months of diligent reading to muck through, while this monstrous paperback in your lap slowly cuts off circulation to your legs - and still you're magically transported to another time and place, with not a care in the world.

For this, I will miss David Foster Wallace.

I do not purport to have grasped all, most, or even a small percentage of the significant ironies, plot twists, social commentaries, and jokes that Wallace weaved into his landmark novel, "Infinite Jest." In fact I read it mostly against my will. I grudgingly kept at it only thanks to the sharp and constant prodding of a friend who I'm sure would have secretly thought less of me had I failed to finish it - and who probably thinks less of me anyway after I admitted that I skipped a few of the endnotes when line after line of tiny font started to blur on the page and give me a headache. But like listening to a Coltrane album for the first time or trying to make sense of a Pollock painting, I knew there was genius in Wallace's artistry. It just took a lot of head-scratching to make what sense of it I could.

Years after reading the darned thing, I fondly remember the world it transported me to, an unsettling vision of Boston in the near future where the years are referred to by their corporate sponsors ("Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad," "Year of the Whopper") and where legal street parking alternates sides at precisely midnight, leading to frantic U-turning and re-parking by all of Boston's residents at 11:59 every night.

At times, dozens of pages into a tangential story about a game of international warfare played by children on a tennis court, or the romantic exploits of a football kicker, I grinned with satisfaction when I understood the points that Wallace was trying to make about pop culture in America today. At other times, I was just tempted to reach for the latest Dan Brown book or flip on the television and watch "Friends." In the end, I'm glad to have experienced the world that Wallace transported me to in "Infinite Jest." Wallace's life was cut short on Sept. 12 after a long battle with depression. He was a professor of creative writing at Pomona College near Los Angeles, where he will surely be missed. He leaves a wife, his parents, and a sister. He also leaves a collection of novels and essays that, provided you are tenacious and ready, will take you to some wonderful places and make you think, perhaps a little bit more than you want to. Or, there's always a "Friends" rerun on television instead.

BILL ZUCK wishes he had been born in the Year of the Dairy Queen Blizzard. You can reach him at wcz78@yahoo.com.