That was basically my reaction too. Wallace had a fertile brain that sprouted ideas like kudzu, but like kudzu they tended to overwhelm the story (not to mention the footnotes). I understand Wallace's editor had to fight tooth an nail to convince him to whittle the sucker down to even semi-manageable form. That editor deserves a Purple Heart. If it were me, I'd have excised the whole Quebecois bit and made it a separate book; it wasn't essential to the main story and was a massive distraction.
In general I feel IJ was the po-mo version of Ulysses - a long, complicated work that many more people claim to have read than actually did read.
