Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest is huge.

That's the first thing you need to know. If you are the sort of person who goes to sleep with a book balanced on their chest and wakes up when it falls on their nose, Infinite Jest will fall over and give you a black eye. That's how big she is. We're talking War & Peace, here.

To give you an idea of how big this book is, there's upwards of 300 footnotes, most of which are just a sentence or two. Several of them, however, are complete short stories in and of themselves, just to describe a single word.

It's also glorious. You could pick any chapter, at random, and it would be one of the greatest short stories you've ever read. Each sentence is immaculately, effortlessly, brain-meltingly smart. And it's always followed and proceeded by a similarly painfully smart sentence. If you're a fan of the well-crafted sentence, they are legion.

In terms of actual plot, well, the book isn't so much plot based. It's more about creating a completely self-sustaining world, not too dissimilar to our own, in which you get to wander about for a while. It is set at an unknown time in the future (years have become 'subsidized', which means instead of saying 2005, you'd say: "The Year of the Whopper" or "The Year of the Depends Adult Underwear"), in which America has joined with Canada, and turned all the northernmost states into 'the concavity'- a huge zone of garbage into which all of America's refuse is projected. Some of the book's most delicious scenes are set on an outcropping in the concavity, where Remy Marathe (a French-Canadian separatist) speaks with Hugh Steeply (a CIA agent) about America, Canada, and 'the entertainment'.

The Entertainment is a disseminated film that leaves anyone who watches it with no other desire than to keep watching that one film- removing the entertainment from their sight reduces them to a senseless coma. The content of it is alluded to but never revealed, and the CIA suspects that the separatists are using the entertainment as a weapon against America.

I may be inadvertantly implying that the entertainment is, in fact, what the book is about. Actually, this is simply one facet of many. Most of the novel switches between the dysfunctional Incandenza family, who live and work at an academy for tennis-playing prodigies; and the residents of Ennet House, a home for recovering drug addicts. To even begin to cover either of these subplots would take far more space than I have here.

Infinite Jest is funny, intelligent, and rewarding. It's also quite a mission to read and occasionally feels overwhelming. In fact, it's so big, it becomes such a complete place in your mind, it's actually really difficult to review with any justice. However it is one of the best books I have ever read, and I can give it my highest recommendation.

It's ace.