I first encountered Infinite Jest way back whenever it came out in Ireland in paperback, at the back of Hodges Figgis in Dublin. I'd never heard of it or of David Foster Wallace, but I was fascinated by the sheer size of it. I was at the time not averse to vast tomes of science fiction or fantasy, anything so long as they were entertaining. This did not look entertaining. It had a tiny little blurb that seemed to sum up a plot that should have been very attractive to me, but I knew just looking at it that this book was not about plot. This book was dense, complex, and had footnotes that looked scary. I was more used to Terry Pratchett's footnotes, which were hilarious. Worse still, erudite-looking blurbs from elevated literary critics writing impossibly academic reviews for highly respected broadsheet newspapers with horribly serious review sections were calling it funny. A comedy. That was it. That was pretty much the kiss of This Isn't For Me.

But I was sad about it. I wanted to know what it was about. I wanted to know how a book with a plot about a search for a deadly film - a plot straight out of Ramsey Campbell and Jonathan Carroll, to name but two - could possibly fill a book this big, and how a book this big and serious could possibly be about THAT. This book was a mystery to me, and normally I liked books with Mystery. After all, it was the sense of magical Mystery that made me fall in love with lord Of The Rings. But I sensed that this was not that sort of Mystery. This was the Mystery of Life in the Real World, and I was pretty sure I wasn't ready for that.

Well, now I've read it. I was right! The book is Mystery. It is dense with stuff, thick with language and character and situations and institutions and interfacings and interactions. It plumbs the depths of stark naked honesty and the horror of hitting bottom and the repetitive banality of just non-stop talking about it via the world of AA and NA. It scales the privileged heights of irony and secrets and silence and entrapment in the highly regimented world of the Tennis Academy. And while those two things take up the bulk of the book, the sheer concentrated accumulation of details about lives and worlds and families and routines and rituals and addictions, there ticks over the satiric science-fiction world-building and the plot by the initially comic-seeming but ultimately revolting wheelchair assassins and their plot to free Quebec from union with America by finding and unleashing the lethal entertainment.

Yeah, wheelchair assassins. Guys with no legs. Then there's the woman in the veil, the brother with pronounced physical disabilities, the overmuscled arms and legs of the athletes, the tattoos and other disfigurements of the addicts. This is a book full of mutilation and woundings and disabilities and deformities. The psychic scarring of the characters should be beyond description, but Wallace goes ahead and describes them anyway.

And yet it is a brilliant book. Incredibly readable and often wonderful. Heartfelt, moving, but also sordid and horrifying. An epic of dependency and prepackaged entertainment. I kept waiting for the plot to kick in properly, and sometimes it did, but the end and the beginning - the first part of the book opens a year after the main events of the book unfold - do not join except in the most suggestive and ambiguous way. This should have been annoying and frustrating, but it wasn't. I felt he could have gone on for another thousand pages and gotten no closer to a conventionally satisfying resolution. Wallace gives us everything we need to know. No amount of light or detail or plot would reveal more of the Mystery. Whatever's left, we have to puzzle out for ourselves.