David Foster Wallace's last unfinished novel concerns the employees of an IRS Regional Examination Center. Men and women with strange powers are being gathered at this office for a mysterious political showdown within the IRS. The novel, more a collection of nearly unconnected fragments, is a rumination on boredom and the role of humanity in a machine-like environment.

Just after I finished reading this book I wrote a fairly negative review, that I thought the book had some brilliant moments, some astonishingly good writing, but the disjointed pieces and the fact that it was so very unfinished made it unworkable and disappointing for me. And then I sat on that review for months and now I've changed my mind. This is a better book than I initially thought, and it borders on magnificent.

The book is definitely unfinished, and it feels less like a novel and more like a collection of chapters and sections and scenes and pieces of things that might have been a novel at some point in the future. There's a corner and a few edge pieces and a big bit of sky over here, but for the most part, the puzzle is unfinished. And knowing of course that the book cannot ever be finished since Wallace hung himself is unbearably sad.

This is a very difficult book to read. It is essentially plotless, and the sections skip back and forth in the narrative. I came to the book with little knowledge of what it was about -- I didn't even look at the book jacket before I began -- and this made the book extra difficult for me. Even a few sentences of summary of what the plot was supposed to be (the ones I wrote at the beginning of this review, for example) will go a long way to helping one work through the book. A central theme of the book is the struggle of the mind over tedium, and many passages are (intentionally) written to be unbelievably tedious and boring. There were times with this book where it was just a slog to drag through a single page.

And yet.

There is so much to love about this book. So many sections that are so compelling and FUN to read. So many sections that are so beautifully written, so haunting. So many characters that are exquisitely drawn, for all their quirks. Technically the book doesn't hold together as a novel, but now that I have more distance from it it holds together in my head. It holds together and it has stuck with me. Lines and characters and scenes from this novel keep coming back to me over and over again. I am so glad I read this book, and I am so enriched for having read it.

Minus one star for being structurally unfinished, but easily one of the best books I've read this year.