Just finished on walk home today, no footnotes in this version though. My thoughts are slightly in line with earlier comment, though it was revealed later in that parts of the story are based on his own experiences when he was in the service of the IRS. It definitely doesn't stand as a whole book, and unfortunately the overarching story is even less revealed than infinite jest. He celebrates the champion of boredom though, with characters telling the stories of how they came to the IRS. This Is Water shared a lot of the same ideas, of acts of kindness from bureaucrats navigating the complexities of organizations to help a person. But in the same way that he made a twenty minute speech out of a joke about goldfish, there are many more complexities discussed, settings shown, and characters explored. I would recommend it, but not to people who haven't read infinite jest or other Wallace stories first (haven't read other books, just many stories/essays)