A Modest Construct | David Foster Wallace

Posts tagged `David Foster Wallace`

¶ Consider the Lobster

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace: Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; Year: 2005; Pages: 352

I’ve read Consider the Lobster before, though my review at the time wallowed a bit too much in a sort of fawning—and brief—incredulity at the author, rather than a substantive look at the book.

Since these essays are themselves reviews of sorts—dissections, really—it would be too easy for a review of Consider the Lobster to enter into a the territory of parody, being a review of a review of a review (more on this later).

This is also the first book of David Foster Wallace’s that I’ve [re-]read since his death in September of 2008. That knowledge, though it really shouldn’t, will undeniably change the character of his pieces in the minds of readers. There are fewer dramatic revelations than, say, his essay on depression or—according to my brother—his book about infinity, Everything and More. We are unlikely, in other words, to glean any particularly exciting or dreadful knowledge about DFW’s mysterious inner being from his pithy comments about the American pornography industry. But Consider the Lobster nonetheless contains some pieces which are superfluous in quality, and it’s worth handling some of the major ones individually rather than in aggregate.

¶ Spanking the Donkey

Spanking the Donkey by Matt Taibbi: Publisher: Three Rivers Press; Year: 2006; Pages: 368

I am aware of Matt Taibbi for two reasons: the first is I was recently made aware of his (new?) blog on TrueSlant, and I like his writing; the second is he was instrumental in founding The Buffalo Beast, whose “Fifty Most Loathesome People” column ends up being the highlight of my year.

Spanking the Donkey is more or less a collection of Taibbi’s coverage of the 2004 election cycle, taken from his articles in The Beast, New York Press, and Rolling Stone. I imagine that in 2006, when this book first came out, it must have seemed especially poignant to defeated liberals spending a lot of time in contemplative navel-gazing—or maybe not. When it comes down to it, Spanking the Donkey says less about the 2004 election and a little bit more about the election cycle generically.

¶ David Foster Wallace is dead

Why do all the writers I like kill themselves?

David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest and a lot of other things, as well as one of the most ferociously intelligent and talented writers I have ever had the pleasure of reading, hanged himself on Friday, September 12.

Wallace, who wrote with an explosive, ironic, but deeply serious passion about subjects ranging from tennis and politics to mathematics and cruise ships, was found dead by his wife in his home Friday night, according to the Claremont, Calif., police department. The 46-year-old author apparently hanged himself.

“He was the best of our generation, and his death is a loss beyond describing,” Richard Powers, winner of the National Book Award in 2006 for the novel The Echo Maker, told The Associated Press on Sunday.

He really was a fantastic writer. I still haven’t had the guts to get through the 1’000+ page Infinite Jest, but his essay collections are some of my favorite nonfiction, bar none.

There is one notable falsehood in AP’s report, though:

Asked what Wallace had been working on at the time of his death, [longtime editor Michael Pietsch] offered no specifics, but said: “He was always writing something. He was always doing something ambitious.”

I distinctly remember reading that Wallace was working on his next big piece of fiction (not short stories like Oblivion, but more like Infinite Jest). I know he probably has lots of unfinished writing that may eventually be edited and released, but this still sucks.

§2376 · September 15, 2008 · 3 comments · Tags: David Foster Wallace, death, literature

¶ The Braindead Megaphone

The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders: Publisher: Riverhead; Year: 2007; Pages: 272

Let me preface this review by saying that despite his ostensible fame—Genius Grant and all that—I’d never heard of George Saunders (or at least not insofar as I remembered him the next day). Taking as gospel his skill as a writer of fiction, his political savvy, poetic sensibility, &c., we must invariably turn to this, his first attempt at a collection of essays.

I am not impressed.

Don’t get me wrong: I agree with Saunders’ premises: the title essay is about how cultural discourse has become so watered down and irrelevant that making political or social choices is like choosing Pepsi as opposed to Coke. The rest of the essays are similarly charged, usually pretty left-leaning. Regardless, he makes good points; especially interesting is his trip to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, which is genuinely interesting travel/political writing.

But here’s my issue with Saunders, especially considering all the plaudits he has for his political sensibility and his nuanced craft: he’s not a very good nonfiction writer. His serious essays are generally teases, scraping the first few feet of a very deep issue, hinting at its subtext without ever really plumbing its depths. I invariably compare any essayist to David Foster Wallace, who manages to take any issue and run it through a gauntlet to a degree I wouldn’t have thought possible. I kept waiting for Saunders to start making better points, but it never came—only reiterations of the problem’s description, like that hack Seinfeld. “And what’s the deal with political discourse?”

Saunder’s satire is unbearably heavy-handed. It’s like somebody making a bad joke and then elbowing you conspicuously and saying “Get it? Eh? Eh?” Where’s the subtlety? If I want obvious political jokes, I’ll watch Real Time With Bill Maher, who’s much funnier.

One of these days, I’ll need to give Saunder’s fiction a try: it’s very possible I’ll be blown away by his talent. But I would advise him to stick to fiction, because honestly his essays just aren’t any good. Not recommended.

§1915 · October 24, 2007 · 1 comment · Tags: Book Reviews, books, David Foster Wallace, memes, Middle East, politics, satire, sociology

¶ A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace: Publisher: Back Bay Books; Year: 1997; Pages: 368

I’m no stranger to David Foster Wallace. You may recall that I digested another collection of essays entitled Consider the Lobster, which I enjoyed despite the sometimes-overbearing nature of Wallace’s writing.

In certain ways, I liked Consider the Lobster considerably more than A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. The latter contains just seven essays, and two of them concern tennis. I understand that Wallace himself played competitive tennis during his teenhood, and so the sport therefore holds a certain sentimental value for him, and I also understand that he can turn his musings on tennis (et al) into grand, archmetaphors, relating his frustration about losing his primacy at tennis to his opponents’ frustration in the chimerical whimsy of the Midwestern wind during a set, but at the same time, I don’t and never have given a shit about tennis.

But this is all incidental. Wallace delivers in grand style here, as he does in everything else. His love of page-long footnotes makes for scattered but wholly enjoyable reading. His tendency to jump between High Concept and potty humour, between academic diction and stream-of-conscious (“and so but then I went…”), between dissertation and bloglike candor, all color A Supposedly Fun Thing with the entire spectrum of rhetoric. Like David Sedaris, Wallace likes to make everything metaphor, or metaphysically significant. The difference between the two, however, is that Foster Wallace is something of a self-depracating postmodernist, and Sedaris isn’t quite so left-field.

The two highlights, I think, are Wallace’s pieces for Harper Magazine, in which he covers a visit to the Illinois State Fair, and the title piece in which he covers a Caribbean cruise on one of those Disney-World-on-rudders cruise liners, concomitantly among a throng a people and yet somehow strangely estranged. Also fantastic is his look at David Lynch (specifically Lost Highway), which is good even though it presupposes some knowledge of Lynch’s work, which I don’t have. Also fantastic, and which is my personal favorite even if it isn’t a linchpin for the collection, is his look at television-as-metafiction: basically, TV the poststructuralist artform escapes the wrath of p.s/deconstructionism because it is self-aware w/r/t its absurdity and thus something of a self-parody to begin with. Much of it went beyond me, and may well go beyond anyone without a background in lit. crit. or philosophy, but it was a staggering work nonetheless.

If I had to choose, I think I would recommend new readers get a hold of Consider the Lobster, which I view as a technically- as well as stylistically-superior book, though I don’t want to cast aspersions on this one—its good qualities are merely haphazardly present, and the essays themselves not necessarily as refined as the others. It would be silly of me to try to make any in-depth critique of the essays themselves, but I would definitely suggest—if you’ve got the grapes for such a thing—that you pick it up and give it a read. Wallace never really disappoints.

§1229 · June 28, 2006 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, David Foster Wallace, nonfiction, reviews