A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Not every essay is great, but some of them are so sharp, witty, original and insightful that you'll wish he were your best friend--the one you talk to on the phone every day, the one who tells you the story about an every day event but makes it so fascinating and fun that you laugh uproariously.

He will be greatly missed by so many!

This collection of essays sparkles with style and wit. Though some of the pieces are overwrought and teeter on self-indulgence, even when the writing appears to turn to sardonic rambling there is much merit in Foster's articulate prose. The titular essay, at the end, is especially funny, and his adoration of the filmmaker David Lynch renewed my long-held interest in the "czar of bizarre."

You simply will not find writing this funny anywhere else. As evidence, I mention just one small topic in a book packed with them: Early in the book's final essay, in a long list of experiences Wallace has had, he mentions that he shot skeet at sea. A few paragraphs later, out of the blue, he pauses to note that it would be more accurate to say he shot AT skeet at sea.

Pretty funny, but maybe sixty pages later he gets around to actually describing the event. He describes the man in front of him, holding his shotgun with "casual scorn," as "perpetrating absolute skeetocide off the stern rail."

Just brilliant use of language.

David Foster Wallace is one awesomely smart guy. This is both his greatest strength and his potential Achilles heel as a writer. Personally, I will read anything this man writes, because I think he is a true genius with a rare sense of compassion, and a hilarious sense of humor. Even when his writing falls victim to its own cleverness, I still find it worthwhile - perhaps because one senses that the writer is a true mensch (not something I feel when being dazzled by the cleverness of a Dave Eggers, for instance).

Oh hell, I want to be seated next to DFW on a long transpacific flight subject to major delays, OK? I have an enormous intellectual crush on this man. And when I cavil, it is done out of love, pure and simple.

But when discussing this book, caviling would simply be out of place. It contains two of the funniest essays I have ever read in my life (the descriptions of his experiences on a cruise liner and at the state fair, respectively). Do yourself a favor. Read this book.

I came to this book of essays via 'Brief Interviews with Hideous' men, a recent DFW short story collection (which I found one of those books I wanted to enjoy but couldn't). This essay collection I found I wanted to enjoy, and I certainly did.

Some pieces contain long stretches of genius. The title piece and 'Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All' are both superb dissections of a luxury Caribbean cruise and a Midwestern country fair respectively. DFW, by merely turning up and observing, picks out with his genius power rays of observation, in hillarious and telling detail, the social rhythms and pulses of these occasions. The Caribbean cruise piece must rank as one of the great modern essays as the detail slowly accumulates to reveal a nauseous portrait of overprivileged wealthy American tourists going through their bovine (with DFW's accompanying 'bovinecophobia) activities, waited on to a ludicrous degree by servants and lackeys, with the express purpose of making sure their every whim is catered for. The Illinois fair piece similarly illuminates the Midwestern condition (people go on holiday to meet people, as opposed to the East Coast where they go on holiday to escape from people) and their dietary habits, their activities (horrendous sounding carnival rides, which the author finds terrifying) and their livestock and rural baking traditions. Credit too for whichever editor of Harpers had the foresight to send DFW on these trips. He certainly taps into a vibe that fairly rips off the page when he writes up such events.

DFW is truly a massively reconstructed Midwesterner. His influences and nostalgia all points Illinois way (as evidenced by a cool piece on the physics of tennis, and his junior ranking years), but his sensibility is all hip and modern - he is well up their with the savviest and smartest of New York writers, in fact he is well above the vast majority of them.

You get the sense that there is no modern feeling that DFW doesn't understand, or try to grapple with. Reading these pieces is to engage with a creative and comic mind of the highest caliber. Unlike many writers, DFW is a true polymath, equally at home in the figures and thought processes of science as he is with pure art. Whether it be the subliminal commercialism that infects so much of contemporary US life, the disturbing suspense (rather than the 'pleasant' commercial suspense) of David Lynch movies, or the unique difficulty modern writers have in grappling with the immense televisual culture, DFW casts illuminating, if at times abtruse, analysis on the situation.

I do feel his style is a little loose limbed at times - my, admittedly probably more hidebound British ear, found the liberal smatterings of 'sort of' 'kind of' and the ubiquitous 'like', though thankfully not ',like', which no one pronounces. And some sentences are clearly only for the super intellectual academic studier of pomo texts. The worst piece, 'Greatly Exaggerated' which trips around various French post modern type deconstruction of the author style theories, is full of sentences like the following: 'What Hix offers as a resolution to the debate is a combination of a Derridean metaphysics that rejects assumptions of unified causal presence and a Wittgensteinian analytic method of treating actual habits of discourse as a touchstone for figuring out what certain terms really mean and do'. Erm, quite.

Still, DFW is known as a super smart intellectual, and he can be forgiven the odd slightly pretentious indulging in his higher planes of thinking. For the majority of this book is accessible, and original, and sheds great light on a whole sweep of contemporary US life, and most importantly is often very very funny in a genuinely warm and human way, which is a trait I find lacking in certain youngish hipster authors.

DFW is virtually unknown in the UK. Unlike some of his contemporaries (particularly Franzen and Safran Froer), he has failed to gain much of a readership over here. His books are only stocked on the shelves of the largest or most enlightened stores. I hope this changes and more non US readers discover his unique voice. As for me, I am limbering up with his most recent essay collection 'Consider the Lobster' as a final wind up before tackling the immense 'Infinite Jest' - any views on how a British reader might find that book from people who have tackled that magnum opus?