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

As many have said, the title essay in this volume by Wallace is worth the price alone. I've been on a cruise before as well, and holy hell are Wallace's thoughts in this essay spot on. Every sentence drips with truth.

Of course, as with anything by Wallace, you've got to meet him half-way or you will not like/understand him. This collection, because most of these essays were written for magazines or as argumentative essays, is actually very conservative writing-wise for Wallace: there are no grammatical and syntactical acrobatics and page-long insanities that inform his book-length long works, or his more aggressive short stories (like the wonderful but taxing Oblivion).

Of particular relevance in this collection is a nearly 15 year old essay E Unibus Pluram, about the corrosive effects of irony as a literary tactic aimed at television. While some reviewers have suggested this essay is outdated (and in terms of its more topical references/subjects, it is), I think it probably holds more relevance than ever, with the kind of unfathomably corrosive effects that reality TV and MTV and etc. have had on youth culture and the English language. And this is coming from a ripe old aged-22-years fogie.

There are some portions of essays that drag, but I acknowledge that may be due to my own lack of interest (say, in tennis, for the second to last essay). This collection is full of some very funny and informative essays (including one on David Lynch) that are moderately readable even with little knowledge/experience of the subject. If you are just getting into reading Wallace, this is a great way to introduce yourselves before picking up his MUCH more experimental fiction.

I picked up this collection of Wallace's essays largely based on his reputation as one of America's young, "genius" writers, in the line of Franzen and Powers and while he amply demonstrates his exhaustive vocabulary and keen sense of observation, his selected subject matter is often mundane. The title essay, ultimate in the collection, recounting his 7-day Caribbean cruise, is by far the best work in the collection, but even it wonders off in the weeds with long passages of minutia that seem pointless except to demonstrate the author's verbal pyrotechnics. I find Wallace's signature stylistic trait, the liberal use of long digressive footnotes, to be distracting. Reading him is like browsing a Web page with numerous URL links to other far-flung pages, clicking on each link in sequence just to check out the reference and then navigating back to the original. By the time you get back, you've lost context and the author's original point -- rereading previous paragraphs often ensues. Suffice it to say, this 'two steps forward, one step back' reading experience is frustrating.

I'll rate this book a ***+ or ****- (since we don't get half stars) primarily based on the occasional nugget of wisdom or spot-on description Wallace sprinkles through his essays. It's certainly worth picking up, particularly a cheap remaindered copy, for the two or three decent essays in this set, since it's easy to skip the clunkers (like his visit to the state fair) and move onto the next piece.

You know those people who have everyone at your table laughing so hard they can hardly eat? Reading Wallace's essays is just like listening to one of them, complete with hysterically funny asides (long footnotes that will crack you up). Just don't try to read his stuff while eating. Oh, and check out his amazing piece on Roger Federer from last summer's New York Times magazine. You can find it on the Times website. It's worth a search.

I discovered Wallace about a year ago, when "Consider The Lobster" came out. (My review of that book explains why.) I have yet to read his fiction; 1,000+ page novels scare the hell out of me, and if you, like me, are one of the great "silent majority" (please, don't start with me, I know where the term originated and I don't need your history lessons, for reasons that should become apparent below), of fiction readers who tend towards popular fiction rather than "literary" fiction, you know where I'm coming from.

But with "Consider the Lobster", I was enchanted, and I did what I mostly do best with current trends: try and catch up 10 years later; those of you who read this and are old will understand; those youngsters among you are already rolling their eyes,if they've survived to this point, but to those survivors I say Wait!

Normally, I'm a bit of a "snoot", like DFW confesses to being in CTL, but unlike him, I haven't the grammatical chops to identify the guilty culprit beyond a reasonable doubt--and far less to name him/her/it. I can only identify when something sounds right or wrong.

And along comes this guy who is a top-notch writer, or so they'd have me believe, who uses colloquial expressions like "like" and "you know", and all those horrible things we were taught to "eschew" (is that the ugliest word in the language or what? It sounds like someone hacking a loogie), and then follows them with pithy observations that are seemingly beyond his years.

This guy actually begins sentences with "And so but" without apology or apparent irony, for God's sake! But his observations, his reporter's eye for detail, are so sharp and telling, and his prose so bitingly clear, that one forgives the annoyances of his style (the footnotes: please don't get me started), and tolerates his wacky genius.

Could he be a better writer? Yes, of course. Could he be funnier? Yes, that too. Could he be both? Probably not, unless he were to undergo a Richard Pryorish running-down-the-street-on-fire thing, which I don't think any of us want to see. And if you do, you're really sick.

So why is this guy a great writer? He breaks most of the rules, certainly all the rules he disagrees with, and leaves in their wake the standard ( Yes, David, "standard", whether you like it or not) postmodern (what a godawful word, and one that he's thankfully avoided in his more recent writings -- don't remember seeing it once in CTL) excuse/reason "That's how my generation talks", and the answer is because he's just plain good at writing. Like his description of himself as a junior tennis player, where he'd be steady and wait for his opponent to let his own mistakes beat him, in a way.

I'm not suggesting that he's a fine writer by default, or unforced error: but by perseverance, and adherence to a goal--describing the situation as he sees it, without apology or irony-- or, if irony's intended, advertizing it well.

Where I do think he is remarkably disingenuous is the point in the title essay where he goes off on Frank Conroy's admittedly "self-prostituting" [sic] essay plugging the cruise line, while explaining to us that advertisements, unlike essays, can never be art.

David, David, David ... tsk, tsk, tsk ....

OK, there's a difference between an essay and an advertisement, but: I read your essay in a book, and it was a book that I bought, and paid for with money out of my pocket, that I worked for, and does the fact that I didn't read it first in Harper's or Esquire or whatever change that? Wouldn't I have had to pay for it one way or another in order to read it in the first place, and doesn't that kind of shoot the legs out of your arguement that essays and ads are inherently different?

Hey, you mentioned postmodernism first, not me.....

David Foster Wallace is a profoundly gifted writer, particularly of nonfiction. Yet backtracking to this "early" anthology of his work was an experience that left me surprisingly disappointed. Admittedly, part of the problem is that his early-to-mid 1990's musings on television and pro tennis (which comprise a substantial portion of this book) are now simply out-of-date.

But additionally, Wallace lacked the focus needed to make his points clearly when he wrote these pieces. While I think it can be fascinating to watch a brilliant mind wander about on the page (Tom Wolfe's nonfiction comes to mind), Wallace is not wandering. He's willfully zigzagging, in the writer's equivalent of "Look Ma, no hands!"

And this obfuscatory style often undermines his own material. A funny line about how tennis pro Michael Chang has "as unhappy a face as I've ever seen outside a Graduate Writing Program" is hopelessly outnumbered by bits like "I was disabled because I was unable to accommodate the absence of disabilities to accommodate." Right. Wallace's word play and tangential trains of thought CAN be amusing and even delightful... but in A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING..., they are more frequently just a chore to read.