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David Foster Wallace

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

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Like the tennis champs who fascinate him, novelist Wallace (Infinite Jest; The Broom of the System) makes what he does look effortless and yet inspired. His instinct for the colloquial puts his masters Pynchon and DeLillo to shame, and the humane sobriety that he brings to his subjects-fictional or factual-should serve as a model to anyone writing cultural comment, whether it takes the form of stories or of essays like
these. Readers of Wallace’s fiction will take special interest in this collection: critics have already mined «Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley» (Wallace’s memoir of his tennis-playing days) for the biographical sources of Infinite Jest. The witty, insightful essays on David Lynch and TV are a reminder of how thoroughly Wallace has internalized the writing-and thinking-habits of Stanley Cavell, the plain-language philosopher at Harvard, Wallace’s alma mater. The reportage (on the Illinois State Fair, the Canadian Open and a Caribbean
Cruise) is perhaps best described as post-gonzo: funny, slight and self-conscious without Norman Mailer’s or Hunter Thompson’s braggadocio.
Only in the more academic essays, on Dostoyevski and the scholar H.L. Hix, does Wallace’s gee-whiz modesty get in the way of his arguments. Still, even these have their moments: at the end of the Dostoyevski essay, Wallace blurts out that he wants «passionately serious ideological contemporary fiction [that is] also ingenious and radiantly transcendent fiction.» From most writers, that would be hot air; from one as honest, subtle and ambitious as Wallace, it has the sound of a promise.
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Цитаты

  • Eleazar Daniel Arellano Floresцитирует6 лет назад
    The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.
  • Eleazar Daniel Arellano Floresцитирует6 лет назад
    The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval.
  • Eleazar Daniel Arellano Floresцитирует6 лет назад
    t’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities.

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