I read this review by Patricia Lockwood of a book by David Foster Wallace. I’d never read the book being reviewed, but that was no problem because the review itself was readable and full of interesting things. What struck me was how important Wallace seemed to be to her. I’ve heard of Wallace and read one or two things by him, but from my perspective he’s just one of many, many writers, with no special position in the world. I think it’s a generational thing. Wallace hit the spot for people of Lockwood’s age, a couple decades younger than me. To get a sense of how Lockwood feels about Wallace’s writing, I’d have to consider someone like George Orwell or Philip K. Dick, who to me had special things to say.
My point about Orwell and Dick (or, for Lockwood, Wallace) is not that they stand out from all other writers. Yes, Orwell and Dick are great writers with wonderful styles and a lot of interesting things to say—but that description characterizes many many others, from Charles Dickens and Mark Twain through James Jones, Veronica Geng, Richard Ford, Colson Whitehead, etc etc. Orwell and Dick just seem particularly important to me; it’s hard to say exactly why. So there was something fascinating about seeing someone else write about a nothing-special (from my perspective) writer but with that attitude that, good or bad, he’s important.
It kinda reminds me of how people used to speculate on what sort of music would’ve been made by the Beatles had they not broken up. In retrospect, the question just seems silly: they were a group of musicians who wrote some great songs, lots of great songs have been written by others since then, there’s no reason to think that future Beatles compositions would’ve been maybe more amazing than the fine-but-not-earthshaking songs they wrote on their own or that others were writing during that period. What’s interesting to me here is not to think about the Beatles but to put myself into that frame of mind in which those Beatles were so important that the question, What would they have done next?, is considered so important.
That’s why I call Wallace, and some of the other writers discussed above, “local heroes,” with their strongest appeal localized in cohort and time rather than in space. “Voice of a generation” would be another way to put it, but I like the framing of locality because it opens the door to considering dimensions other than cohort and time.
Has anyone actually read Infinite Jest? I tried but after fifty pages decided that there were lots of welcoming books I hadn’t read yet. It would take an infinite amount of time to read that book; that’s the jest. I suspect that it is like Finnegan’s Wake, highly praised by people who were actually incapable of reading it.
BTW, the Lockwood review made me check my morning meds to make sure I hadn’t taken some THC edible instead of my lisinopril.
I like many complex works. I’m willing to work to read books. I read Faulkner, Nabakov, Joyce (one exception), etc.
I read it. I did not find it anywhere near as impenetrable as Finnegan’s Wake; I think a better comparison on those lines would be Ulysses. I would not argue that these on the same level as works of great literature, just that I think they’re roughly comparable in my ability to read them with normal attention and figure out what is going on. You could try it again, maybe it would seem more readable, that happens to me sometimes.
No, no, no! Oh gosh, oh gosh! Um … erk …
I am 5 years younger than you Andrew, and David Foster Wallace was important to me, and to lots of people my age and older. There’s something magical about the fusion of Pynchonian zaniness with confessional intimacy, probably derived from his teacher Stanley Cavell … it was a way of moving forward without moving backward …
Oncodoc, Infinite Jest is WAY more readable than Finnegan’s Wake, definitely worth the investment IMO. There’s about 400 pages of really intensely moving writing about addiction and recovery in there. I remember the spring I spent reading it, maybe 20 years ago, it was the only thing I read for like 4 months.
And the Beatles … the question is whether they would’ve made some late-in-life turn that lived up to the amazing revolutions of their earlier music. Like Beethoven or maybe Dylan. Could they redraw the map a second or third time? Turn maturity and age into a new kind of rock music? Why is that a silly thing to wonder about?
Dmitri:
1. The generational overlap thing is only some sort of average; it won’t work in every individual case. For that matter, Orwell has always mattered a lot to me, and I was born after he’d been dead for 15 years. John Updike means a lot to me too, and there’s no way I’m his target generation. Veronica Geng too.
2. Regarding the Beatles: sure, I guess. It just seems to me that the most likely outcome would’ve been many more albums of “Band on the Run”-style material. I’d rather just have ELO. I agree to having some curiosity about what they’d do next, but it doesn’t seem like such a big question anymore. But maybe you’re right that I’m missing the point in that I’m evaluating the Beatles based on the quality of their songs without also giving them credit for being innovative.
I’m skeptical that a fondness for David Foster Wallace is a generational thing. I’m sure the number of people of any generation who like David Foster Wallace is extremely small, but perhaps those who do are very passionate about it, maybe like model train or vegan cheese aficionados.
I believe I’m halfway between Patricia Lockwood and Dmitri (above) in age, if that counts for anything. In 2022, I finally read Infinite Jest and I noted, “It took me a long time to finish all 981 pages. Was it worth it? No. At times, it’s brilliant – funny, poetic, imaginative. But much of it is a slog.” I didn’t even bother noting it in my end-of-year list.
Raghu:
Maybe what I’m getting at is not so much that Wallace is so important to Lockwood, but rather that Lockwood seems to think it’s so natural that he’s so important to her. That’s the generational part. I think that a writer of a different generation might feel the need for more of an explanation as to why Wallace seems so important.
I checked Infinite Jest out of the library, and remember that I stopped reading after the first paragraph (or sooner). It just didn’t connect. I don’t think I have ever been persuaded by a novel so quickly that I didn’t wan to read it.
Wallace wrote on a wide variety of topics. I never read his fiction, but did enjoy some of his nonfiction, including, for math aficionados, his quirky “Everything and More” volume on infinity which I reviewed almost 10 years ago on an old blog:
https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2014/07/infinity-and-angst-david-foster-wallace.html
I enjoyed just about every piece in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments.” Anyone who thinks they don’t like DFW because they tried and hated Infinite Jest should try reading this.
Supposedly Fun Thing is awesome. His essays on tennis are also great, even if you are not a tennis fan. The String Theory about Michael Joyce, a tennis player no one ever heard about, is available online: https://www.esquire.com/sports/a5151/the-string-theory-david-foster-wallace/
My vague impression from starting TIJ several years ago is that the man could write, but I didn’t like his characters. My “best book” award went consecutively from Heinlein’s “Red Planet” (pre-teen) to Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” to L. Sprague de Camp and Pratt’s “The Incompleat Enchanter” to Pohl and Kornbluth’s “The Space Merchants” to Heinlein’s “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” to Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle”, and then I stopped keeping score.
Blindfold me in a library and I wouldn’t like probably 95 out of 100 books I grabbed, but the other five I would like a lot. I have accepted that people’s tastes in books varies a lot, so those I don’t like might please somebody else.
Rereading some of my favorites takes me back in time to the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s, etc. Life was a lot different then. Probably most youngsters now wouldn’t connect well with those books. (“What’s a pay phone and why should I care?”)
I particularly liked Wallace’s book of essays entitled ” String Theory”, a collection of essays about tennis. His piece on tennis great Roger Federer is the best writing on tennis that I have ever read. Another memorable essay is about Michael Joyce, a less familiar tennis player and coach.
The only thing I’ve ever read by Wallace was his non-fiction essay, “Consider the Lobster”, which was published in Gourmet magazine, of all places. I thought it was quite good, especially given that I’m interested in issues related to animal rights. You can read the article here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230403152335/https://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf
Local Hero Authors might make a fun category for the next Seminar Speaker bracket.
It would hard to come up with authors with heroism of similarly-sized locales. My mind goes to Chinua Achebe (local hero to East Africa), Edward Gibbon (local hero to 19th Century elite), … and now I’m trying to think of other interesting dimensions of locality.
Gregor:
There are lots of local hero writers in the sense of physical locality: George V. Higgins, Alfred Kazin, Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, etc., really zillions of writers out there who are associated with some city or region or whatever. Other dimensions, though, hmmm: there’s that whole “lost generation” thing (F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc.), the First World War poets, some others, I guess.
You’d have to read DFW’s original Harper’s essays, and his early short stories, to understand why he became an intellectual star. Not the revised versions of the former that appear in collections. He really blew the doors off literary fiction and what was at the time called creative nonfiction. I don’t think it’s actually possible for someone to be famous in the way he was because not enough people care about literary writing anymore. But for those of us for whom he was indeed a local hero, he will always be important (even if most of us never read IJ)z