Books
Ferocious appetites
by Carl Shuker
The disturbing brilliance of David Foster Wallace.
Has David Foster Wallace become cynical?
Way back, after Brief Interviews with Hideous Men finally emerged into the last pale-violet remains of the afterglow of Infinite Jest, there was a time when this was an important question. A superfan I know assumed the most intense of expressions, took the 30 seconds’ processing time appropriate to address a question of such gravitas and, at last, with a cringe and a squint, reluctantly acquiesced that there was a case to be made. We smiled at each other with the pleasurable ache of sharing a hero in danger. We pondered gravely.
Wallace described his first novel, The Broom of the System, as “the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP who’s just had this mid-life crisis that’s moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction and Austin-Wittgenstein-Derridean literary theory, which also shifted his existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6 percent calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct”. No matter how much of a disguised bildungsroman it might have been, the book wound up as a smart cartoon, a kind of early Pynchonian South Park, alluding to Wittgensteinian problems of context and inextricability with a combination of oblique gestures and slapstick gags (and too many jokes about dick size) that never seemed to coalesce into something that fully resonated. But it was still – occasionally – incredibly funny, and full of shining moments that usually had much less to do with, say, intellectual prowess than they did with Wallace’s already mature, acute and unerring sense of the tragic pathos of (even the most absurdist) insoluble dilemmas.
The next book was Girl with Curious Hair, a collection of short stories that included stunning experiments with dialect (“John Billy”) and a long novella (“Westward the Course of Empire Makes Its Way”), that, although at first read like labouring, über-extended metafiction, was in fact a critique of the action of metafiction on straight fiction – ie, labouring, über-extended meta-metafiction. But simply to say that anything Barth can do, dfw can do meta would be to ignore the brilliant, deadpan satire of the title story and the luminous, hallucinogenic “Lyndon” – a near-conventional political fable featuring a chillingly well-rendered LBJ that demonstrated that when Wallace wants to play it straight, he can do it with one hand tied behind his back. Packed with terrible and brilliant jokes, terribly sad and brilliantly turgid digressions and allusions, Curious Hair marked the next step for a writer seemingly intent on mastering as many forms of narrative expression as possible. Reading dfw made one want to read more of everything, to understand how he got where he was, so young, so confident. But he was still on the way, still going somewhere, and that place was the huge fantastic world of 1996’s Infinite Jest.
There are those who avoid the novel and Wallace, seeing the praise that he and the book garner as evidence of some kind of collusive, patrician, white and chauvinistic conspiracy engineered to privilege the overeducated and the emotionally underfunded. People use words like exasperating, smart-aleck, overwritten, overloaded (yet, interestingly, never overwrought). The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani grimaced and tut-tutted as she always does when reading Wallace, mixing strong condemnation with a dash of reluctant admiration, and likening the novel to an unfinished, “under-excavated” masterpiece. Even after, as everyone who frequents thehowlingfantods.com website knows, Wallace’s editor at Little, Brown left 700 manuscript pages on the cutting-room floor. Now the book is in its long term, canonically speaking, representing a landmark to those in the know, and a big, troubling, yet avoidable hole in the road for those who aren’t.
The most intriguing thing about Infinite Jest from the perspective of the fiction Wallace has produced since is that it is an intensely sad, loving and big-hearted book. Fans shared copies of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, murmuring encouraging disclaimers. “It’s … different …” And after reading, the question was popped. Has he? It was perhaps the sense that dfw was in consolidation mode; that, just after he had given so much in Infinite Jest, we wanted him to give us more and more, and, instead of the combination of heart and head, we got something different – something colder, smarter and more abstract.
So, despite prior publication of several of the stories, Oblivion was awaited with great anticipation, and some suspicion.
It has been met with a similar ambivalence: a bemused rehash of dfw’s stylistic tics here, a critical savaging here, a New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year inclusion over, well, there. The point has been missed by many. Although it often feels as abstract and overly (though less overtly) concerned with form as Brief Interviews, Oblivion is a widely varied and subtle experiment in structure, and part of Wallace’s ongoing argument for the work required to extract the pleasures of difficult and challenging fiction.
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