Ten essays by David Foster Wallace, on subjects ranging from US election to talk-back radio, via the porn industry, tennis and Dostoevsky. There should have been something here to like, but unfortunately my opinion has been coloured by Wallace’s writing tics, which annoyed the bejeezus out of me. More on that later.
There are ten essays in the book, some more interesting than others. Big Red Son is an account of attending the Adult Industry’s biggest trade show, which if you aren’t a customer of this industry (and even if you are) might tell you a thing or twenty you didn’t know. Authority and American Usage is a lengthy book review of Brian Garner’s American Usage, a kind of bible of American English. It also examines and unpacks the ‘usage wars’ in a way that uncovers some hidden motives of both camps. It’s a good essay if you’re a word nerd and/or a grammar Nazi.
The View From Mrs Thompson’s is an account of watching the events of 11 September 2001 unfold, from a small mid-West American town. It’s the best piece in the book. How Tracey Austin Broke My Heart unpacks sports biography, and tries to work out why people keep buying the genre even though its bland, uninteresting and unexceptional.
Up, Simba is a piece that Wallace wrote for Rolling Stone about the Republican Primaries for the 2001 Presidential election. Wallace followed John McCain as he fought George W Bush for the nomination. This was particularly interesting to read in the context of McCain;s loss to Obama last year. It explains some of McCain’s appeal, and it also documents some mistakes that McCain made all over again in the Presidential race.
Wallace is known for his writing style: long multi-clause sentence, extensive use of footnotes, and abbreviations that he makes up himself. The first and the last I can cope with. The footnotes, some of which take up more than a page, and some of which have their own footnotes and then footnotes on the footnotes to the footnotes, made me want to throw the book across the room. See, I was raised, so to speak, in a school of writing that follows these maxims:
- if it’s important enough to be in the text, it should be in the text, not in a footnote
- if you need a footnote to explain it, it’s either not as important to the text as you thought, or you need to explain it better
- footnotes are the work of Satan, they stuff up the formatting, they crash MS Word once there are more than about five of them in a document, and no-one reads them anyway.
So for many of these essays, I skipped the footnotes because, dammit, I want to read the story. Essays are meant to be focused, disciplined pieces of writing. The story is what should be important, not the author’s comic asides or little pokes to make sure that you heard the last comic aside three pages back, or digressions into other topics. However, it seems Wallace has worked out that the footnotes annoy people like me, and came up with a way to make them even more annoying: incorporate them into the text in boxes with arrows, like this (click to enlarge):
That’s where I did throw the book across the room.
I know Wallace is renowned for being inventive and innovative. And that’s grand. But I don’t think that the ‘inventiveness’ in this book does anything to move the genre along, or adds anything to the reader’s understanding of the material. If neither of those are being achieved, ‘inventiveness’ is only serving to dress up the material, which is often a cunning disguise for lack of content.
If you want to read David Foster Wallace’s non-fiction, I recommend seeking out articles that have been published in the MSM, not least because they will have been edited. You could start here.
Consider the Lobster, and other essays
David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown
