David Foster Wallace is one of my favorite authors, so don’t take what I’m about to say the wrong way. I thought Infinite Jest was inventive, fresh, and emotionally intense, and as pure entertainment it was just off the charts. And his essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again proved that he could pull off nonfiction that was just as good. But by the time I was halfway through this collection of stories I realized something had gone horribly wrong.
These stories are self-conscious in the extreme, emotionally detached, and peopled by repulsive characters. Worst of all, several are just plain boring. The collection consists of stories interspersed with a series of “brief interviews” conducted by a woman whose name we never know and whose questions are reduced to the letter “Q” as a placeholder between the men’s answers.
There are a few stories that are excellent, but the majority are wearying in the way they cover the same ground, namely the moral bankruptcy of human beings, men especially. One story features a man who tries to do a good deed by secretly giving money to a needy friend but who then can’t help but reveal it was he who gave the money. Another is a detailed and vicious description given by a man on his deathbed of why he finds his own son to be a grasping, despicable, and repulsive human being.
One of the grimmest stories in the collection, “The Depressed Person,” is about a cripplingly depressed and self-obsessed woman who spends all of her time talking to her beleaguered “support system” of friends. As the story closes, she is on the phone with a friend who is dying of cancer (and who can’t stop vomiting from her chemotherapy) while the Depressed Person relates her psychic pain and essentially says, “but I’ve talked enough about me–what do you think of me?”
The interviews are even darker. In them men reveal their utter contempt for women, and although their voices and stories are different, each man is the same in the lack of goodness, kindness, and basic decency he reveals in the interview. Chilling stuff.
But then I found out something that made this whole collection make sense. In a recent interview in Publishers Weekly, Wallace said that he “has twice ‘flunked out’ of Catholic instruction.” So I went back to square one and reread this monster looking for God. And after a second go-round I can’t quite see how I missed it the first time: These stories are rotten with God.
God was in Infinite Jest, but only as one of the mindless but inscrutably effective steps that made Alcoholics Anonymous work. God was there, but had about as much depth and weight as the slogan “one day at a time.”
The presence of God in these stories is not described firsthand so much as notable by its complete absence. There are only a few direct descriptions of religious people. There is a woman who mitigates the terror of being raped by praying (although it’s non-Christian and she refers to it as “focusing,” the spiritual nature of what she is doing is explicit). And then there is the man who drops to his knees and prays when a woman (mugging just like a picture she saw on Page 18 of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue and acting out a scene from a movie she’s seen) tries to seduce him.
These hopelessly screwed up people are incapable of fixing themselves. $1,080 worth of psychotherapy a month hasn’t helped the Depressed Person one bit because in Wallace’s mind there’s only one thing that can lift her–and all these people–out of their self-consciousness, narcissism, and psychic horror, and that thing is Grace.
Which all leads to the question, is Wallace no longer producing entertainment? Are these stories an attempt to show the reader the utter wasteland that is American moral culture today? Are they supposed to be instructive as opposed to entertaining? Has he crossed the line between amused satire of human weaknesses and horror and contempt? I’ve been stewing over all this and I’m eager to hear your thoughts.
Best,
Eliza
