Seth:
This collection is a disappointment, but you’re wrong to say it falls flat. It may not be what either of us wanted, but you have to give it a degree of grudging respect for what it is.
First of all, this book did get me thinking about things I generally try not to think about, which is, I think, Wallace’s real intent. It got me thinking about whether there is a way out of the dead-end street of self-obsession and hypertrophied self-consciousness (which Wallace is dead-on in nailing as rarely addressed contemporary epidemics), other than complete devotion to or belief in something greater than yourself, meaning, of course, God.
It also has going for it the best argument I’ve read for why much of psychotherapy is a scam (in the form of the story “The Depressed Person”). And for all the bleakness of the characters in these stories, there was a sickening ring of truth to even the most terrible among them. Take, for example, the pair of well-intentioned grad students in “Brief Interview #28” who say that although “deep down you do have to agree that women are historically ill-equipped for taking genuine responsibility for themselves,” it’s not women’s fault–it’s the media’s fault. I feel like Wallace perfectly captured these men’s voices, their prejudices, their pretentious sprinklings of lit-crit jargon, their complete obliviousness to the grossness of what they’re saying–I felt like I must have met these guys in a bar once somewhere.
So this collection isn’t a failure because it doesn’t contain interesting and vivid portraits, or doesn’t perfectly pin down certain types of people. The disappointment comes from the distastefulness of reading about the seamy side of human nature. But wait, you may say, the seamy side of human nature is just about as well-beaten a dead horse of a topic for contemporary literature and film as you can find. But this is a different kind of seaminess. This isn’t Silence of the Lambs or American Psycho–this is worse: It’s about the shameful combination of neediness and boringness. The average person has a very slim chance of turning into a serial killer (and even if he did, he’d then become a celebrity), but just about everyone has the potential to become needy and boring.
It’s also the kind of thing most writers (who already tend to be a pretty self-involved bunch) wouldn’t touch. But Wallace doesn’t stay above it all or pretend he’s better than the fools he’s writing about–he admits to his own weaknesses. In the story “Octet,” which is a series of moral dilemmas posed as questions in a “pop quiz” format, he gets sidetracked into long metafiction-y passages about his aims in writing the story and how he doesn’t quite think the piece is working, and in doing so Wallace himself becomes one of the self-conscious and self-obsessed people that he depicts:
So it’s not as if he doesn’t know what he’s doing and it’s not as if the collection lacks internal logic and cohesion, which I think would have to be the case if you were to really contend that Wallace had really failed to pull this thing off. What say you to that?
Yours,
Eliza
