Eliza,
David Foster Wallace has indeed stopped entertaining … and become a grotesque, introspective mess–akin to the characters he offers up for ridicule in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. It’s a shame, as I approached this book with such hope. I loved Infinite Jest and Supposedly Fun Thing, and couldn’t wait to see new work from Wallace. But like you I’m disappointed. Brief Interviews highlights everything that’s wrong with David Foster Wallace, and little that’s right.
I hadn’t recognized the religious theme in this book, but now I see the thread. In Jest, characters mostly turn to drugs or liquor to counter life’s meaninglessness. Even the AA types who’ve given up booze now divert themselves with a set of rules and fake spirituality that are meaningless in themselves. And the book’s central symbol is a movie so diverting that the viewer ineluctably watches it in a repeating loop until death. There’s a void they’re all trying to fill with substances or entertainment. Perhaps God is just the next void-filling step. The upshot for DFW is greater earnestness, more heartfelt searching for meaning. And a somewhat boring new book.
That’s shocking, as DFW’s never been boring. Jest kept me riveted for some 1,300 pages. The book’s arrogant conceit is to suggest that it itself (like the movie mentioned above) is infinitely entertaining–a work absorbing its reader so fully as to force repeated and uninterrupted readings until death. And it’s remarkably close to true; I started rereading Jest immediately after finishing it. When he’s on (e.g, describing the relationships between a group of kids at a tennis academy, or a group of recovering addicts at a halfway house) DFW’s one of the greats. His best characters (i.e. Hal and Don, Jest’s two leads) are as fully realized as anyone’s, he’s laugh-out-loud funny, and his use of language is astonishing. But in hindsight, I guess, Jest’s brilliance contained the seeds of DFW’s current failure. Part of what makes Jest feel so new and giddy is its anti-economical expression: Eschewing the parsimony that’s marked “good” fiction from Hemingway to DeLillo, DFW opts to over-explain everything. Every (often extraneous) detail in Jest occasions a footnote filled with even further (often even more extraneous) detail. Every drug mentioned gets a footnote revealing its precise chemical equation. Cliché d phrases get revived through a formula of needless extrapolation (don’t have the book in front of me but something along the lines of “forcibly striking the ten-penny nail on the proverbial metal cranium” gives you a not entirely exaggerated idea). Plus, of course, the sesquipedalian vocabulary–in Wallace’s world, “self-urticative” and “nomologically” are everyday words. All contributing to a bigger-is-better philosophy drastically at odds with our general conception of well-crafted literature. The whole while as I read Jest I thought “This should not be working, but somehow it is.” In Brief Interviews, the high-wire act finally falls on its face. Everything’s too big: too wordy, too long, over-explained, over-described, overwrought, and above all, overly self-conscious.
Tomorrow let’s talk about the self-consciousness–I think its the key to understanding the book’s characters, and DFW’s shortcomings.
As ever,
Seth
