I think I can say he failed to pull it off even though he did know what he was doing and even though there indeed is a cohesiveness to the book. I just think his aims are an unfortunate misstep, and I think his technique has lost a tad of its luster for me.
You’re right that there’s lots of good stuff here. He’s still a word magician, he’s still extremely smart, and he’s still trying to do new things–a huge plus in my book. But too often his run-on pyrotechnics didn’t grip me the way they used to. And the metafiction stuff you offer up in his defense, claiming it proves he’s grappling with the same demons of hyper-self-consciousness that he inflicts on his characters … well, maybe so. But I got the idea pretty quickly. The infinite loop of self-awareness gets old–fast. The Depressed Person becomes just as tiresome to us as she must be to her support group of friends, as this one-note story drones on for 28 meandering pages. He could have expressed the same idea in one-fourth the time.
Maybe you’d argue that this is precisely the point. That he’s breaking down the fourth wall and forcing us to endure the Depressed Person, to feel just what it’s like to be in her support group. “Octet” is sort of the pinnacle of this theme in the book. It’s where DFW lays it all on the line, revealing exactly what he’s trying to do even as he does it. Again, I think it just doesn’t come together quite right. I refuse to give him a free pass on writing a lame, metafiction-y mess just because he himself reveals in the text that he’s well aware of the danger of writing a lame, metafiction-y mess. (And in fact, DFW recognizes even this level of abstraction, accusing himself of pulling the “Carson Maneuver,” whereby, like Johnny Carson, one metacomments on the lameness of the joke one just made. Again, he’s not excused from pulling this maneuver just because he announces he’s doing it–in effect he’s Carsoning the Carson Maneuver itself.) The counterargument I tried to make to myself (when I wanted to convince myself I actually liked the story) was that DFW has in fact brilliantly broken the rules by purposely casting himself as a “hideous” man in his own right, needy to the point of hounding his reader with “do you like this story?” questions in the midst of the story itself, and further blurring the boundaries between narrator, subject, and author. Then I realized that the story still wasn’t very good, that there’s a reason all the cheap techniques he chides himself for using are thought of as cheap, and that the narrator here is just another Depressed Person–and no more entertaining.
The metafiction reaches an irritating crescendo in “Adult World,” a two-part story. Part I is a fairly standard piece of fiction about a wife who gradually realizes that her husband’s a chronic masturbator (all the masturbation references in these stories might be inadvertent glimpses at the author’s literary technique). Part II is essentially DFW’s notes for writing Part I, offered up verbatim–e.g., “avoid ez gag” or “hammer home fiduciary pun.” This may be wholly rewarding for DFW’s eventual biographer, and students writing their theses on his approach, but it adds no value to the story.
Maybe I’m a fuddy-duddy for bounding my definition of good writing like this. Maybe I should embrace DFW’s attempts to be “more like a reader … down here quivering in the mud of the trench with the rest of us, instead of a Writer, whom we imagine to be clean and dry and radiant of command presence and unwavering conviction …” as he writes in “Octet.” I will admit, in the comradely spirit of self-referential hand-tipping and nothing-up-my-sleeving, that I find myself tempted to exaggerate my dislike of the book for the sake of a good argument with you. In fact, I liked a lot about it, and I enjoy thinking about all these things it forced me to think about, and I still can’t wait for his next work.
As ever,
Seth
