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I'm currently going through something of a David Foster Wallace phase at the moment. Infinite Jest was the first thing of his I read, and it utterly beguiled me. It became a mini-obsession. Admittedly, as iconoplast says, there's a definite sense of "Look ma! No hands!" to the writing - no work of fiction needs over a hundred pages of footnotes, let's be honest - but it's seems to me more like the work of a writer being overcome with ideas and wanting to run with them to their conclusion than the work of someone in love with their intellect hammering out a Big Book just for sheer "fuck-you" points.
Although, to be fair, there's a bit of that, too. I could have done with slightly less on the minutiae of tennis.
Still, I blew through it in a week of lunchtimes and red-eyed lamplit bedtimes, and it never felt like a chore. It's certainly the only book I've ever read where it took three hundred pages or so to actually get a handle on what the hell it's actually about in any real sense, but even when Wallace bounces from Subsidized Year to Subsidized Year, from character to seemingly unrelated character, without explanation, the energy and humour was more than enough to keep me going until the big picture started to become clear, and I could see where he was going with it.
Or where it seemed like he was going, anyway. It seems to be a particularly Wallace trait to build to a big ending and then stop short. Infinite Jest is notorious for it (although I would argue that Hal's line in the opening section that "I think of John N.R. Wayne [...] standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head" is enough of a horribly chilling end to the story as it is), Broom of the System ends similarly without conventional narrative resolution, as do many of the pieces in Interviews with Hideous Men and Girl with Curious Hair... I wonder why Wallace is so drawn to the sudden, unexpected, and arguably unsatisfying ending. Maybe he's been influenced by George Morrison... ?
Nedrichards is right, though, when he says that Wallace is a witch with language. There's a story in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men called "Forever Overhead" that is just chock-full of effortlessly beautiful imagery. It's ten pages of that particularly Wallacey woozy, dreamtime strangeness (see also "John Billy" in Girl With... ), and the linking of the onset of puberty and swimming pools just seems to make a perfect, odd kind of sense on a number of levels. I keep reading over it again and again. The prose is weightless, frictionless.
I see that he's co-written a book called Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present. Anyone read it? Is it as horribly chinstrokey Media Studies "worthy" as it sounds? |
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