I first heard of David Foster Wallace while sitting in my high school library during senior study hall and flipping through an issue of Newsweek, while under the close scrutiny of the librarian, a 68-year-old harp player who often referred to herself as "The Rock," who had placed me in the "Quiet Chair" for an unnamed and unknown transgression.
Sitting there, I was reading about this guy who had written a 900-page "comic masterpiece" with something along the lines of 120,000 typos in the drafts. Masterful, but messy.
This, I concluded, was my kind of writer.
So that summer, I read the much-edited "Infinite Jest," Wallace's biggest and best novel to date. It was brilliant, inspiring and widely acclaimed to be one of the best novels of 1996. Wallace got one of those "genius grants" of about three times as much money as he had typos.
Yes that book is long, but it is about drugs, wheelchair-bound Canadian terrorists and a guy killing himself by exploding his head in a microwave. Plus, the author wears a do-rag and chews tobacco during interviews. 'Nuff said.
Now Wallace is back with "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," a collection of essays on everything from tennis to television to cruise ships, recently released at an affordable paperback price. Even better is that these essays are "director's cuts" of sorts, each an expanded edition of what has appeared previously in print.
Now then, making an impassioned effort to give my reader something solid to seek his/her teeth into, I will point out that these essays are brilliantly written commentaries on many aspects of modern life and that they are each funny as (insert the strongest euphemism The D will let me use here).
So how does this work? What basically happens is that Wallace goes somewhere and proceeds to turn into an IMAX camera, where he records every possible sensory experience, pertinent conversation, quirk, smell, whatever, into disgustingly literate textual pictures of whatever it is he is doing.
In the essay at the Illinois State Fair, he does more than give an east coast cynic's take on America's Heartland. He captures the surprisingly likable image of a corpulent women as she fervently dances in wooden clogs and juxtaposes it with the sinister air that surrounds the "carny" (those white T-shirt guys who run the rides and eye your date) and turns the whole thing into a masterful hodge-podge of humor, pathos and cultural anthropology.
Onboard the cruise ship, he really opens the F-Stops and reveals everything, from the charming, individual weirdness of the multitudes of senior citizens to his paranoia that the first officer of the ship is attempting to kill him with the vacuum-powered flush toilet.
The amazing thing is that this barrage is in no way tiring; it is like the literary equivalent of celery -- yeah, you expend energy to eat it, but it is still a yummy snack.
Be warned: there are a few literary criticism essays in the middle that contain phrases like "fusing theories of creative discourse with hard-core positions in metaphysics," but who cares? Skip it, if you want to, or read the highbrow stuff under a blanket in the middle of the night and hope your roommate does not catch you.
The underlying beauty behind all of Wallace's work -- something that you will figure out after about a paragraph -- is that all of his stories are about Wallace first, the topic second.
Through it, you get an amazing insight into our next, in my opinion, "great American writer."
He is smart; he is funny; he wears a Spider-Man hat in public; he mentions Beavis & Butthead; he admits to having been a late-night TV and infomercial addict; he will make you think and says the kind of stuff that hits you in a way so you know it really matters. It gets no better.
Bottom line is that "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" is fun first, intellectual second. If "Reading Rainbow" was for college kids, LeVar Burton would be holding this one in his hand, telling you not to take his word for it. Take mine, and go read the silly thing.
