Books by author: David Foster Wallace

As the title suggests, DFW's newest collection is not light reading. I had seen some of these bits of short fiction in Harper's over the last year or two, but they fare better in this form, where the various pieces comment on each other. The more I read DFW's work, the more I appreciate what a great achievement Infinite Jest is. It stands as one of my favorite novels. I eagerly await his next novel, though it may be years in the coming.

I started reading this with hopes that it wouldn't grab my attention in quite the way it did (I'm trying to prepare for my Area Exam and reading for pleasure isn't helping!). Wallace is an outstanding writer, and this, his first novel, is great. His writing is like cross-country travel — the ultimate destination isn't the main focus, but rather the concentration is on enjoying the scenery and local color along the way.

I was a bit frustrated by the ending, but the other merits of the novel outweigh that minor "flaw".

David Foster Wallace is very smart and clever, and he's very fond of making sure you, the reader, never forget it. Although his "look at how well I use the English language" approach works well for me in the context of a novel (such as the fantastic Infinite Jest), it doesn't quite hold together in the context of a book on mathematical history.

I'm not afraid of math. I have advanced degrees in electical engineering and computer science, and my mother is fond of recalling the time when I insisted to my first-grade teacher that you could subtract a larger number from a smaller number if you allowed for negative numbers. And the time I excoriated my high-school geometry teacher for giving our class a nonsensical problem that was based on a "swingset" in a plane. So, it's not fear of mathematics that made this book unappealing.

I think the problem here is a mismatch of form and content. Wallace is clearly educated well-enough to truly understand transfinite math, and he's sufficiently skilled as an historian to put the details in order, but somehow the presentation, in an incredibly dense 300 pages, doesn't quite work. The footnotes too often have a tinge of condescension, and the build-up of concepts is too slow in some places; too fast in others.

As a result, I struggled to maintain momentum as I read. It didn't help that I had to look up a word in the dictionary every few pages (the A-Lex software on my PDA was a huge time-saver there). In the end, I understand infinity a little bit better, and I expanded my vocabulary infinitesimally (that's a lame joke, I know). However, I don't know anyone to whom I could in good faith recommend this book.

Wallace is a wonderfully deft writer. While these stories don't have anywhere near the scope of Infinite Jest, they display a verbal agility that simply blows me away. I particularly liked "Little Expressionless Animals", "Here and There", the title story and a couple of others whose names escape me.

Wallace has written a massive book about addiction, both to controlled substances and to "entertainment". His prose itself is addictive as it parallels the "anti-confluential" style of the "entertainments" created by J. O. Incandenza, the novel's absent pro/antagonist, whose video "Infinite Jest" is the ultimate addictive substance, tapping directly into the pleasure centers of the human brain. Most of the novel's interconnections are revealed (however often in a subtle manner), though I never was able to figure out the connection between Hal and Don Gately. Readers who enjoy Pynchon are likely to enjoy Wallace, though Infinite Jest is perhaps closer to Vineland than to Gravity's Rainbow in both feel and in ultimate reader satisfaction.

I think I've officially lost interest in David Foster Wallace's short fiction. This is probably a better collection than Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, but my overall reaction is more negative, perhaps because I no longer have the mental energy to suss out whatever message Wallace is trying so hard to obfuscate. Granted: there is a sentence to die for on nearly every page, and there are interesting and unique elements in every story. However, it doesn't add up to an enjoyable experience for anybody but the most devoted pomo wonk.

There are eight stories in this collection, ranging from the devastatingly pithy three-page "Incarnations of Burned Children" (which, after reading, I put down the book and retreated into myself for an hour) to "Another Pioneer" consisting of a single, 20+ page paragraph. I enjoyed "Good Old Neon", but in the other stories, either the style got in the way of the substance, or the subject matter just didn't connect with me.

I'm still holding out hope that Infinite Jest wasn't a fluke. I read that first, and I've liked subsequent books less and less. Time for another novel, DFW!