DFW

"Hell hath no fury like a postmodernist scorned." — David Foster Wallace, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way"

As far as hysterical realists go, David Foster Wallace has always been able to have his cake and pop out of it, too. He's probably the best of that now-muted fin de siecle group of upstarts—Eggers, Franzen, Vollmann, Dixon—who specialized in arch emotion, self-conscious narrative and ambition to beat the band. A better short story writer and essayist than he is a novelist, Wallace is nonetheless thought of as inextricable from his titanic second novel, Infinite Jest.

Stephen Burns, who wrote the Reader’s Guide to this heavily footnoted doorstop, almost parodies the scope of his quarry by limiting his review of the 10th anniversary edition of Jest to such scant space:

For all its many branching offshoots, the structure of Infinite Jest is built on a narrative foundation that recalls James Joyce's Ulysses, an ancestor text that is specifically evoked in Wallace's use of the famous Joycean compound "scrotumtightening". Both texts have one foot in Hamlet, and both are organized around two narrative arcs that set a youthful prodigy who has problems with his father, next to an older man, who is less well educated but more humane than his son. In both books the author begins with the younger talent, but moves toward the older man as the story approaches its end. In Wallace's novel, the Leopold Bloom figure is provided by Donald Gately, an enormous former burglar who is trying to lead an earnest life and recover from his addictions at a halfway house. Balanced against this story is that of the Stephen Dedalus figure, provided by Hal Incandenza, a teenage lexical and tennis prodigy who is descending into addiction even as Gately makes his escape. Between the cynicism of youth and the developing sincerity of the recovering addict, Wallace attempts to explore what he calls "the soul's core systems", probing his characters' sometimes nebulous sense of self.

More Hamlet than Ulysses, I’d say, because the only aspect of Wallace that puts one in mind of Joyce is the recourse to onomatopoeia and impenetrability – if not, unintelligibility. There are whole chapters in Jest, many of them brilliant, written in a Faulkernian idiom apostrophizing the character whose exploits are being described. One memorable set piece involves a cross-dressing, drug-addled hustler running down the street having shit himself.

But consider Hal O. Incandenza’s* mother has taken up with her brother-in-law after the death of Hal’s father. Hal’s got a chemical dependence on marijuana, which, if it doesn’t quite make him go insane, makes him paranoid and verbose and, at the beginning (read: “end”) of the novel, convulsive.

I suppose here I should declare my interest, also my infinite patience in having actually read this monstrosity cover to cover – pair of bookmarks in hand, one for the text, one for the index – and absolutely loved the damned thing. Fancy a shelf-warper about addiction being so addictive. (Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly famously wrote a review of Infinite Jest that was all about how hilarious she found it that Entertainment Weekly expected her to read Infinite Jest.)

I know, I know. Too clever by full. All “bells and whistles.” Onanistic, even. Didn’t you read that Onion story: “Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20”? As it happens, I have a term for the self- and reader abuse Wallace thrills in, yet which makes him so strangely readable. I call it Wallacio.

So much of the charm is in seeing just how much this prodigy thinks he can get away and still be thought talented. The truth is, he is talented. No one could who’s read his stories, “Good Old Neon” and “The Depressed Person” (a mind-refracted and involuted metafiction that’s shockingly insightful), could deny the fact.

And with his last collection of short stories, Oblivion, Wallace proved he was capable of cutting the fat and writing lean without any damage to his peculiar way we live now. A tale about a man who can sculpt his ordure straight from the colon sounds disgusting because it is disgusting. Though would you think me fatuous to say it’s also one of the most exigent works of “9/11 literature**” in print?

Wallace is a master of the underworld; his métier, what actuates the obsessive-compulsive and the niche extremists of post-industrial America (talk radio personalities, tennis players, twelve-steppers, ad execs, former child celebrities, mathematical theorists, David Lynch***).

And but so it’d be a shame to think his brightest days are already behind him.

Powell's Books – Review-a-Day – Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, reviewed by Times Literary Supplement

* "Radiant angel," is this name supposed to connote? ** (!) *** I owe my first viewing and subsequent devotion to Blue Velvet to DFW's essay on Lynch.