David Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

David Foster Wallace is the author of the novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System , as well as the story collection Girl with Curious Hair . His writings have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Playboy, Premiere, Tennis , and other magazines. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Paris Review Prize for humor, and an O Henry Award. He lives in Bloomington, Illinois.

INFINITE

JEST

“The next step in fiction…. Edgy, accurate, and darkly witty…. Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis. Think.”

— Sven Birkerts, Atlantic Monthly

“Uproarious…. It shows off Wallace as one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything.”

— Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“What weird fun Infinite Jest is to read…. Truly remarkable.”

— David Gates, Newsweek

“A virtuoso display…. There is generous intelligence and authentic passion on every page.”

— R. Z. Sheppard, Time

“A blockbuster comedy of substance abuse, family dysfunction, and tennis, set in the postmillennial future…. No other writer now working communicates so dazzlingly what life will feel like the day after tomorrow.”

— Gerald Howard, Elle

“A work of genius…. A grandly ambitious, wickedly comic epic on par with such great, sprawling novels of the 20th century as Ulysses, The Recognitions , and Gravity’s Rainbow .”

— Paul D. Colford, Seattle Times

“Exhilarating, breathtaking…. The book teems with so much life and death, so much hilarity and pain, so much gusto in the face of despair that one cheers for the future of our literature.”

— Dan Cryer, Newsday

“Infinitely readable, even better than its hype…. It shows signs, in fact, of being a genuine work of genius.”

— Will Blythe, Esquire

“Spectacularly good…. It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on Jeopardy! ”

— Walter Kirn, New York

“Brilliant…. Wallace’s talent is immense and his imagination limitless.”

— David Eggers, San Francisco Chronicle

“So brilliant you need sunglasses to read it, but it has a heart as well as a brain…. Infinite Jest is both a vast, comic epic and a profound study of the postmodern condition…. Wallace offers huge entertainment.”

— Steven Moore, Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Bigger, more ambitious, and better than anything else being published in the U.S. right now…. Infinite Jest unerringly pinpoints how Americans have turned the pursuit of pleasure into addiction.”

— David Streitfeld, Details

“Brashly funny and genuinely moving…. Infinite Jest will confirm the hopes of those who called Wallace a genius.”

— Bruce Allen, Chicago Tribune

1This, and thus part of this essay’s title, is from a marvelous toss-off in Michael Sorkin’s “Faking It,” published in Todd Gitlin, ed., Watching Television, Random House/Pantheon, 1987.

2Quoted by Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness , Harvard U. Press, 1981; subsequent Emerson quotes ibid.

3Bernard Nossiter, “The F.C.C.’s Big Giveaway Show,” Nation, 10/26/85, p. 402.

4Janet Maslin, “It’s Tough for Movies to Get Real,” New York Times Arts & Leisure Section, 8/05/90, p. 9.

5Stephen Holden, “Strike The Pose: When Music Is Skin-Deep,” ibid., p. 1.

6Sorkin in Gitlin, p. 163.

7Daniel Hallin, “We Keep America On Top of the World,” in Gitlin’s anthology, p. 16.

8Barbara Tuchman, “The Decline of Quality,” New York Times Magazine , 11/02/80.

9M. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America , Vintage, 1945 edition, pp. 57 and 73.

10I didn’t get this definition from any sort of authoritative source, but it seems pretty modest and commonsensical.

11Don DeLillo, White Noise , Viking, 1985, p. 72.

12Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire , Harvard U. Press, 1974, pp. 103–118.

13This professor was the sort of guy who used “which” when the appropriate relative pronoun was the less fancy “that” to give you an idea.

14If you want to see a typical salvo in this generation war, look at William Gass’s “A Failing Grade for the Present Tense” in the 10/11/87 New York Times Book Review .

15In Bill Knott’s Love Poems to Myself, Book One , Barn Dream Press, 1974.

16In Stephen Dobyns’s Heat Death , McLelland and Stewart, 1980.

17In Bill Knott’s Becos , Vintage, 1983.

18 White Noise , pp. 12–13.

19Martone, Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List , Indiana U. Press, 1990, p. ix.

20Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist , Harmony/Crown, 1990, p. 82.

21Mark Crispin Miller, “Deride and Conquer,” in Gitlin’s anthology, p. 193.

22At Foote, Cone and Belding, quoted by Miller — so the guy said it in the mid-’80s.

23A similar point is made about Miami Vice in “We Build Excitement” Todd Gitlin’s own essay in his anthology.

24Miller in Gitlin, p. 194.

25Ibid., p. 187.

26Miller’s “Deride…” has a similar analysis of sitcoms, but Miller ends up arguing that the crux is some weird Freudio-patricidal element in how TV comedy views The Father.

27Lewis Hyde, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking,” American Poetry Review , reprinted in the Pushcart Prize anthology for 1987.

28Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review #146, Summer 1984, pp. 60–66.

29Pat Auferhode, “The Look of the Sound,” in good old Gitlin’s anthology, p. 113.

30Miller in Gitlin, p. 199.

31Greil Marcus, Mystery Train , Dutton, 1976.

32Hyde, op. cit.

33 White Noise, p. 13.

34A term Gitlin uses in “We Build Excitement.”

1(I haven’t yet been able to track down clips of the N.B.C.C. spots, but the mind reels at the possibilities implicit in the conjunction of D. Lynch and radical mastectomy….)

2“M.o.L,” only snippets of which are on BV ’s soundtrack, has acquired an underground reputation as one of the great make-out tunes of all time — well worth checking out.

3(’92 having been a year of simply manic creative activity for Lynch, apparently)

4Dentistry seems to be a new passion for Lynch, by the way — the photo on the title page of Lost Highway’ s script, which is of a guy with half his face normal and half unbelievably distended and ventricose and gross, was apparently culled from a textbook on extreme dental emergencies. There’s great enthusiasm for this photo around Asymmetrical Productions, and they’re looking into the legalities of using it in Lost Highway’ s ads and posters, which if I was the guy in the photo I’d want a truly astronomical permission fee.

5(And Dune really is visually awesome, especially the desert planet’s giant worm-monsters, who with their tripartitely phallic snouts bear a weird resemblance to the mysterious worm Henry Spencer keeps in the mysterious thrumming cabinet in Eraserhead. )

6Anybody who wants to see how the Process and its inducements destroy what’s cool and alive in a director should consider the recent trajectory of Richard Rodriguez, from the plasma-financed vitality of El Mariachi to the gory pretension of Desperado to the empty and embarrassing From Dusk to Dawn . Very sad.