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

“Further cements Wallace’s reputation as probably the most ambitious and prodigious literary talent of his generation, an erupting Vesuvius of prose and ideas and intellect.”

— John Marshall, Seattle Post Intelligencer

“The title essay is worth the price of the book… irrefutable proof of comic genius…. Yes, he’s a great writer, get used to it.”

— Adam Begley, New York Observer

“Wallace puts enough energy, attitude, thought, ‘fun’ (in and out of quotes) and sheer information into any single page to wear me out. But they don’t…. As long as he’s willing to get down and rassle with this stuff, I’m glad to sit here and read all about it.”

— David Gates, Newsweek

“You don’t want to miss out on reading David Foster Wallace. Yes, he’s that good.”

— Kane Webb, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

“He has Gore Vidal’s biting wit, Christopher Hitchens’s ability to disrobe intellectual impostors, and Pynchon’s sense of the bizarre…. Not just refreshing, it’s downright exhilarating.”

— David Daley, Hartford Courant

“Wallace’s sheer verbal precocity and versatility stun.”

— Joan Hinkemeyer, Rocky Mountain News

“DFW is smart and funny, a man from whose word processor flows a torrent of brilliant observations and hysterical wit. Do your disposition and your mind a favor: Read this book.”

— Steven E. Alford, Houston Chronicle

“A marvelous book…. Sparkling reportage…. If one wants to see the zeitgeist auto-grappling, in all its necessary confusions, one must read every essay in this book.”

— James Wood, Newsday

“Funny as all get-out…. This guy uses words like a Ninja uses throwing stars…. Wallace proves that cutting edge is a term that needn’t be reserved for fiction only.”

— Jef Leisgang, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“What he’s doing in these essays is rather extraordinary: Treading chin-deep in postmodern waters, he’s constructing an exceptionally funny, viable, open-minded, openhearted voice, and he gives some of the rest of us new ways to think about how to navigate our own perilous waters.”

— Cornel Bonca, OC Weekly (Orange County)

“Engagingly bizarre thinking and gleefully uninhibited writing…. Wallace is smart and funny to about the same extent that Bill Gates is rich. He leaps exuberantly from one original observation to the next.”

— Margaret Sullivan, Buffalo News

“This volume not only reconfirms Mr. Wallace’s stature as one of his generation’s preeminent talents, but it also attests to his virtuosity…. His novelist’s radar for the incongruous detail and the revealing remark — along with his hyperkinetic language and natural storytelling gifts — make him a remarkably able reporter.”

— Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“He’s funny, actually…. Read him.”

— Maureen Harrington, Denver Post

When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad’s alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I’m starting to see why this was so. College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids — and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child’s play.

In late childhood I learned how to play tennis on the blacktop courts of a small public park carved from farmland that had been nitrogenized too often to farm anymore. This was in my home of Philo, Illinois, a tiny collection of corn silos and war-era Levittown homes whose native residents did little but sell crop insurance and nitrogen fertilizer and herbicide and collect property taxes from the young academics at nearby Champaign-Urbana’s university, whose ranks swelled enough in the flush 1960s to make outlying non sequiturs like “farm and bedroom community” lucid.

Between the ages of twelve and fifteen I was a near-great junior tennis player. I made my competitive bones beating up on lawyers’ and dentists’ kids at little Champaign and Urbana Country Club events and was soon killing whole summers being driven through dawns to tournaments all over Illinois, Indiana, Iowa. At fourteen I was ranked seventeenth in the United States Tennis Association’s Western Section (“Western” being the creakily ancient USTA’s designation for the Midwest; farther west were the Southwest, Northwest, and Pacific Northwest sections). My flirtation with tennis excellence had way more to do with the township where I learned and trained and with a weird proclivity for intuitive math than it did with athletic talent. I was, even by the standards of junior competition in which everyone’s a bud of pure potential, a pretty untalented tennis player. My hand-eye was OK, but I was neither large nor quick, had a near-concave chest and wrists so thin I could bracelet them with a thumb and pinkie, and could hit a tennis ball no harder or truer than most girls in my age bracket. What I could do was “Play the Whole Court.” This was a piece of tennis truistics that could mean any number of things. In my case, it meant I knew my limitations and the limitations of what I stood inside, and adjusted thusly. I was at my very best in bad conditions.

Now, conditions in Central Illinois are from a mathematical perspective interesting and from a tennis perspective bad. The summer heat and wet-mitten humidity, the grotesquely fertile soil that sends grasses and broadleaves up through the courts’ surface by main force, the midges that feed on sweat and the mosquitoes that spawn in the fields’ furrows and in the conferva-choked ditches that box each field, night tennis next to impossible because the moths and crap-gnats drawn by the sodium lights form a little planet around each tall lamp and the whole lit court surface is aflutter with spastic little shadows.

But mostly wind. The biggest single factor in Central Illinois’ quality of outdoor life is wind. There are more local jokes than I can summon about bent weather vanes and leaning barns, more downstate sobriquets for kinds of wind than there are in Malamut for snow. The wind had a personality, a (poor) temper, and, apparently, agendas. The wind blew autumn leaves into intercalated lines and arcs of force so regular you could photograph them for a textbook on Cramer’s Rule and the cross-products of curves in 3-space. It molded winter snow into blinding truncheons that buried stalled cars and required citizens to shovel out not only driveways but the sides of homes; a Central Illinois “blizzard” starts only when the snowfall stops and the wind begins. Most people in Philo didn’t comb their hair because why bother. Ladies wore those plastic flags tied down over their parlor-jobs so regularly I thought they were required for a real classy coiffure; girls on the East Coast outside with their hair hanging and tossing around looked wanton and nude to me. Wind wind etc. etc.