"Infinite Jest: Reviews, Articles,
and Miscellany"
Date: Sunday, March 9, 1997
By Richard Stern.
Section: TRIBUNE BOOKS
Copyright Chicago Tribune
VERBAL PYROTECHNICS
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again:
Essays and Arguments
By David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown, 353 pages, $23.95
`I go out of my way," wrote Essayist Number One, "but
by license not carelessness....I want the material to make its own divisions...without
my interlacing them with words, with links and seams put in for the benefit
of ... inattentive readers." As to style, "I love a simple, natural
speech, the same on paper as in the mouth...succulent and sinewy, brief
but compressed...better difficult than boring...irregular, disconnected
and bold."
Montaigne's 400-year-old prescription works to describe these wonderful
essays by David Foster Wallace. The best essays -- blends of fact, scene,
observation, analysis, portraiture and commentary -- Wallace says, are often
written by fiction writers, "oglers" who "watch over other
humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision
of themselves as witnesses."
It's this ogler's greatest charm -- as it was Montaigne's -- that he supplies
a piecemeal but consistent self-portrait that runs through the book. The
portrait is of a precocious, physically timid, endlessly self-conscious,
endlessly curious, naive sophisticate, a great shower and explainer, a loved
and loving son, neurotic, brilliant, good-hearted and self-deprecating ("extremely
sensitive: carsick, airsick, heightsick; my sister likes to say I'm `lifesick.'
").
In the best of these essays, he shows up as a fledgling journalist, one
who forgets to bring a notebook, is astonished at his press perks and is
puzzled by journalistic requirements ("how many examples (do) I need
to list in order to communicate the atmosphere?").
It may be this self-portrait, as much as the constraints of Wallace's journalistic
assignments, that saves these essays from what old-fashioned novel-readers
like me thought was the narrative-killing excess of his 1,000-plus-page
novel, "Infinite Jest." Some of that mastodon meat is in the essays
-- tennis, teens, television -- and some of its manner, too -- footnotery,
abbreviations, acronymania. But only here and there, say in the tribute
to director David Lynch ("Eraserhead," "Twin Peaks,"
the new "Lost Highways"), does the "IJ"-shy reader want
to call for halter, bit, reins and whip.
The title -- and longest -- essay is a blow-by-blow account of an expenses-paid,
week-long luxury cruise in the Caribbean, a counter to a "polished,
powerful, impressive . . . best that money can buy..." essaymercial
by a writer Wallace admires, Frank Conroy (who tells Wallace that he's ashamed
of having written it). No one will mistake Wallace's uproarious demolition
of the "sybaritic and nearly insanity-producing indulgence and pampering"
on board the Nadir (his rechristening of the cruise ship Zenith) for an
essaymercial. It has more interesting characters than most novels, as much
solid information as a technical brochure, and its genial depiction of the
commerce of "Managed Fun" is as devastating as Henry James' analysis
of the economic significance of the skyscraper in "The American Scene"
(1907). Fifty times more amusing -- and 500 times cheaper -- than the cruise
itself, Wallace's account of it may lose him a thousand perks for every
hundred new readers.
There are two essays on tennis, one about becoming a teenage tennis whiz
by learning to play the winds and cracked surfaces of central Illinois courts,
the second the best essay I've read on professional tennis. Its focus is
the world's 79th-ranked player, Michael Joyce, competing in a recent Canadian
Open, but it's prodigally full of tennis lore, wisdom and thumbnail portraiture:
Michael Chang, with his "expression of deep and intractable unhappiness,"
and his mother, who "may have something to do with the staggering woe
of Chang's mien"; Jim Courier, who "can hit winners only at obtuse
angles, from the center out"; Petr Korda, who "has the body of
an upright greyhound... plus soulless eyes that reflect no light and seem
to `see' only in the way that fish's and birds' eyes `see.' " (There
is even a lethally seductive sentence about Du Maurier cigarettes. If Wallace
loses his journalistic assignments, he can moonlight as a copywriter.)
Perhaps the gem of the book's four gems is a 54-page essay on the 1993 Illinois
State Fair. There is more about the look, sounds, smell (Wallace is a great
smeller), feel and meaning of rural Illinois here than I've seen in such
small space since, say, Bellow's 1957 10-pager for Holiday magazine: "Miles
and miles of prairie slowly rising and falling...a sense that something
is in the process of becoming or that the liberation of a great force is
imminent, some power like Michelangelo's slave only half-released from the
block of stone." Wallace's lyrics are more staccato and his assessments
swifter and less powerful than Bellow's, but he has lots more space and
covers much more: not just the fair but its visitors, officials, reporters,
the governor ("impressive") and his wife (whose tragic flaw is
her voice), the prize horses, cattle and swine, the auto races (though,
"What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic
Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle"), baton-twirling, clogging, ag
people, Kmart people, message-bearing T-shirts, the flatness, the space,
the loneliness of the Midwest where he grew up and from which, years ago,
he fled.
Perhaps the highlight of the state fair essay is this great scene:
Wallace has invited Native Companion, his old Philo High prom date, to go
around the fairgrounds with him. N.C., who "teaches water-aerobics
to the obese and infirm," is now married, has three children, and bungee
jumps. She accepts a carny's offer to try out The Zipper, the wildest of
the near-death-experience rides. Our "airsick, heightsick" author
manages, with "an act of enormous personal courage," to watch
as she's strapped into a cage and spun, hurled and tumbled "like stuff
in a dryer" in a horrifying ellipse. A long scream, "wobbled by
Doppler," comes from the cage. "Then the operator stops the ride
abruptly with Native C.'s car at the top, so she's hanging upside down inside
the cage," with her dress hanging down over her head. The operator
and a colleague ogle her. After another scream from the cage, "as if
Native C.'s getting slow-roasted," Wallace, outraged, almost summons
enough saliva to "say something stern." But at this point the
two carnies, "laughing and slapping their knee," start bringing
her down. Finally, N.C. bounds out of the cage and, in a burst of expletives,
tells them " `that was....great.' " Wallace is furious. "
`They were looking up your dress...I saw the whole thing.' " N.C. looks
at him. Her color is high. " `You're so...innocent, Slug,' " she
says.
Four hundred years ago, dear old Montaigne described falling off his horse
and "dying." For 400 years, readers have loved him for his account
of it. Perhaps 400 years from now, readers will love Not So Intrepid and
Not So Innocent Slug Wallace.
Richard Stern's first novel, "Golk" (1960),
appeared in the world two years before David Foster Wallace.