Everything And More [Paperback]

Wallace begins with a series of anecdotes that promised to fill the bill, leavened with plain talk and a bracing occasional bit of scatology. But the book's reliance on advanced notation -- much of it impenetrable even to this reader, despite four years of college math (up to differential equations!) -- soon kills the narrative flow.

Wallace's parenthetical asides and copious footnotes sometimes provide illumination, but the book's scattershot structure belies the dust jacket's promise of "a literary masterpiece."

Even Wallace himself acknowledges the book's shortcomings, apologizing at several points for convoluted sentences, bewildering explanations and jumbled storytelling. A good editor could have helped him cut those knots, isolating the advanced math or otherwise rendering it intelligible, allowing him to deliver what author James Gleick hails in his promotional blurb as "exquisitely (and hilariously) original science writing." (Did Gleick and the other reviewers survive the entire book? Or did they just get the funny parts?)

Reading "Everything and More" was like being trapped in a literary version of Zeno's Paradox: Finishing half the book, then struggling to complete half of what remained, then half of that ... I finally just gave up, disillusioned.

He knows a lot of math for a creative writing prof, but he often doesn't know what he does and doesn't know. There was a lot of history and philosophy in the book that I didn't know about, and so I didn't find many errors in those kinds of sections. I probably learned something about that stuff, but unfortunately having seen so much mathematical incompetence I have to distrust DFW as a non-fiction writer.

DFW writes with a dangerous tone. Not a compliment in this case. The tone is: "This is a lot of difficult (but gorgeous) material, but *I've* got it all figured out. So you just trust me to guide you through it (and even when I'm telling you stuff that appears unjustified and kooky, you know it is correct and worth reading because I'm so well-educated and clever)." It's pompous and it's fun and it's fine if you're right. If you take that tone and you're wrong, you suck. Sorry, DFW.

Other reviewers hate the footnotes and other style/organizational whatnot. I agree with a *little* of that. Mostly I thought his willingness to entertain tangents and interpolations and sidebars an appropriate way of handling the material.

DFW refers a lot to items he learned in "college math" and "sophomore math" and so on. The book acknowledges that these math-items may not be familiar to you, but implies they would be if you took math in college and remembered it. That's often probably not quite true; DFW went to Harvard and appears to have had a college math experience atypical even amongst the rather well educated in America. Does he not know this, or did he make a Command Decision that this book is only for people for whom college = Ivy League?

Can you do a 2nd ed. sometime, DFW? It is story that ought to be told well, and I think you have a great draft here.

But the mathematical mistakes just spoil everything. Like the proof of dichotomy convergence using Weierstrass delta-epsilon thing for continuity. What was that? Looked like the author himself didn't quite understand what he was trying to do, so he just crumpled the proof: "Hence... Hence...".