Customer Reviews

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Wallace is a fun writer. He's amusing. He tries very hard to spin the ordinary with a barrage of sidebars, witticisms, and irony. How odd then that we expect so much more even as we enjoy the work. This is a tough question but one that his writing raises.

The first essay discusses his adolescent tennis playing and his lack of true talent (although in other places he drops other hints about his upbringing that seems to contradict what we read here. (I am unsure what I can really believe of his writing about his past.) Next follows an essay about television and fiction that relies heavily upon a number of studies. Most shocking is how he never discovered John Fiske whose work, Television Culture is one of the major works on the subject. Wallace discusses metafiction from the viewpoint of novelistic deconstruction and postmodernism yet his weaknesses of not having a visual studies background really shows. Thus he stumbles upon some "revelations" that have been pretty well documented by other writers. Eventually the lack of a clear structure in this essay undermines whatever point Wallace is attempting to make. Skip the David Lynch,(unless you are a David Lynch groupie)in which the writerly problems of structure and theme are completely lost.

The essay on tennis player Michael Joyce is packaged in a journalistic wrapping, but it's as though Wallace never really gets the feel of the person or the atmosphere. He bounces around with pen and pad taking down impressions that are superficial. For example, in covering the Montreal tournament he never questions what it is that makes tennis in Quebec so different from the US Open. We get a skimming essay, with the oh so expected Wallace ironical touch but without real digging.

Once Wallace is assigned by Harpers to cover the Illinois State Fair or a week on a cruise boat, we begin to expect he'll rise up and grab the subject by the horns. But he's found his formula, the pastiche of the Wallace style and it's as though he doesn't dare break out. So we get two essays that promise us the world and deliver more rambling impressions. I wouldn't call the experience grating but slightly disappointing. These are not "razor sharp" essays of laugh out loud humor. The humor is one of juxtapositions, of lists of names of food vendors at the fair, of comparing walking tourists to cattle. It's amusing, not rip roaring.

Still Wallace is at times a real word master, offering some absolutely terrific sentences. Check out the first paragraph of the first essay to be convinced, "...the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates." It's great stuff in such instances.

Wallace is full of himself for sure. I felt that he was making it up some of the time when he needs more information, and then denying the reader information when it suits him by often saying "It's a long story." And often he glosses over details that would make the essay even better, as when at the fair he overeats (maybe) and goes to the hospital emergency room (maybe. Yet he skips over all this in order to provide us more random observations. Maybe that's who Wallace is, the guy who gets sidetracked listing the types of trees while forgetting the shape of the forest.

In a way his style is well conveyed by the picture on the cover in which a boys head is superimposed on another body, eyes rolling tongue sticking out,hand on gut, smoke flying out of ears. We get the point from the tongue and head, do we really need the smoke too? But I think Wallace does, he can't stop adding more and more even though the extra texture eventually detracts. Still, reading Wallace is a fun thing, and I'll do it again even though I tire of his formula.

I find I can't look away from David Foster Wallace's writing, even though from this book onward, his work keeps playing out the same way.

If you want to understand Wallace, you can't do better than this book of essays. It's all here, from the sharp insight to the overcaffeinated but entertaining riffs on minutiae and big themes alike, to the terrific sense of order in his arguments, ebbing and flowing, delightfully departing from the pyramid structure/straw man tricks we've all seen eight billion times before.

And, vexingly, there's that Other Thing about DFW to be found all over these clever essays: a curious lack of feeling about the outer world and his inner life. It's kept him from making the leap throughout his career, and it's never been exposed more plainly than here.

You can see it in stark relief in his glimpses into sport. His essay on his own tennis playing doesn't carry the emotional freight he was gunning for, and it's no accident that the other tennis essay in this book, on the struggles of an obscure professional, is easily more evocative. Focusing on someone else, DFW is free to do what he does best (analyze) and escape from what he does the worst (feel).

You can see DFW's signature numbness undestandably coloring his looks at cruises and state fairs--activities that clearly aren't his bag. More interestingly, you can sense DFW's engine revving beneath the surface of the narrative in his homage to David Lynch. The admiration for Lynch ties back to DFW's own authorial frustrations. He can't arrange objects literally, magically, or expressionistically to conjure the responses that Lynch can; DFW doesn't have the feel for it and knows it. DFW's nonfiction wit has never translated to fiction; his imagination needs real-world facts and factoids in order to spark--weirdly and sadly, Wallace can't get going with a blank page. The dark comic bounciness of Chuck Palahniuk that should have been DFW's never happened, because Chuck knew how to navigate dark territory with voice, speed and jokes in Choke and Fight Club, whereas DFW couldn't escape his own voice, couldn't construct or pace his story when deprived of facts, and found himself trapped with himself in the creepy flatness of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

Lastly, you can see DFW's problem laid bare in the book's best essay. It's on television, and it's worth multiple reads, not only because it's the best and clearest love-hate encapsulation of TV that you'll likely ever come across, but also because DFW, in a miracle of accidental self-revelation, performs an autopsy on his own fiction.

It's a virtuoso look at television's retrofitting of irony and metafiction, making them vehicles to move product and (above all else) sell television consumption itself. And DFW deftly argues that TV's dazzling use of irony has a withering effect on contemporary fiction. The essay concludes darkly with DFW admitting he can't see a way out for fiction, because practically every object, every plot line, every characterization imaginable already carries with it the oppressive weight of eerily undermining pop cultural subtexts.

It's a compelling argument, especially from DFW's point of view. Except for two things. One, fiction is like any art form with a lot of purveyors--most of what's produced in any given time isn't very good. Quality is the exception, not the rule. I'll bet that DFW is clever enough, if forced to play devil's advocate, to produce a pretty compelling essay arguing that, generally speaking, fiction from ANY era is (was) dead on arrival.

Second, well, there has been fiction that's broken through the fortress of irony since this essay. Writers depicting non-televisual, non-mainstream worlds have genuinely resonated, from Lumpiri to Leroy. The "hysterical realism" of White Teeth infused irony with playful humor, history, and real feeling, and leapfrogged DFW's quagmire. In Underworld, Don DeLillo--a hero of Wallace's--tried to burn through tired academic word games (a DFW fave) and pop cultural irony to find feeling, and for the most part, he succeeded. Even the low pop phenomenon of Harry Potter seems to won over the most impatient, media-saturated, medicated generation in history.

DFW, on the other hand, despite all his obvious talents, hasn't. And this book lays out why he never will.

All of which makes for a fun read. Buy it.

One of the most insightful collections of essays I've read in years, Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing explores contemporary life with fresh and vibrant language. Too many try to compare these non-fiction essays with his magnum opus, Infinite Jest; there's a directness, a desire to not beat around the bush, present in A Supposedly Fun Thing. I.J. is a massive metaphor for the issues and concerns discussed in A Supposedly Fun Thing and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (another fine Wallace book). I'd love to read Wallace's take on the post-Sept. 11th America and the Bush Administration. If you're reading this, Dave, consider this a suggestion for more exceptional essays. Thanks for the great book.

This was a thorough and entertaining read. I laughed all the way through.

...but i really loved this essay collection.

Wallace is (IMO) a totally hilarious writer and the essays collected in this book are astute observations and analyses of a number of topics and events written wittily with a voice that is brutally critical yet somehow still compassionate. His accounts of things as varied as a day at a small county fair to his experiences going on a "luxury cruise" are filled with information, abstract analysis, biting wit, and self-examination. I laughed out loud frequently, yet it made me think about society and selfhood a lot as well. Highly recommended for fans of this sort of writing.

Occasionally Wallace manages to craft a story or essay that holds interest throughout. More often, however, he uses language for no other purpose than to show his adeptness at using language. His paragraphs of description upon description demonstrate that he has a way with adjectives, but they fail to actually improve the reader's understanding of the story-- if there is a story buried beneath the description. It is not vivid description that makes a good author, but relevant description. "See what I can do!" his writing seems to scream. It seems to work for him, as reviewers regularly comment on his brilliance.

More brief than his novels, just as inviting, conversational, thought-provoking, and funny. The addition of a self-effacing first person is really charming. After having read the novels, which are so cool they're practically untouchable, this book is absolutely sparkling. I'd say David Foster Wallace is even better at nonfiction!

The title essay, about a hundred pages, is a sort of spy mission where the author, a man who makes it clear that he loathes the philistinism of conspicuous consumerism, poses as a boat cruise passenger and chronicles the depression and uneasiness that results from a luxury boat cruise. Wallace's depression is our joy because he is extremely funny in the way he shows how the Pampering Industry, that is, the boat cruise staff, is in fact a bunch of bullies who force us to "have a good time" as we luxuriate on a cruiser, which Wallace envisions as a sort of huge, warm womb where consciousness is lost and where the tourists experience a sort of death. Funny, profound, disturbing, Wallace hits a home run in an essay that was originally published in Harper's magazine around 1995. I believe this version is slightly different, longer, but curiously, missing some juicy parts that I remember enjoying in the magazine version.

David Foster Wallace is a gifted writer and always a joy to read. His fiction is groundbreaking, and as this book proves, his nonfiction may even be better.

"A supposedly fun thing" is a collection of essays that are ostensibly stabs at journalism, the big joke being that Wallace is no journalist. He comes off as an endearingly neurotic-bordering-on-pathologically-self-concious red headed step child of Hunter S. Thompson. In fact, it could even be stated that this book is a sort of postmodern inversion of "The Great Shark Hunt", where Thompson's diving in head first to live inside the events he reports is replaced by Wallace's endearing midwestern unwillingness to get in the way and fear of making a nuisance and/or humiliating spectacle of himself.

Mixed in with all that, though, are startling on point revelations about the state of American Culture, what it means to be an american, the nature of art, and the human condition, which one normally doesn't expect from works about TV, Tennis, State Fairs, or Carribean Pleasure Cruises(in the title essay).

While it may not be as great an accomplishment as Infinite Jest (and the comparison to that magnificent book is the only reason this is getting four stars instead of five), "Supposedly Fun Thing" is without a doubt an incredible read and well worth the price of entry.

James Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman, entitled _Genius_, spent a while defending that choice of adjective. The word ``genius" gets tossed around so much these days that it's been stripped of almost all its value. I tried to come up with a suitable subjective definition of genius, and my provisional one is something like the following: a genius is someone whose work changes the future direction that his particular speciality takes; after he's published his work, his speciality will never be the same again. By this definition - and by any others that I can think of - David Foster Wallace is a genius.

His genius comes from a few directions. First is his astonishing ability to meld diverse thoughts into a coherent whole. I think this is revealed most clearly in ``E Unibus Plurum," Wallace's essay within _A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again_ about the effect that television - particularly television's habit of swallowing irony - has on fiction. He diverges briefly into thoughts about what this means for our society in general. What happens when we spend our time conversing ironically - that is, commenting sardonically, but not actually fixing anything?

But at the same time that he can be incisive and intelligent, he's incredibly funny. The title essay from this collection describes Wallace's trip aboard a luxury cruise liner for Harper's Magazine, and the strange sort of death-transcendence (his term, not mine) that defines cruise lines. It's both funny enough that I had a hard time breathing at certain points, and almost heartbreaking.

I guess I don't always think of Wallace's genius until days like today when I'm sick at home and pull his essays off the shelf. I learn a little bit more about his arguments each time; laugh a little bit more; and find myself in the presence of an old friend who's incredibly candidly honest with me: ``[The mirrored staircases are] wickedly great because via the mirrors you can check out female bottoms ... without appearing to be one of those icky types who check out female bottoms on staircases." This is a man who's laying it all out on the line for you: his sense of humor, his erudition, and his very human perversions. He seems like the kind of guy with whom I could have a great conversation over coffee.

Imagine this essay collection as a conversation with an incredibly brilliant friend. It will be some of the best few hours you ever spend with a book.