You Should Read David Foster Wallace
if i have to, so do you
The problem with reading David Foster Wallace at this moment in literary history is that there’s a never-ending swarm of hot takes that buzz around his name. Whether or not you’ve read DFW or even the hot takes is beside the point. The noise that exists around his work is invasive. Before you can crack the spine of Consider the Lobster, a collection of the late author’s essays, the internet has already reached inside your critical wiring and fiddled with the relays. Or, more accurately, the internet has dulled any desire to start the engine—that is, to read the work—and not just because the hot takes often emphasize DFW as overrated and even immoral, but just as equally because whatever camp continues to fight in his honor also seems to belabor his reputation. They think he’s great, so great, and maybe the very man for our political moment. The pressure itself—positive or negative—is a deterrent.
Worse, the problem with being the kind of person who has a blog about writing that’s updated, oh, every three months, is that DFW is the kind of writer it’s almost impossible not to want to write about should you finally read an entire work by him. To be really precise, in a way that might mimic but never actually captures the power of Mr. Wallace, the problem with writing about DFW is that so much has been written about DFW, and more importantly memed about him, that the urge to write about his work is immediately met with an internalized blockade that actually spurs you further into wanting to write because you’d never let some invisible mob of Paste has-beens (meaning both camps) dictate what draws your attention.
Oof! If only there were a chronicler of this sort of modern and crippling (though sometimes elevating) self-consciousness! A writer whose obsessive desire for precision is leavened by a genuinely expansive, if sometimes combative, curiosity.1
The good news is that the internal blockade around DFW can serve as a canny introduction: name the conundrum as a way to slip under the armor of the reader’s own resistance. Even better, such an introduction is itself a spiritual pastiche of David Foster Wallace, who never met an idea that he couldn’t examine from a slightly different angle, and who didn’t write so much in a dialectical mode2 as he chased ideas down every textual alleyway until it was more or less helpless—not captured, but caught clearly in the beam of his differently scaled descriptions.
In short, although I have much more to say about it, I think most people should read David Foster Wallace.3 I think even if you avoid his fiction, and even if you hate him and his worst fans on a personal level for the rest of your life, you should bump his essays higher up your list. I don’t know how your to-read list works—mine is more or less a catalog of titles I never want to forget even as it remains powerless to actually sway4 my reading decisions in any day-to-day way—but Wallace’s essays should be added, maybe upvoted, maybe highlighted, etc.
Why is he worth your time, though? It’s not a rhetorical question. Time and attention are commodities more than ever; are abstractions we seem to possess, having been convinced by the self-help tomes of CEOs and ad writers that everything is a commodity rather than a decision or a judgment or a preference. Time and attention are things we control and which we hand out, something we pay with, something we budget and allot and waste on variously-sized screens.
Let’s leave the terrible system intact, for now. Time and attention are things we keep in reserve, like coins in our soul’s piggy bank, and I’m asking you to crack open the porcelain for the sake of one of the internet’s favorite litmus tests. If you read DFW, much less enjoy him, no one in your actual life will care.5 But a bunch of people who may one day see an anodyne Instagram shelfie6 from your account might absolutely, clinically lose their minds if they note David Foster Wallace among your less problematic tomes.
To be frank: David Foster Wallace is problematic.7 And, honestly, I’m the kind of sensitive, readerly, character-driven surburban dad who doesn’t take his reputed bad behavior all that lightly. If I’ve been light in tone until this paragraph, it’s because Wallace as a writer invites a kind of lightness, a playfulness,8 that I think is often lost amid the critical consideration of his recursive or discursive or pick-your-vursive literary designs. If the footnotes are endless in an exhausting sense—or could be described that way—I think they might also be seen as something less solemn. Comedians have the same kind of self-interrupting tics, for instance. If they’re heading down known territory, they often jump ahead of themselves with a kind of side commentary before seeing the joke through to its natural conclusion. Jim Gaffigan9 does this quite literally in his early specials, deploying the famous high voice of an imagined audience member to heighten, or more often extend, the punchlines.
The point is that Wallace the person can’t be taken so lightly. Mary Karr, the poet and memoirist, published alarming details about Wallace in her memoir Lit (2009).10 When #MeToo swept through American culture in 2018, she pointed out that no one had ever really cared about her anecdotes. I won’t recount all the disturbing details here, mostly because they’ve been summarized better elsewhere. Also, and more controversially, I won’t recount them at this moment because there’s no reason to still be talking about David Foster Wallace except that he wrote (allegedly) great works of prose.
Personally, I borrowed The Broom of the System (1987),11 Wallace’s debut novel, in either college or grad school not because I was hoping to become the next literary misogynist and solipsist,12 but because he was supposed to be one of the great modern writers. Meaning really modern, like young enough if he hadn’t committed suicide,13 he’d possibly be teaching English to this day, much less publishing. His work made him important in his lifetime, made him famous in his death, and has made him infamous in light of his personal demons. The demons themselves are insufficient in and of themselves to have ever elevated him. The work matters, culturally if not to you or me personally, as a precipitating event to the ongoing wars about his moral value.
If you care about his bad behavior, and would like to battle the influence of his hypocrisy, that means eventually you must read the books.14 The further we get from DFW’s death and from his possibly poisonous effect on the lives of women and men still living, the more we enter the debates we always have about deceased artists whose moral nadirs are public record. Maybe what I’m suggesting here is just the standard “admire the work despite the author” position,15 but once you read David Foster Wallace, rather than about him, the questions regarding his behavior are necessarily sidelined. The relationship is now between what exists on the page and has been offered for readerly consideration, and your own inner thoughts.16
Relavent confession: Consider the Lobster, the last book he published before he died, is the first book I’ve finished by David Foster Wallace. I hope this drives home how little my argument is, “Infinite Jest is genius, actually!” Although I remember vividly the first chapter of The Broom of the System from my college (or grad school) perusal,17 part of what I recall so strongly is that I knew I couldn’t keep reading. One of my weaknesses as a reader, or perhaps as a writer, is that I have a hard time finishing any novel or story that feels like it might be related to my own ambitions in fiction. This doesn’t mean that I write like DFW and worry I’ll find what I hope to achieve already accomplished, although that’s sometimes the case.18
With Broom, the quality of the first pages alone made me realize how amorophous and incipient and, perhaps most accurately, inchoate my own novelistic tendencies were at the time. The clarity of his authorial voice, and honestly the sheer authority of such a young writer’s point-of-view, was startling. I knew he was young when he wrote the work, and I was young (early-twenties at latest) at the time, and I also was beginning to sense that I was a late bloomer, of sorts. Or a later bloomer.19
After that, I put Wallace aside. I didn’t want to wrangle with his fiction, especially the more I learned about (though without ever reading) Infinite Jest. It didn’t matter that Zadie Smith, one of my favorite novelist-cum-critics, thought his short stories were some of the most vital pieces of fiction she’d come across. It didn’t matter that I attended Syracuse University’s MFA program, which has all sorts of connections20 with David Foster Wallace.
Instead, my contact was incidental: I heard that one graduation speech he gave about the fish and “This is water” and so on, which I thought was decent, and I found a convincing blurb of his about taking usage (rather than “grammar”) seriously that I assigned to my freshmen writing students. The latter, to be honest, is probably why I ended up buying Consider the Lobster—again, in Syracuse—though all the noise around him and my own multi-layered resistance to his work kept me from reading the book until now.
Relevant tangent: George Steiner, one of the 20th century’s critical luminaries, begins his definitive book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky by declaring that “literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love.” To be more precise, “the poem or drama or the novel seizes upon our imaginings,” such that “we are not the same when we put down the work as when we took it up.”
I can’t offer anything so certain regarding Wallace’s work, or about the essays in Consider the Lobster specifically. But the same instinct to testimony invigorates the reader as well as the critic, and certainly inspired this post. The tension over Wallace the writer and Wallace the human, however, is that his work has inspired Steiner’s species of literary love. If my own testimony is a little more lukewarm, I still want to press it as firmly as possible into your hand, a gift of one wandering literary nerd to another. You may not enjoy Consider the Lobster’s best essays the way I have, but I don’t think anyone can read “Up, Simba”—Wallace’s novella-sized profile of then populist-candidate John McCain and his 2000 presidential campaign—without feeling like an essential dynamic of American power versus American sentiment has been unpeeled layer by layer.21
In other words, I don’t feel a “debt of love” to Wallace, but I do feel that subtle shift of perception which occurs after encountering a remarkable, and bracing, influence. Worse, I sort of half-believe many of Wallace’s most intelligent partisans.22 I can’t count myself among them, but when I say, “You should read David Foster Wallace,” it’s in the name of curiosity, and maybe even a challenge to best him at his own game. If everything he oozes as a vibe remains an intractable block on my curiosity, the ironic conclusion of refusing to engage his work is that I end up a less generous reader and thinker than the writer I’m hoping to condemn.23
If that’s too petty, here’s my testimony on a higher plane: reading Consider the Lobster can never undue the damage of Wallace’s life, but it has helped me with some of the mental burden of my own. That’s a rare gift, and I think anyone serious about American literature should test whether their own literary taste will allow them to accept it.
If it feels like I’m short-shrifting the actual issues around DFW—give me a few more paragraphs! Also, if you’re reading this by email, I suggest clicking through to the actual Substack website, where footnotes are much easier to navigate.
Although his footnotes might suggest “dialectical,” and probably are “dialectical” in some technical sense, I think he’s closer to a lexicographer. The footnotes are often citations, or examples furthering his descriptions (which are definitions at length); he’s shoring up the boundaries of what might be considered relevant.
This sentence is the purest, good-natured DFW satire of the piece, IMO.
This is a split infinitive, the “actually” interrupting “to sway.” If you were taught this is “wrong wrong wrong!”, please read DFW, specifically his essay on usage in Consider the Lobster.
Assuming, of course, that you aren’t one of the unfortunate few whose friends are mostly writers and aspiring literati, among whom the online life becomes alarmingly enfleshed. Before I went to Syracuse for my MFA in fiction, I warned my wife that a lot of nomenclature she’d only seen online—or, to be honest, had only heard me discuss when talking about online tensions and topics—would suddenly become a conspicuous part of our social life. “No one will have a boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse,” I told her. “Everyone will have partners.” Verily, it came to pass.*
*Sub-footnote: That’s not to pass judgment on the neutral “partner,” per se. Many of my favorite writing and/or socially progressive friends have used and will probably always use that designation! All the same, it feels a little like the change from “A.D” to “C.E.” in historical writing. Maybe it’s a helpful widening, but the dates aren’t less tied to anno Domini any more than your partner Adam is divested from his essentially midwestern boyfriend behavior by the power of semantics.
Please shoot me if I ever use this word again.
Diction note: someone once pointed out that “problematic” comes to us from the French “problematique”—or something like that, I don’t know enough French and don’t have time to look it up right now. But “problematique” (or whatever) was a noun, a kind of critical document produced on a certain subject, rather than a certain subject or person being described as “problematic,” which more or less means “morally questionable” if not “morally damnable.” Anyway. It bothers me that I can’t stop using it.
In the audio version of Consider the Lobster, DFW narrates several of the essays himself. Instead of saying, “Footnote” and “End footnote” as the professional reader does, he records the footnotes in a slightly “smaller,” quieter audio. The interruptions are endless, but in this rendering, their playfulness is more explicit than ever.
Perhaps the least likely David Foster Wallace analogue of all time.
I met Mary Karr while I was at Syracuse. One of my great regrets is that I didn’t take a full semester of classes with her. She was funny, honest, and the kind of Texas transplant—however chic, however whip smart—that made millennials in the year of our lord 2017 very uncomfortable. She had her own “problematic” vapor trails during my time—and as a white male I know I’m exactly the demographic to be accused of dismissing those out of hand—but all I can say is I thought she was funny as hell and a better story teller than anyone else on staff. *
*With apologies to Arthur Flowers and, coming out-of-nowhere with hair so thick and white-tipped it could be a kind of miniature tidal wave, Jonathan Dee.
The year I was born. I don’t think that means anything, but I’m also sure it probably made me feel a little happier when I picked up the novel. Which is to say I am a whimsical and ridiculous man, and such a fact should be the pinch of salt you apply to everything I wite.
I’d love to be known as one of the great male writers who “was as boring as a pun”; a man who loved and wooed one woman, was more or less a puritan* of personal habit, and who got drunk so rarely that the occasions could be calculated on two hands. And yet was, like, still very cool. You think he’s not cool? He hikes, you guys. As in, atop mountains. Sometimes he even bicycles.
*Some people really dislike using “puritan” in this sense. I don’t care!
“Committed suicide” is no longer the polite phrase, and I’m genuinely sorry if anyone is offended by it. My own experience and relationship to the fact of taking your life, to say nothing of the desire to write mellifluously and candidly as opposed to jargonistically, means it’s the phrasing I still think is strongest, maybe even most accurate.
Or not! But I suppose what I mean is that if you want to demythologize David Foster Wallace, or even to win arguments with these supposed “lit-bros” who care so much about his work, you’ll have to make textual arguments. He matters, good or bad, because of his cultural footprint. And of course there’s always the third option, which I tend to take with (say) Bret Easton Ellis, an author who may have produced worthwhile fiction but who seems like a bit of a cad when he’s not seeming like a bit of a bore online: “I’ve never read him, actually.”
Which is basically my position generally. Wallace has a very good essay on Joseph Frank’s multi-volume biography of Dostoevsky that could be a model for how one might approach Wallace himself; never dismissive of his damaging choices, but mindful of the fact that no one would care about Dostoevsky’s legendary fiscal debt or personal assholery if he hadn’t written Crime and Punishment. The texts, in other words, make the life worth exploring, and not the other way around.
This is probably as close as I get to New Criticism, a school of literary thought that Wallace doesn’t seem to have enjoyed all that much.
“Peruse” actually means the opposite of scan. A “descriptive” dictionary like Webster’s* might tell you that it can also mean “scan” now because we’ve all been using it incorrectly for years, but Webster’s is wrong.
*If you never read anything else, let me say it again: David Foster Wallace’s essay, “Authority and American Usage” from Consider the Lobster is a must-read for anyone half-serious about writing, and certainly for anyone who ever pretended to be a “grammar Nazi.”
I’ve wanted to write a mid-grade novel for years, and probably will someday. And for this reason I cannot make myself read Katherine Rundell, the author of children’s lit romp Rooftoppers and (somehow!) a biography of John Donne. We might be tilling similar land, so to speak, and I don’t want to shift my course based on what she’s done!
I remember telling my wife, though not this precisely, that I felt like my love for (e.g.) Connie Willis and my equally strong admiration for (e.g.) Flannery O’Connor was emblamatic of my incoherent urges. How to marry two such voices? The truth was that I just hadn’t read enough or written enough. Maybe no one ever publishes my novels, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t finally written (a few) of them, and, personally, I think they’re very good. They also exhibit trace lineages of Willis, O’Connor, and even more disparate influences.
Not all positive, as has been noted regarding Mary Karr.
Forget Trump, the all-pervading hermeneutic* of our age (at least when elected). You shouldn’t read David Foster Wallace so you can better understand Trump, but so you can also think through the various iterations of America’s self-interest seduction, of which Trump is our current flavor. Those seductions, those tensions, are going nowhere fast.
*The essay linked here, which is about Rebecca West, was given the headline,“Tired of the Same Trump-Era ‘Must-Reads’? Read This Instead”—which I genuinely think killed the piece. Maybe I did use Trump as a hook to pitch my first piece on Rebecca West, but the argument is actually that such a critical cage is insufficient for understading any great piece of art, and that great pieces of art can speak to us at these moments because they are (surprise!) timeless. Anyway! It’s a decent essay despite the hook.
Zadie Smith should have the last word, typographically if not within the main action of the piece: “To appreciate Wallace, you need to really read him—and then you need to reread him. For this reason—among many others—he was my favorite living writer, and I wrote this piece to remember him by, which, in my case, is best done by reading him again.” From “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace,” collected in Changing My Mind (2009).
Just kidding, let me give the last word to Mary Karr, a badass and (again) a target of Wallace’s abuse. “Oh just read it,” she says of Infinite Jest. “I still read loads of books by folks w deplorable acts in their bios.” She isn’t suggesting a white-washing of Wallace the person, and neither am I.