Wallace’s essays flouted the rules
David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, was his generation’s most eloquent cartographer of the Total Noise society. In his fiction and non-fiction, he mapped this new America that was entertaining itself to death and reeling at once from overstimulation and boredom, information overload and emotional numbness.
He charted the absurdities and sadnesses of life in this land of hype and hyperbole, and he did so in incandescent prose that was as magical as it was elastic..
Both Flesh and Not, a new collection of Wallace’s nonfiction, isn’t as choice a selection as A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997) or Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005). There are a couple of disposable entries, and a thoroughly offensive one in which Wallace perversely argues that casually promiscuous members of his own generation “might well come to regard AIDS as a blessing, a gift perhaps bestowed by nature to restore some critical balance, or maybe summoned unconsciously out of the collective erotic despair of the post-60s glut.”
Even the more compelling essays in this volume — like so much of his fiction — could have done with a little judicious pruning. But at their best, these essays remind us of Wallace’s arsenal of talents: his restless, heatseeking reportorial eye; his ability to convey the physical or emotional truth of things with a couple of flicks of the wrist; his capacity to make leaps, from the mundane to the metaphysical, with breathtaking velocity and ardour.
Wallace taught writing for many years, and the stronger entries here underscore just what a wonderful teacher he must have been.
He dissects other authors’ work with a fellow craftsman’s sympathy and hardnosed knowledge of technique, and in an essay about Jorge Luis Borges he pushes the reader to question kneejerk assumptions about the connections between a writer and his life.
In a 1988 piece about “Conspicuously Young” writers (most famously represented by the likes of Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and David Leavitt), Wallace writes that “the vast bulk of the vast amount of recently published CY fiction reinforces the stereotype that has all young literary enterprises falling into one or more of the following three dreary camps”: “Neiman-Marcus Nihilism” featuring salon-tanned yuppies, “none of whom seem to be able to make it from limo door to analyst’s couch without several grams of chemical encouragement”; “Catatonic Realism, aka Ultraminimalism, aka Bad Carver,” which specializes in the “deliberately flat, understated, ‘undersold’ ”; and “Workshop Hermeticism,” or creative-writing-program stories — “nice, cautious, boring” and “as tough to find technical fault with as they are to remember after putting them down.”
Today’s literary landscape, of course, is exponentially richer, more variegated and more complex — in no small part because of Wallace’s influence on contemporaries and younger writers, who have learned from him how to break the rules, how to combine the high and the low, the pop and the highbrow, and how to find idiosyncratic voices of their own.