Essay on David Foster Wallace is a new lens on an old favorite
Every so often I like to check back in with my past reading self as a way to gauge who I was then versus who I am now.
We all change as we grow older, right? For example, when I was four years old, I would’ve told you my favorite books were Richard Scarry’s “What Do People Do All Day?” and “Goodnight Moon,” by Margaret Wise Brown, while today…
Actually, those books still rule, so maybe I haven’t changed that much.
I had a specific occasion to do some reconsidering after reading a typically interesting and insightful essay by author/ critic Patricia Lockwood on the work of the late David Foster Wallace, recently published in the London Review of Books. The over 8,000-word piece includes both Lockwood’s personal reaction to and relationship with Wallace’s work, as well as how Wallace’s texts are of great importance and talismanic wisdom to a certain class of young males.
Guilty as charged. I read Wallace’s story collection “Girl with Curious Hair” as a college freshman and it was like connecting with someone who seemed interested in the same things as me: television, how books work, girls.
In graduate school, I became obsessed with Wallace’s nonfiction (“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”), essays about his trip on a cruise ship, or my personal favorite, a close observation and deconstruction of the Illinois State Fair.
At the end of graduate school, counting the days until I had to move back home to my parents’ basement, I pared my possessions down to a bedroll, comforter, lamp and copy of “Infinite Jest,” a long novel about a society-wide existential crisis that sustained me as I went through my own personal existential crisis.
Wallace’s erudition, his humor, his willingness to blend the low and highbrow felt like the kind of attitude I would like to project to the world, even as I understood my more limited intellectual firepower. I would have called him my favorite writer, no doubt.
Lockwood discusses both aspects of Wallace the writer and Wallace the person that perhaps should be grappled with as we consider his work 15 years after his death in 2008. We know that he stalked and intimidated a romantic partner. We know that he could be crude and unkind. He never purported himself
to be a saint, but sometimes in death we decide those things don’t matter, and maybe we shouldn’t.
Lockwood suggests that years on, as fresh and new as Wallace’s work seemed to be at the time, perhaps it is not as innovative as once believed and that turning Wallace into a guru is a dead end.
Interestingly, I found myself agreeing more than disagreeing with Lockwood about her views of Wallace and his work, particularly the notion that he would make a lousy guru, given that it’s something I sort of tried for a couple of years.
It is important we continue to evolve as we experience the world. What a drag it would be to keep reading the same books over and over. Expanding one’s worldview is a great pleasure of reading.
More than 30 years after having first read Wallace’s work and being truly wowed by it, literally feeling a jolt of energy, this no longer happens.
But at the same time, I feel the echo of that feeling. I am not that young man anymore, but also, I will always be that young man, if that makes sense. That’s not a bad thing either.
I can look back on that past self with some fondness and understanding, even though (perhaps especially because) he still had (and has) some growing to do.