In the New York Times Book Review: David Foster Whatthehell

In the New York Times Book Review: David Foster Whatthehell

In this past Sunday's NY Times, Walter Kirn reviews David Foster Wallace's new collection "Oblivion."

One reason it's tempting to follow the smart set -- that anxious clan of stylishly camouflaged, overeducated social maladapts that functions in the literary world a lot like those old guys sucking White Owl cigars do in metropolitan Off Track Betting parlors -- and flatly declare David Foster Wallace a genius and the greatest young fiction writer of his time, is that doing so is much, much easier than actually reading his sentences (compared to most of which this one is a haiku).

Hells yeah. Negotiating a typical Wallaceian sentence is like surfing three oceans at once while juggling six decades' worth of Sears catalogs. Here's an example Kirn cites from the story "Mr. Squishy":

Showing as yet no signs of polypeptide surfeit, a balding blue-eyed 30-ish man whose tag's block caps read HANK was staring, from his place at the corner of the conference table nearest Schmidt and the whiteboard, either absently or intently at Schmidt's valise, which was made of a pebbled black synthetic leather material and happened to be markedly wider and squatter than your average-type briefcase or valise, resembling almost more a doctor's bag or computer technician's upscale toolcase.

Three-and-a-half years ago, I started reading Wallace's novel "Infinite Jest," footnotes and all, and today I'm no closer to page 1,079 than I am to becoming a world-renowned geophysicist, and I can't tell a mesosphere from a tube of Compound W.

Maybe it was the mescaline I did in 1986 -- the time I thought my friend Dave's dad's green Toyota Celica GT turned into a giant frog at a Manhattan stoplight -- or maybe it was subsequent years' worth of bong hits and Avengers reruns that revised my reading comprehension downward, to below the standard a Wallace-hewn sentence requires. After the first hundred or so words I'm like Leonard Shelby without a pen -- damned if I can remember what was going on at the beginning. I am just unable to absorb Wallace's level of detail. Once, I even considered having a CAT scan to see if I had a damaged melon, which I thought might be causing a real short-term memory deficit. Such was how personally I took my inability to get at Wallace's often-noted genius -- his comment on the inability of language to express our complex physical world, etc. etc. ad infinitum.

Anyway, who cares if I "get" Wallace or not? Unlocking Wallace's prose is a badge of honor only to those who 1) have more education than employment demands, 2) live in an urban area with others who have lots of daytime leisure, and 3) exercise their lit-crit vocabularies in inverse proportion to the scrawniness of their physiques. Boy howdy, do I wish I fit that profile (scrawniness notwithstanding).

If I show up covered in handwritten notes and post-its, you'll know I made yet another pass at "Infinite Jest."