A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. - book reviews

ArtForum, Summer, 1997 by Andrew Hultkrans

Gifted ironists die hard. Which is why it's so painful to watch David Foster Wallace's awkward attempt to transmogrify from arch metafictionist to champion of Meaning. In his recent A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a collection of magazine articles written between '92 and '96 and revised for the book, we witness Wallace's protracted struggle to shed the glib, ironic armor of his early fiction by declaring his willingness "to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs . . . the 'Oh how banal'" of the gifted ironist. For veteran Wallace-watchers, this New Sincerity routine is hard to swallow. After all, this is the pomo prodigy whose fictional characters appear on Late Night with David Letterman, and whose obsessive footnoting leads to notes that simply read "!" or "Duh." But in an essay from ASFTINDA (in homage to Wallace's passion for acronyms, I'll refer to his book in this way from now on), Wallace emerges, somewhat clumsily, from the Chinese boxes of ironic distance. lacking portions of its argument from Mark Crispin Miller's anti-TV polemic Boxed In, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (clever title, huh?) broadcasts the same "Stop the Irony!" message Wallace has been feeding interviewers on his book tour. This 1993 essay posits that today's young fiction writers are irreparably damaged by television's endless churn of self-reflexive irony: "irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture." Fair enough, Apart from these tongue-tied sentences, there's little to disagree with here. While his intentions are noble, and his point hard to dispute (partly because we've heard it so many times before), Wallace can't seem to get his other foot out of the puzzle box. Perhaps fearing ridicule for such a passionate blast, he puts a cutesy subhead "I do have a thesis" above his mission statement, effectively hedging his bets. Like the dead-end residents of Infinite Jest's halfway house, Wallace is an addict, in recovery from a serious irony problem, and, like all twelve-steppers, he is prone to relapse now and again.

Written after the favorable cult reception of his first two efforts - the Pynchonesque novel The Broom of the System and the arch, virtuosic collection of short stories Girl with Curious Hair - but before he embarked on the three-year marathon that resulted in Infinite Jest, "E Unibus Pluram" is the lament of a precocious talent at the crossroads. His quandary - "To Mean or not to Mean" - also informs the zigzagging narrative of Infinite Jest, a masterful, labyrinthine novel that perfectly illustrates Wallace's struggle with his own ironic impulses. Its setting and period details are classic early Wallace, overbrimming with broad satire of the metaspectacular society in our near future. Canada has been absorbed by the US to form a post-NAFTA alliance entitled the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N. for short, get it?), calendar years are now commercially subsidized, leading to absurdities like the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, and the Statue of Liberty brandishes familiar consumer products instead of her eternal torch. Within this occasionally groan-inducing frame, Wallace sets one of his two major narrative threads at a Boston-area halfway house, giving us a dose of his newfound seriousness to stunning effect. Through the organ-spilling confessions of his broken addicts, he delivers not only the best writing yet on the often misunderstood world of addiction-recovery, but the best writing of his career. In interviews, Wallace maintains he gleaned his AA portraits from research and friends' experiences. Either he's lying or he's just that good. Reading the incredibly moving halfway-house portions of Infinite Jest, it's hard to believe this Wallace is the same writer who produced the decidedly style-over-substance stories in Girl with Curious Hair. Unfortunately, infinite Jest's other major plotline - concerning the improbably eccentric Incandenza family and their tennis academy - suggests John Irving filtered through Don DeLillo, and like the book's satirical near-future setting, demonstrates that Wallace is still too attached to his own cleverness to breathe human life into all his characters.

The portrait of the artist as recovering ironist painted by Infinite Jest takes center stage in ASFTINDA, too, to equally mixed results. Wallace, baldly calling for more seriousness, sincerity, and ideological agendas in contemporary fiction, commits the Creative Writing 101 sin of telling instead of showing. In two extended profiles, on tennis pro Michael Joyce and filmmaker David Lynch, Wallace's predilection for self-reference prevents him from keeping his journalistic gaze trained on the matter at hand, resulting in "profiles" that are largely devoted to Wallace himself - his past, his impressions, his personal connections to his chosen subjects. Much of this navel-gazing takes place in footnotes - those rhetorical analogues of self-consciousness - and is only redeemed by Wallace's innate talent for humorous self-deprecation. It is, in fact, the endless self-reference, the clever asides, the nudge-wink to sophisticated readers that makes for the two best pieces in the collection - the title essay (about a seven-day luxury cruise) and "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All" (about the Illinois State Fair). These two journeys into the heart of middle America showcase Wallace's eye for microscopic detail, his wry humor, and his amusing habit of crawling deep inside his own ass. They also court charges of wise-guy elitism and clash uncomfortably with the high-minded sentiments of his anti-irony polemics.