An epic talent

National Review, Oct 20, 2008 by Mark Hemingway

THE recently deceased novelist, essayist, and journalist David Foster Wallace was a genius. And a big, showy one at that. His style, laden with his trademark footnotes, was that of a man whose brain was permanently stuck in overdrive--a mind so bright, an observer so exactingly acute as Wallace seemed to have no other option. He was going to struggle mightily to convey the whole of his experience and insight on any given topic, and lest anything slip through the cracks he would insert it on the bottom of the page where he hoped that there was still room, given his typically voluminous outpouring. They say brevity is the soul of wit, but Wallace's agile mind was witty enough to rewrite the rules.

Wallace's two collections of journalism and essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster, remain his most accessible works. But most of his career came in the shadow of his magnum opus, the dystopian doorstop of a novel Infinite Jest. The book describes a future in which the U.S. has turned a huge section of its Northeast into a toxicwaste dump (where herds of feral hamsters roam) and declared that region part of Canada, angering our neighbors to the north to the point that there's a terrorist group made up entirely of Quebecois assassins in wheelchairs frantically searching the country for an avant--garde film-- the Infinite Jest of the title--they plan on using as a weapon. The film is said to be so compelling that all who see it want to do nothing but watch it until they waste away. Even more oddly, most of the book's characters are either youths at a tennis academy or the occupants of a drug--rehab center.

The novel is about addiction, and about the whole of the American experience. It's very, very funny and very, very sad and, according to the jacket copy, which for once is not exaggerating, is "one of those rare books that renew the very idea of what a novel can do." But as is most often remarked upon, it is nearly a thousand pages long, not counting the additional 97 pages that contain the book's 388 footnotes.

To say Wallace needed an editor is a not--altogether--unfounded criticism, but Infinite Jest is surprisingly readable. It's true that its length is almost unmanageable; it's overstuffed with textual games and knowing pop--culture references and, as such, appears to bear all the hallmarks of postmodern literary self--indulgence. And yet, the two most common assessments of Infinite Jest and, to some extent, of Wallace's entire literary output--that it is self--indulgent and postmodern--are fundamentally wrong.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

To put it plainly, Wallace was the postmodernist who wasn't. What Wallace wrought in Infinite Jest and elsewhere wasn't just brilliant writing in the vein of a previous generation of postmodernists (think Gaddis, Pynchon, Barth, DeLillo) so much as a response to them. Where a generation of writers before him saw America as a vast canvas for their expansive intellects and decried it as a hollow, satire--demanding place, Wallace almost never wrote without empathy for the world of flesh and blood and feelings and those who inhabit it.

As the critic A. O. Scott observed, Wallace's early novella "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" (published in his first short--story collection, The Girl with Curious Hair) pulled off a neat trick. "It features authorial intrusions in the manner of John Barth; whimsical collages of wild fabulation and deadpan realism that recall Richard Brautigan, or maybe middleperiod Kurt Vonnegut; and long, long sentences in the style of Donald Barthelme. The proceedings are shot through with an air of wild Pynchonian intrigue," Scott wrote. The novella, set in a creativewriting workshop, adeptly mimicked nearly every major postmodern writer-- solely for the purpose of exposing the limitations of their cleverness. (Wallace singles out Barth's unbelievably selfreferential book Lost in the Funhouse for an especially delightful skewering.)

Which is not to say that Wallace's own displays of literary pyrotechnics were insincere. Wallace truly did believe in pushing the envelope of what language could do and how it could be employed. But in a very contradictory and unpostmodern fashion he was also acutely sensitive to the rules and limitations of language. He wrote a very credible and amusing essay for Harper's on the debate over whether English usage rules should be prescriptive or bend and break as usage changes. And one of Infinite Jest's many amusing asides concerns an organization known as the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, which, among other things, organizes boycotts of stores featuring signs that read "10 items or less."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Wallace's biggest indictment of postmodernism was that he never stopped raging against solipsism, literary or otherwise. Wallace, whose academic background leans heavily on math and philosophy, took the topic on directly in his now--classic commencement address at Kenyon College, where he said: