Case Building or this is aggressively long for a reason

This part was added at the conclusion of the post and may seem to contradict what lies below. This post contains somewhere on the order of 3,500 or so and took me just under two hours to construct. In fact, if you posted it, spaces included, into a new word document it would stretch on to nine pages. An interminable nine pages, I hear you. It's even reasonable to ask why I'd bother sharing that sort of information up front. I just don't won't to break the contract that an author has with his readers, few though they may be. And I feel that promising something light or in any way vaguely short, or artsy, or kind of smile inducing would be fraudulent and on the order of inviting you over to my house for steaks only to reveal upon your arrival that I meant vegetarian ones. 3,500 words are a lot of words to spend on case building, but then, I always hear people in the sciences complaining about the amount of page space they have to spend just explaining results. How tedious. The following blog post does not contain any mention of a) my daughter b) certain slants of light c) the reasons why it's irritating to always see muscle adds that say scientists in Cambridge discover new muscle building miracle d) economic growth e) suburban sprawl f) the likelihood that literature is a dying medium g) the budget h) either S or s (though I thank them both for their assistance in allowing me the time to construct this thing, S, ((pact noticeably broken)) for bustling about, paying taxes, doing dishes and only grumbling a bit while I acted as an aggregator for more than an hour and s for being so damn cute that it hurts). This post is mostly about trying to prove a point that David Wallace was the best writer of his generation, so, now in a way. And the author is forced to humbly submit to the reader that he finds this to be greatly important. And that he believes, the author, that literature provides us not with great entertainment, but at its best, with a reminder that we are not alone in our thoughts and worlds. And, if you accept, or at least willing to consider that that might be the case I'd encourage you to read on despite the heft of the texty monolith below.

This post isn't that long, but I'm fairly certain that in the current annals of skimming it qualifies as an obscenely long piece of aggregation. More below. It's long because I'm trying to build a case that the reason I was always prattling on about David Wallace during graduate school, much to some folks chagrin, is that he was the best writer of his generation. Not, one of the literary greats, or, a great writer, literally the best American writer of his generation. Now, in order to make such a claim it's important to find relevant data to back it up. This is a problem we struggle with in the humanities, building cases. We're forced, unlike a mathematician, to rely on our own ability to discern gold from dross to determine what the best sort of writing is. Note: it seems strangely appropriate to be writing this note after the publication of The Pale King, a book, which is mostly sad and sometimes funny, but what has at its core the assertion that the great trick in life is deciding what to pay attention to because you will receive a myriad of impressions, sights, smells, textures, opinions, facts, fictions disguised as facts, and you, particularly as a member of a democracy, will have to decide which of those you are going to pay attention to. And what you choose to pay attention to will almost certainly determine the sort of person, useful member of a democratic society that you will become because we have the option to pay attention to nearly an infinite number of things now. Choose wisely.

Listen, that note was excruciatingly long and even grew a bit preachy towards the end, which is rarely the way to reach anyone. Sunday's excluded. Anyhow, as I watched my classmates eyes glaze over as I talked about the incredibly wonder that a book like Infinite Jest I regret that I didn't have all of the ammunition that I've supplied below. Note: Inwardly the author of this piece was, on some small level, most definitely engaging in some internal eye rolling at people who dismissed his recommendation out of hand without actually having ever read the text or even considered it after his sterling recommendation, even though he's perfectly aware that this sort of not paying attention to recommendations is the sort of thing he engages in daily. But still, read the damn book you ignoramus, he sort of thought because the attendant eye rolling was probably at least a little bit warranted for the sorts of folks, literary types, that he was talking with who hadn't bothered to read what was, at the very least, the most interesting (caveat that had hit the mainstream. Kind of). American writing being done and that the sort of eye rolling oh here he goes again on his high horse was not only perceived as insulting but almost vulgar coming from people who by all rights were interested in writing or reading and analyzing the next great work of American literature. It seemed to me a sad hint of hubris, and I suppose I'm sort of offering up here a not so vague f--k you to the eye rollers. (Some folks who I just plain like excluded such as those who at least provide me with playlists about IJ or have all sorts of good intentions about reading stuff like me but just didn't get around to it). It all winds up sort of tying back into X generation type stuff, of which I'm nominally a part where it is much easier to be sarcastic and self-deprecating about oneself and the status of the world because there's almost no attendant risk, and to be sincere, risks ending up sounding saccharine or end up with sentences like a not so vague f--- you when the sincerity isn't attended to. This whole post is aggressively lacking in paragraphs at this point as well, but I hope it's clear that the form is supposed to be mimicking the content. Should I even include this? I mean, what's probably easy to misunderstand about a person who seems cynical, sarcastic, word du jour, is the degree to which they too are sensitive. But now it's just the author, me, whining about people's inability to pierce the wall between two human beings, a problem that is not unique but a central problem of being a human being at all. This is all already too long. Though, to add, the oddest part about the above irritation is the shocking amount of time this very author wastes on inconsequential type stuff when he could be reading Ecclesiastes or something rather than checking on the 3rd quarter score of a first round NBA playoff game 2 to see if Brandon Roy is getting minutes. The appended note above is the sort of thing that Wallace mastered, no comparison here, light years difference in intellect, but, the brain voice. What I mean is, the voice that tells you to write something like f--- you but then minutes later is saying, "Wait, was that such a good idea?" maybe we should append something to that. The brilliance of Wallace is that he was willing to follow that chain of thought down to its core where he generally came up with the meaning as something both unifying and sort of insidious the need to be perceived in a certain way by others, or by ourselves that wasn't authentic. And if we couldn't be authentic, even with ourselves, how the hell were we supposed to go about this daily job of living without our collective heads exploding?

What's collected below? Well, let's just say it's like that fantasy where you get the genie who grants you three wishes.


Doesn't this sort of undercut the whole argument? I have a weakness for things that I perceive as funny. No, what's collected below are a series of excerpts from some of the reviews written about The Pale King, which help illustrate, with what is about as close as we're going to get in the humanities to scientific data that David Wallace may well have been the best writer of his generation as I've asserted above, and asserted in conversation with many generous, and not so generous folks that I've spoken with in the last few years. Note: I don't have as much guilt as I pretend to have about the humanities. I believe that things like science, particularly related to health or interstellar space travel are more important for our future than Robinson Crusoe, but I also firmly believe that a world without the sort of consideration that we get in our best fiction, non-fiction, commentary etc. would be a pretty shitty place to live. Author exits stage left.

From The Telegraph:

This was perhaps an inevitable occurrence for a writer who had produced a novel justly considered by Time magazine to be one of the top 100 novels written since 1923, and even if he wasn’t always producing his best work, Foster Wallace remained arguably America’s most important author.

Montreal Gazette:
Wallace was, and is, one of the titans of contemporary literature. He was the writing equivalent of a Swiss army knife; whether as a scholar, an essayist, a journalist, a novelist or a short-story writer, he had the right tool. His 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, a footnoteladen epic, is one of the pillars of post-modernism - you don't read it so much as get flattened by it. His journalism was detailed and illuminating

Tumblr:

Hear me out: I love David Foster Wallace. That I’ve grown into the person I am today is partially his doing. That I’ve grown up at all is partially his doing! More than any other writer, artist, or thinker, DFW has shaped my moral consciousness. His words make sense of an otherwise illogical world.

With every well-placed turn of phrase, his writing reminds me that I’m not alone - and neither is anyone else. With every achingly true observation, he sets off mental fireworks that (just like real ones) make me feel like I’m part of a bigger and more meaningful experience. Yeah, it sounds stupid, but that’s just how sincerity is.

Harvard Crimson Review:

It’s a matter of fact that Wallace’s life and his relationship to the writing process informed his work. But rehashing this fact pays mere lip service to what makes the manuscript a unique and formidable artistic achievement in its own right, and to what made Wallace himself the voice the loss from which American literature has still not recovered.

15 years after the release of his sprawling masterpiece “Infinite Jest,” Wallace’s aesthetic—a metaphysical hunger sheathed in self-referential flourishes of both high- and low-brows varieties—has influenced a generation of writers who themselves now dominate the cultural moment in English-language prose, dubbed ‘hysterical realists’ by pejorative and endearing turns each

Sunday Post:

Often cited as the greatest American writer of his era - most famously he wrote the novel Infinite Jest -Wallace committed suicide in 2008, and his long-time editor Michael Pietsch has pieced together this final work from the drafts he left behind.

The Independent:

Of all the myths that have spread about David Foster Wallace in the years since his death, the most frustratingly pervasive was that he was a difficult writer.

It came about mostly because he wrote a very long novel, Infinite Jest, that was exceptional for its intelligence and its vaulting ambition to summarise the meaning of life in an era of information overload. But those characteristics never made it punishing. More than anything else, it was fun to read: the size of the thing just meant you could relax in the knowledge that you still had plenty ahead of you.

The Pale King is pretty long, too, but you can never quite relax in the same way. This is all we have of the book that Wallace, maybe the most talented American writer of his generation

Chris Hayes on Rachel Maddow:


Eamon Brennan from espn.com

In the 1960s, an American philosopher named Richard Taylor made his colleagues weak in the knees. His paper, "Fatalism" -- which would achieve renewed renown as the subject of beloved late author David Foster Wallace's undergraduate thesis -- made a disconcertingly logical argument. Given the apparent choice of fighting or not fighting in a battle, a naval captain cannot actually choose to do anything other than what he would have done the following day.


Christian Science Monitor:

n turns satiric and sad, thought-provoking and funny, “The Pale King” is ultimately a compassionate view of the individuals who make up the IRS, the institution we have all grown to hate. It’s awe-inspiring that David Foster Wallace, one of the greatest writers and social critics of our time, should make the IRS the subject of his final novel, and that a man for whom no institution was sacred, in essence found the sacred in human beings struggling to survive that institution: the machinations, the promotions, the fear of demotion, the craziness, and paleness that it breeds, along with the humor. Pages turned endlessly, workers taught to clinch their bottoms to avoid discomfort, tedium tolerated to support a child, and yes, in the face of all this, contemplation of suicide.

The Spectator:

When David Foster Wallace took his own life two and a half years ago, we lost someone for whom I don’t think the word genius was an empty superlative. He was an overpowering stylist, and a dazzling comedian of ideas. He could be gasp-makingly funny, but had an agonising moral seriousness. There’s more on one page of Wallace than on ten of most of his contemporaries. His mind seemed to have more buzzing in it than the rest of us could imagine being able to cope with, and perhaps than he could.

The Sydney Morning Herald:

n the years following Infinite Jest, his genius had been confirmed by several collections of journalism and short fiction. The quality of Wallace's writing that his death illuminated was its receptiveness to the sense-impressions, feelings and ideas of the attentive mind. Its effect was to transport the reader to the innermost corners of his characters' consciousness.
Of course, this is what most novelists attempt; Wallace was just the best at it. Every time I have read him, I would return to the world with a sharper set of eyes.


From the New York Times book review by author Tom McCarthy:

But there’s an older ghost haunting “The Pale King” even more, I think, one whose spectral presence combines both the political and metafictional ways of reading the book: Melville’s Bartleby, the meek and lowly copyist who cannot will himself to complete the act of copying — or, to put it another way, the writer who cannot will himself to complete the act of writing. In effect, all the I.R.S.’s clerical serfs are Bartlebys; through them, and through this book, he emerges as the melancholy impasse out of which the American novel has yet to work its way. America’s greatest writer, the author of “Moby-Dick,” spent his final 19 years as a customs officer — that is, a tax inspector. To research “The Pale King,” Wallace trained in accounting. We’re moving beyond haunting to possession here. Bartleby, of course, ends up dead, leaving a stack of undeliverable papers. This is the inheritance that Wallace earnestly, and perhaps fatally, grappled with. The outcome was as brilliant as it was sad — and the battle is the right one to engage in.

Slant Magazine:

Lovers of literature will embrace the chance to gobble up further ruminations from one of their favorite philosophical minds, just as readers feverishly inhaled Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and his other books. Wallace is often compared to some of the greatest minds of the literary world, Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Vonnegut to name just two.

The Millions:

But Wallace’s canonization, now close to complete, means these criticisms no longer have much bite. Mostly we feel that Wallace’s headlong, encyclopedic, garrulous manner was born of necessity, not indulgence, that the stylistic innovations, including the massed detail, grew not from vanity but from some kind of mimetic imperative to reflect back to us our dizzy, painful, teeming, inconclusive lives.


The Globe:

He went on to pen Infinite Jest, one of the most critically lauded novels of the last quarter-century. His short stories garnered wide acclaim; several pieces of his long-form journalism are rightfully celebrated as classics of the genre. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the “genius” grant. In 2008, after discovering that his antidepressant no longer kept the symptoms of his illness at bay, he killed himself.

Boston.com

So what do we have here then? And how are we supposed to read it? These are important questions because American literature will rarely, if ever, give us another mind like Wallace’s. He was at once the recorder, the mimicker, and the synthesizer of our Age of Information. He showed how corroded our language had become; the way this loss radically ablated our spiritual lives; and he knew, intimately, how hollow we all felt, filled up and emptied out — interior life no longer this vaulting space, but a series of chemical loops and trip wires, entertainment an escape so irresistible that, in his masterpiece, the 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,’’ people die from it.

Wallace’s genius was that he could absorb the infernal logic of data — all those vectors of complexity, its relentless torrent — and still give us the magic of narrative. That moment when we, as readers, become co-imaginers of a text because there are characters in whom we believe, and a story we learn how to anticipate. Information and storytelling: They are opposing forces, like certainty and faith, yet Wallace stood across this divide and proved that if there was, in fact, a social novel of our time, here is where it would be built. Not by papering over the ruptures in realism, but by writing right through them.

Thought Catalog:
Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t bother to read it. You most certainly should. Just be aware that it’s not the kind of book designed to be a blockbuster, to keep you turning pages late into the night. Which you’ll be doing a lot of, if you’re a fan of literature. But it won’t be because the plot is so engaging (it is indescribably tedious at times) but because DFW was so damned good at writing that you can’t really believe what you’re reading. If it renders you speechless it won’t be because the prose has taken your breath away, but because you suddenly feel unworthy to be speaking the same language as someone who has so obviously and completely mastered the art of bending it to his will. And if it makes you sad, it will have less to do with the book itself and more to do with the fact that The Pale King is the last you’re ever going to get from the greatest American writer of this generation. That’s it. That’s all. Show is over, folks. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

The Observer:

David Foster Wallace, the most gifted and original American novelist of his generation, took his own life in 2008. His widow, the artist Karen Green, talks of the struggle to deal her loss and her decision to publish his unfinished work, The Pale King

From authors Darin Strauss and Charles Yu:

Charles Yu: There’s nobody else, for me, who, when you just hear the voice, you have to stop and just get into it. It’s like when I’m in the car and flipping through the radio and I’m not looking for anything in particular—and things kind of blend into a murmur of the radio. And all of a sudden I hear something I kind of wanted to hear that I didn’t realize I wanted to hear. And it’s like: “Wow.” And that’s what reading The Pale King was like, to me. I had been kind of avoiding [Wallace’s] fiction for a while; I’d been reading a lot of his nonfiction. And when I started slam-reading this I thought, “Oh man, I gotta go back and read his fiction again, things I haven’t read for years.” The Pale King just really stayed with me.


Strauss: Beyond even having appeal for outsiders, he was just the most talented and engaged writer of his generation, I think. And that was just something that was fun and intimidating to watch as his career unfolded because you knew whatever he was doing was going to be worth reading—and something you could look to for the kind of instruction we look to all the great books for. After he appeared on the scene, people’s fiction voices sounded a little different—a little slangier, a little looser, and also at the same time often a little more mathematically precise. It was that mixture of precision and looseness that was so influential.

London Review of Books:

In the spring of 2008, shortly after he started reading Infinite Jest, my friend Francis got in touch to say a) he found the book astonishing, everything I’d said it was, one of the greatest literary works of all time

The Hipster Book Club Review:

About 15 years ago, I fell in love with David Foster Wallace. Although, at first I didn’t like him. I saw an article about him in The New York Times Magazine, and thought, Cute, but I bet that book sucks. The New York Times has bad taste. And the stupid book was ridiculously long and about tennis. TENNIS! Who cares about tennis? Not me! I almost failed tennis in college(1)! I read it anyway.(2)

It’s not an overestimation to say that Infinite Jest changed my life. I was a big reader before, reading all the hipster classics of the ‘90s, but Wallace opened up my world to authors like Barth and Barthelme and Sukenick, to philosophers like Rorty and Lyotard and Barthes. I know, too many Bs. I started writing essays about my love for Wallace online and became known as “the girl who stalks David Foster Wallace.”

GQ Review:

Here's a thing that is hard to imagine: being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished. That's what Wallace's suicide did, two and a half years ago. It wasn't just a sad thing, it was a blow.