A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

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• ISBN13: 9780316925280

Description

This exuberantly praised--and uproariously funny--first collection of nonfiction pieces by one of the most acclaimed and adventurous writers of our time--the author of "Infinite Jest"--"reconfirms Mr. Wallace's stature as one of his generation's preeminent talents" ("New York Times") 5-city author tour. Print ads .

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David Foster Wallace made quite a splash in 1996 with his massive novel, Infinite Jest. Now he's back with a collection of essays entitled A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. In addition to a razor-sharp writing style, Wallace has a mercurial mind that lights on many subjects. His seven essays travel from a state fair in Illinois to a cruise ship in the Caribbean, explore how television affects literature and what makes film auteur David Lynch tick, and deconstruct deconstructionism and find the intersection between tornadoes and tennis.

These eclectic interests are enhanced by an eye (and nose) for detail: "I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21,000 pounds of hot flesh . . ." It's evident that Wallace revels in both the life of the mind and the peculiarities of his fellows; in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again he celebrates both.

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Customer Reviews

Art & Alienation
A Supposedly Fun Book That Is Occasionally Fun (for select audiences):

"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley": DFW has the kind of self-effacing charm that allows him to forge an instant bond with readers. When he discusses relatable things like athletic ability, being a late bloomer, and the strange connection he feels (and then does not feel) toward his natural environs, the reader is instantly hooked. The fact that DFW resents nature for not endowing him with more physical strength & beauty is plenty interesting, but DFW also has another quality that is just the opposite of self-effacing and not nearly as charming, and that's his excessive brainyness. DFW often ruins perfectly good essays with excessive brainyness (apparently his revenge for not having enough brawn or beauty). The math babble threaded throughout the essay just reads like intellectual showboating. Luckily, in this essay, the brainyness doesn't spoil whats good, but in other essays it sometimes does. Some readers seem attracted to the brainyness, the learned references, the intellectual display (which becomes a kind of replacement sport for the tennis that he so loves), but to me those are not the qualities that make him worth reading.

"E Unibas Pluram: Television and US Fiction": If you are interested in answering the question of whether DFW was a postmodernist or not, this is an essential essay. This 60+ page essay is a ramble about alienation and irony. DFW admits that like many writers of fiction he is a compulsive watcher/observer and that this habit makes him feel alienated. TV, he says, seems to offer a release from alienation and so many alienated writers are tv addicts, but he decides that tv does nothing to alleviate the problem. He also contends that writers of his generation (the ones he mentions are all postmodernists) incorporate tv (and other pop references) into their work because its part of modern/postmodern life, but that this replicating of modern/postmodern life in fiction still offers no relief from the alienation that it explores/configures. DFW claims that irony/ironic detachment was a favorite writerly device/attitude for the early postmodern writers (a group that he sees as his forebears) but that irony which is also a favorite device/attitude of his generation of writers also offers no relief from alienation. Although he does make a Marx joke (in the State Fair essay), which may or may not indicate that he sees alienation as a universal condition, it would seem that his own alienation is due more to a personal than a sociological pathology. Reading between the lines (as well as the other essays in this collection), one gets the feeling that DFW is not particularly interested in connecting to any of the communities that he describes, nor that he is particularly interested in connecting to other alienated artists. Quite the contrary. It seems that DFW is rather fond of his alienated status as its the subject of virtually everything that he writes, and his trademark. Even though the essay eventually morphs into a call for a new kind of art that would deliver writers & presumably readers from their alienation, one wonders if relief from alienation (the very thing that provides the impetus for his writing) is really what he seeks. So is he a postmodernist? I think the answer is yes. Even though he often voices nostalgia for a time before the postmodern, this nostalgia is itself a key component of postmodern consciousness/writing. DFW is very good at mapping the impasse where postmodern writing leads, but the reason that he knows this impasse so well is because it is his own.

"Getting Away from Being Pretty Much Away from It All": Another extremely long 60+ page essay that is more consistently enjoyable than the previous essay, but so full of filler (endless descriptive passages of cows & horses & pigs) that one finds oneself wondering whether DFW ever cuts or deletes anything. This along with the cruise ship essay are the author at his most accessible, and his funniest. DFW is a reluctant traveler (some of the funniest bits are about his own discomfort) but he is very entertaining when summing up human types.

"Greatly Exaggerated": As in 'the rumors of my death have been...'. Despite that title, this is a humorless synopsis/review of H.L Hix's Morte d' Author: An Autopsy. The book & the book review summarize and assess the long battle over whether authorship as a concept is alive or dead. Hix is not on either side of the fence really, and believes that the argument revolves around a misuse of the word "author." Authors, Hix argues and DFW echoes, are not completely autonomous agents (no one ever really thought they were), but are influenced by culture, language, and even tv. So, as Hix explains it, there's no real side to be on. Ok, I went to grad school a few years ago and remain somewhat interested in this kind of grad school inquiry, but like many (not all) academic exercises/arguments this essay takes a very long time to say very little and certainly nothing new and most readers will do well to simply skip this one.

"David Lynch Keeps His Head": Premiere magazine asked DFW to visit the set of Lost Highway and although the author never says one word to David Lynch, he writes nearly 70 pages about him. Instead of talking to the director, DFW analyzes each and every one of his films. The interesting thing here is not the film criticism which is not particularly insightful but watching one alienated artist watch another albeit from a distance. DFW admires the work, but he is suspicious of the man behind the work who he describes as creepy. But what makes Lynch "creepy" is the same thing that makes many artists "creepy"--the strange distance they keep.
Accompany this essay with the earlier one about TV & US Fiction and you have two very interesting meditations on alienation. Again, I would say that this is DFW's main theme. Even in the travel pieces, its the author's alienation from his subject that gives the work its unique charm (we all love someone who feels even more alienated than we do) and force.

"Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry...": Tennis reportage that is really a meditation on the price paid for being obscenely good at one thing. Although DFW admires their art, he decides that Joyce and pros like him are "grotesques" ie., freakishly one-dimensional creatures.

"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again": This near-100 page essay deserves its reputation as a masterpiece of travel literature, and is the reason most people buy this book. If these essays prove anything its that DFW is a masterful and witty observer of humans at their most absurd (I only wish that DFW had a sense of humor about some of the topics that he treats seriously because when he's funny he is sublime and when he's serious he sounds just like any other academic/critic). If you've never been on a cruise ship this will make you book a cruise just to see whether DFW is exaggerating or not. All of these essay will appeal to the DFW fan, but this is the only "must read" for the general reader.

2010-06-22 (Miami Beach, Florida United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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(Insert clever title here)
I agree with the critic who said that we shouldn't let the revisionists have the day, Wallace's finest work is Infinite Jest. However, these non-fiction essays, though some are a little dated, will stand the test of time. Excellent work from top to bottom. And, yes, I like some essays more than others, obviously the title essay, the state fair essay, and the one about math and tennis. The essays that didn't resonate as much with me didn't strike me as gratuitously boring, rather, just things like David Lynch that I'm not as interested in. However, to expect every essay to include grand themes of life is to somewhat miss the point of modern life. We have so many things to choose from, Wallace's gift is in being a guide to a few of them. The sort of guide you always wished you had on one those lame Disney raft rides.

2010-06-04 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Just great writing
This is some of the best writing I've ever encountered, fiction or nonfiction, on any topic. I can't recommend it highly enough.

2010-02-07 (Brooklyn, NY United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Life, the Universe, and Tennis
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is a collection of seven non-fiction pieces written by David Foster Wallace that appeared in various magazines and journals in the early '90s, presented in this book in their "uncut" forms. Just to give you an idea of how different some of these are from their previously published versions: at a reading of the Illinois State Fair piece, Wallace says that the piece originally appeared in Harper's in "extremely attenuated form".

While the ostensible subjects of the essays are Wallace's early years in the Midwest, the effects of television on fiction in the U.S., a visit to the Illinois State Fair, a book on literary criticism discussing the "death of the author", the career of a world-class but not yet superstar tennis player, David Lynch's work and what it was like to be on the set of Lost Highway, and a seven night cruise in the Caribbean, these essays are filled with wonderful observations and digressions that cover much more than the original subjects.

For example, in the cruise essay a main theme of excess and insatiable indulgence quickly develops, and there are digressions on artistic advertisements, ingenuous communication, and self-conscious behavior. In addressing the effects of television on literature in the U.S., Wallace also addresses how television pervasively affects life in general. In the Michael Joyce essay: feelings of self-worth when confronting the best of the best, choice and desire, the beauty of tennis. The David Lynch essay: the general audience's desire for dichotomy (especially good vs. evil) in stories, how Blue Velvet affected Wallace and some of his peers. Just to name a few.

And there are, as you've probably read or heard, numerous humorous (often hilarious) digressions and observations throughout. I don't want to overshadow the serious and profound parts of Wallace's work with them in this review, but I will say that there are many laughs to be had, and I felt that there was a nice balance of humor and cogitation.

Although the essays cover a wide range of subjects, they are not entirely unconnected; there are certain themes present throughout. American experience and how it is shaped and affected by consumerism and media is a big one. Self-consciousness is pretty pervasive, whether Wallace is discussing self-conscious art, his own self-conscious behavior, or even writing in a self-conscious manner about how the very text he is writing may be cut out by editors later on. Ironic/cynical behavior is huge in E Unibus Pluram and makes a few appearances in the other essays, art and its function is discussed a few times, and so on.

The upshot of all this is that the book as a whole addresses some of the most relevant and important issues of our time. I really enjoyed it. I know I will read it again. Knowing that different people can read the same book and come up with wildly different interpretations of it, I obviously can't guarantee that everyone will enjoy this book, but I would still recommend that they at least try to read it. Let me rephrase that so that my caution doesn't detract from your idea of how highly I regard this book: I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone.

2010-01-17 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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spectacular prose
If you like bravura prose this is a must-read; if your taste runs to short, affect-less little sentences don't bother, this is not the book for you. How good is good? This good: the essay on the tennis pro is so moving, profound, and brilliantly crafted you'll want to read it twice in a row, even if you cultivate an active dislike for sports in general and athletes in particular, as I do. The essay on the Illinois state fair is so vivid, intense, funny, sad, and deep that you'll not only feel you've been there, but been there on the hallucinogen of the gods. The Caribbean cruise essay is a meditation on pleasure, profit, and unhappiness, and the link between them, but the descriptions are so evocative (a cloudy sky is "the color of old dimes") and hilarious that you hardly notice the unfathomable depths you've been taken to. That said, honesty compels me to admit that some of the essays are only so-so, and you can see why some reviewers marked the book down because of them. But the good ones are so very good they sustain a claim that Wallace remains the most exciting American writer since Nabokov and Capote.

2009-12-15 (Washington, DC) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780316068222
• Adapt: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Poise, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and utility to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Description

Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.

Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.

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Customer Reviews

Shameful recasting of a beautiful thing. Do not buy.
This is a horrible rendition of a wonderful speech. The layout misrepresents his words as aphorism-sized bites, and nothing could be further from the real piece. How can these sentences stand alone on a page?:

p 61

That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

p 122

That is being taught how to think.

There are piles of these stand-alone sentences that should have never stood alone. But even reading it in order, first page to last, leaves the sense of the thing messed with terribly. The cadence is as college students reading poetry in their coffee-house meetings. Why format the book in the way it's formatted? For sense? To pre-chew the speech and let me know what to think about it by breaking it up into parts that make an editor's points, not the speechmaker's? It's formatted this way so that it is stretched out to almost 140 pages that can bring in >$10.

This isn't even getting into the censorship of his original speech.

This is a shameful recasting of a fantastic speech. Shameful. For shame!

The most terrible thing is that we see a hint that, in death perhaps as in life, the people who were close to DWF clearly don't get it.

Do not buy this.

2010-08-25 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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Worth Keeping in Your Back Pocket
My sister gave me this book about a month ago for my birthday. I had read it a long time ago on the internet, but I'd just scanned over it with mild interest and quickly had forgotten it.

I was a fool, of course, that time I read it. I'd done exactly what Wallace so eloquently warns against in "This is Water." I'd read it while entrapped within the prison of my self-concern. I had read it without full mindfulness, in a rush to move on to other things. And look what I had missed.

It's a beautiful book that reminds us of truths that float around us in many forms (he points out cliches) but that we somehow never seem fully to grasp. Wallace reminds us that if we live unconsciously, according to the default settings that focus on ourselves, we can end up living cynical and bitter lives. He instead urges awareness, so that we may experience even the most banal of experiences as "not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things..."

Like I said, it's a beautiful book that I find worth reading over and over, just to remind myself, again, to pay attention.

One more note. I do very much appreciate the book form This is Water takes. The small volume is attractive. The speech is published with one sentence per page which serves to help the reader enact the skills that Wallace so urges in the book: awareness and thoughtfulness. It's a perfect example of form matching content, and even if This is Water is still available for free online, the book is well worth the cost.

2009-10-25 (San Angelo, TX) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Save your Money and buy the BANRR 2005!!!
This speech (as well as a lot of other awesome stories, articles, essays, quotes, first-lines, jokes) is included in the 2005 Best American Non-Required reading, which was edited by Dave Eggers.

[...]

Spend less money, and get a lot more out of it!

By the way, the speech is a great speech. You really should check it out.

2009-09-24 (Richmond, IN) | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 1

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Audio Version
First of all, this commencement address, in whatever form, is worth the price. I have the book form, or at least, did. Evidently my 18 year old took it with him to college.

Now, the audio form. From Audible. It is read by Wallace's sister, Amy, which I find distracting because:

(1) Wallace was not a woman and this is a first person address which should be read by a man. And don't give me any sexist equality nonsense on this. This speech is delivered from a man's POV, not a woman's. It's not something that is gender specific, but in my view, it is not something expressed in a way that a woman would express it.

Actually, since there is, as I understand it, an actually video of DFW reading it himself, there's no reason that the audio, however poor, should not have been stripped, enhanced, and sold instead of Amy's reading;

and (2) Amy "reads" it rather than "delivers" it. You can tell the difference. This reading requires an actor, or at least an actress, not a reader.

But still. This is the commencement speech your child should hear or read BEFORE going off to college. And after. And every year thereafter.

You, too.

2009-08-31 (Near the Lake) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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A Gift
This speech is a generous gift delivered by a deeply troubled and pained person of unusual intelligence. And while this is an address to graduates, it seems to me that he speaks, in a way, to try to convince himself too. He says,

"...there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught how to think."

He's talking about existence, and the freedom to love. And to love is to rebel against periods of depression and unhappy listlessness and repetition and pain and absurdity, to care about others and to sacrifice. It's a Sisyphean existence. I subscribe to that. The struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart. I think Camus said that.

2009-08-19 (San Francisco, CA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

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• Health circumstances: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Self-reliance, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and aid to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• ISBN13: 9780316013321

Description

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.

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Customer Reviews

Great Reading For The Insomniac
Not since listening to Jimmy Carter's "Living Faith" has any book put me to sleep so easily. I used to bring his tapes on flights with me to lull me to sleep. I now have a wonderful replacement in this book.

I love reading essays so when I read the glowing blurbs and the high praise on Amazon I thought I could not miss. But every time I started to read - I think I started on the essay involving his observations on going to the video porn convention - I just not keep my mind from wandering. It was just so boring. So incredibly dull. Unbelievably awfully hard to read. I kept thinking - where is the funny? Where is the wit? The interest? The keen observation? Then - I thought why is that man putting unwrapped cookies in his pocket? I wonder if the water in the lav is potable. Does this seat back go back any further and will I disturb the woman's cocktail on her tray table if I go back? Yep. MIND WANDERS while reading this. But soon I found that - say - I could read about being on the trail with the 2000 McCain campaign and suddenly fall into a deep sleep only to be revived by touchdown at MIA. I could consider the lobster right through page two. Next thing I knew JFK was directly below.

So - If you need a sleeping... draft... you should consider the lobster and his other essays. If you want to spend some time on some entertaining essays - consider the collection in "In Fact". Or for some humor on CD how about some Davis Sedaris. Contemplative? How about Thoreau's "Walking"?

But for sleeping - "Consider the Lobster and Other Essays" is peerless.

2010-07-03 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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hard to put down
I sailed through this marvelous book of essays. It's a small victory for Wallace that he can keep someone as ADD as me engaged through essays on everything from literary theory to lobster festivals.

2010-01-06 (Provo, UT) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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A true Talent
Consider the Lobster is a collection of muscular essays from the late David Foster Wallace on an absurdly wide range of topics. Each of them was commissioned by a particular magazine with a particular topic, hence Wallace's tendency to direct his voice at his readers like a canon. However, Wallace can never be contained by the banalities of his topic here. His work on the AVA's is a particularly damning portrait of the pornography industry, in all its unimaginable insanity and sadness. I particularly like the piece on the American Usage Wars, which involves an impressive demonstration of Wallace's knowledge regarding the history of English grammar debates over the course of the last several decades. Not all of the pieces here are great-the one on McCain in particular is repetitive and mundane. And DFW's tendency to use lengthy footnotes to 'fragment the linearity' of his text is a mere affectation. Still, this represents the work of a great mind, whose creativity and intellect will sorely be missed.

2010-01-05 (New York) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Wallace at his best
David Foster Wallace reachs new heights in this brilliant collection of essays. Although uneven, as is much of his work, the best of these essays set new recent standards for this art form. In the finest works of this collection, he truly does achieve art with non-fiction writing. Imagine a critique of a new academic work on English grammar usage that is too fascinating to put down, and frequently too humorous to not have to stop reading while your laughter subsides. His points are made without his ever becoming preachy, and are all the more convincing for it (c.f. the title essay). His mastery of understatement serves to place a new emphasis on events of chilling importance by observation of events seemingly mundane.
His use of sarcasm and irony when appropriate remains as adroit as ever.

For those who are already Wallace fans, I recommend this as my favorite of his collections of non-fiction. For those who have never encountered him before, I think this is the best introduction to his non-fiction work (and that is high praise indeed, as his other collections are wonderful).

This book serves to remind us of the tragic loss to American arts and letters caused by Wallace's untimely passing. I mourn his absence, and am deeply saddened by the void he leaves behind. Treasure these works, he was unique and nothing quite like him will come again.

LJS

2010-01-03 (Highland Park, Illinois United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Journalism, not essays
These pieces do not earn the category "essay". They read like the journalism that they were. I watched Wallace a few nights ago in a 1990s Charlie Rose interview and felt connected to this bright young man. But he writes too casually, letting any thought get into the narrative. The endless digressions sap the energy of the text. I understand that his novels are that way too (i e endlessly digressive). How sad that he was unable to overcome his depression. Maybe he would have matured into a more disciplined writer.

2009-12-08 (.) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Oblivion: Stories

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780316010764
• Notes: BUY WITH Trust, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and accommodation to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• Demand: New

Description

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion"). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate. Oblivion is an arresting and hilarious creation from a writer "whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

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Customer Reviews

Read this to study for the GRE, but not to be entertained
This is fiction of a style I would label A.D.D. prose: there is very little action yet we spend pages reading about dribbly insignificant details. It is easy to lose focus while reading this book. Wallace writes sublimely detailed sketches of the characters, but it is only a still life; there is no action, no dimension. The one redeeming quality is the English of this book; extremely erudite, it is like reading a dictionary.

2008-01-26 (USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Please enter a title for your review
*contains spoilers?*
where the vast majority of "literary fiction" writers say to themselves "i need some detail to add color to this scene, what's a generic characteristic that would be apparent and what's the best way to allude to it possessing overlooked significance?", Wallace finds and focusses on the details that are actually interesting and thus only needs to describe them in an objective rather than poetic way demonstrating the irrelevance of poetic descriptions when you have enough of a sense of reality to find the facts that define the nature of a situation and let them speak for themselves.
i felt like most of the writing in the first half of this book consistently paid off with a new idea that built on the previous ones every second or third sentence. i was too engaged by the minor immediate payoffs to even be anticpating an ultimate ending crescendo. i struggled to find any ideas that could hook me in the second half though, which is the same experience i had with Infinite Jest. all the faults of that previous novel are equally apparent here, the progressively increasing reliance on suspense to hold reader attention and excluding or vaguely implying the most relevant information.
the title story Oblivion is a non-linear minefield of half-ideas with a conclusion seemingly consisting (although i could be completely wrong) of the "...and it was all a dream" twilight zone ending. the cryptic style is perhaps designed to represent a dream, but since all his writing has included an element of surrealism it isn't different enough from his other stories for the intention to be apparent even retrospectively.
The Suffering Channel is alternating boring and frustrasting, spending all of it's 90 pages raising question after question that are never answered and dragging out the suspense with the kind of banal detail that can only be called padding, something DFW clearly knows better than to use. the minor philisophical ideas never go beyond surface level kneejerk reactions, something that, again, DFW clearly knows better than to use.
just like Infinite Jest half of it blew me away but i couldn't see how the same writer could take any pride in the lesser half.

2008-01-09 | pancake_repairman (gfjdhgfjhgj) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Brilliant
The best collection of short fiction from the best living writer in the English language. It demands patience and attention, but the rewards for the effort are incredible. The best story in the collection is Good Old Neon, which is bifercated (by use of footnotes), such that there are two distinct endings, both of which would qualify the story as probably the best I have read this year.
These stories coil and bend, and the sentences are often labyrinthine; casual reading really won't suffice. If you do put forth the effort, I think you'll find that they engage the mind and that other thing, whatever it may be, that makes us what we call "human." Truly an outstanding collection.

2006-12-21 (The Lifeworld) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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I go back to it fairly frequently
Pissed off at the mindnumbing aspects of television, I found this collection of stories to be a breath of fresh air showing me the power and scope of what fiction writing can be when someone courageous enough will put in the work. You can trust Wallace to know what the heck he's writing about, just don't think too hard about it - like television - enjoy it and the words and ideas in each story will, in the end, make you glad you did, unlike television. I especially enjoy 'Good Old Neon' and 'Another Pioneer'.

2006-05-18 | Rabel (OR) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 4

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Missing Something
First, let me say I absolutely LOVE reading David Foster Wallace. This collection showcases one of his strengths: the attention to detail - or, more accurately - the minutiae - of everyday thoughts; how, for example, three minutes of a day can only be captured by pages & pages & pages of prose, because the human brain simultaneously functions on so many levels (best illustrated when you find yourself listening to someone attempting to explain 'the dream I had last night' but use so many qualifiers that a dream that lasts for probably no more than one minute absorbs the conversation of an entire lunch - or as least smoke break).

Ultimately, though, I found myself wishing a strong editorial voice would have confronted Wallace on several counts prior to the publishing of 'Oblivion.' This is especially true with the first story, 'Mister Squishy,' which seems to build up to a crescendo that is never reached. Wallace weaves together several different narratives into what the reader expects to come together at some point, but instead the story just...ends.

'The Suffering Channel' is a lost opportunity of amazing proportions. In this story, a highly engaging tale begins - and the reader falls into it helplessly, increasingly curious as to what it all means and where it's all going. Yet, instead of reaching a conclusion, or really any sort of resting point, the story abruptly ends. I wondered if the printer had left out pages & pages of the book, and I fought against the urge to hurl it across the room.

I absolutely love Wallace's amazing & rare gifts. But what 'Oblivion' shows is a 'writer's writer.' These stories are partial projects, not stories. They are, at best, extremely well fleshed-out beginnings.

It's a joy to read the words of someone with such innate talent, with such incredible gifts with the written word, but to me what we're left with is just one-half of a whole. Most of these stories end so abruptly, one can scarcely even call them a 'slice of life' because they consistently refer to past or future events that are never quite clear or explained. It's not that I'm left frustrated because 'I want to know what happened.' I'm frustrated because what could have been three or four great full-length novels were robbed.

I will always read Wallace because it is an incredibly intense & enjoyable experience. But I probably would not recommend this book to anyone I know because it is so unfulfilling and ultimately disappointing.

I guess 'Oblivion' can be classified as 'experimental' fiction or non-narrative storytelling, but Wallace is capable of so much more than that, as we have seen in the past, as we will hopefully see in the future, & as even 'Oblivion' attests.

2005-10-24 | popjunkie (Atlanta, GA USA) | Helpful Votes: 8 | Rating: 3

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Infinite Jest

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780316066525
• Shape: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Trust, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and mending to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Description

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.

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In a sprawling, wild, super-hyped magnum opus, David Foster Wallace fulfills the promise of his precocious novel The Broom of the System. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction, features a huge cast and multilevel narrative, and questions essential elements of American culture - our entertainments, our addictions, our relationships, our pleasures, our abilities to define ourselves.

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Customer Reviews

Don't believe the hype

I decided to try this book based on several good reviews and the fact that Time magazine had rated it as one of the 100 best books of the 20th century. I read over 400 pages of it before I gave up. If you enjoy 50 page descriptions of such obscure subject matter as competitive youth tennis or if you want to explore, ad nauseum and in more than vivid detail the world of overwhelming addiction, then this just might be the book for you. And if you are able to connect the youth tennis angle to the addiction angle, more power to you. I just couldn't do it. I was able to accept from the first few pages that this was a "weird" book that would require a lot of effort, but I could not keep up the effort for 1000+ pages. This is not a good book, despite the hype and the critical reviews. It might be an OK distraction if you have weeks and/or months to spend, but trust me there are much better ways, and better books on which, to spend your time. If you like quirky depressing fiction, try Chuck Palahniuk. His stuff is more in your face and brutal, but at least it doesn't waste your time. Or check out Lionel Shriver or Sam Lipscomb for more subtle offerings. This book is literally and figuratively a boat anchor. Stay away.

2010-08-29 (Fort Worth, TX United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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I wish it really was infinite...
I picked up Infinite Jest after hearing many favorable comparisons between its author, David Wallace, and Thomas Pynchon, my favorite zany and reclusive author (sorry Salinger!). Reading IJ is a huge commitment; reaching that final page will take for most a minimum of one month, and for most, including myself, it will take several months, but it's completely worth the investment. Summarizing Infinite Jest is a nightmare in theory and in practice doesn't do the book justice: over the period of a few weeks in November, wunderkind Hal Incandenza deals with his personal and familial issues at the Enfield Tennis Academy; reformed burglar and addict Don Gately tries to stay sober in a Boston halfway-house; radical Quebecois terrorists seek an experimental film that reduces viewers to mindless zombies crying for repeat viewings; packs of feral, carnivorous hamsters roam the toxic wastelands of Old New England; a guy named Roy Tony is mentioned once, appears briefly five hundred pages later, and is never heard from again; a brief essay appears out of nowhere to explain the rise and fall of video-telephones, and so on and so forth. Infinite Jest isn't a traditional story with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, Wallace pulls back the curtain and allows the reader a brief glimpse at his own fictional world full of characters, events, and locations tied together through very elaborate and delicate means that only become apparent as the novel reaches its end. Along the way, the reader becomes acquainted with Wallace's bizarre humor, political satire, 12-step mantras, Boston street-argot (I'm trying to bring "demapped" and "promoted" into my vocabulary now), and science fiction that sometimes becomes eerily similar to today (I discovered the joys of Netflix's Instant View features around the time Infinite Jest explained how TP's download content from the internet). The only disappointment with the book is that it eventually does end, and somewhat clumsily as others have whinged about, although the in media res first chapter offers a skeletal road-map to what happened. All whinging aside, for those four months I spent with Infinite Jest, I had a comforting presence on my bookshelf, a brick of words and paragraphs containing an entire world within its pages and end-notes full of beauty, vulgarity, complexity, humor, and pathos.

2010-08-28 (Oregon) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A different perspective that may help...
Unfortunately, I didn't go through all 412 reviews to see if this point has been brought up, but. Here's a different viewpoint that may help you to understand and love this book as I do(apologies to anyone else who may have already pointed this out):

Infinite Jest is a beautiful novel while also a textbook for mental health disorders--the mood, anxiety, psychotic and other mental disorders--co-occurring with addictions. However, if you're like me, you don't read straight through entire textbooks, even if they are written well. But this book I read twice, and it was well worth it, enriching my world and leading to a much better understanding of fellow human beings. The Co-occurring Disorders Textbook nature of this novel is evidenced by:

1) The narrative is disjointed, disorganized, with run-ons, rapid changes, and neologisms, often relying on the music of the language more than the content of the sentence to get the point across. This sort of narrative, a chaotic mess with layers upon layers that often don't seem to go anywhere (i.e. footnotes of footnotes) is the kind of narrative a psychiatric interview will often uncover from someone who is psychotic or floridly manic. This is also the narrative form of dysfunction, trauma, and abusive environments. (I don't know from novel structure--I'm a psychiatrist, not an English professor).

a) also, the setting is not in an alternate future...it is set in the 1990's, but a place that continues to have the fears of terrorism, environmental degradation, and possible global annihilation from nuclear weapons, warped by delusion. Everything sounds real-enough to the narrator but very confusing to a reader who lives in the era of al-Qaeda, NATO, and OPEC.

b) the compression and expansion of time, concrete thinking and muddled metaphors, and a constant undercurrent of terror are common in psychosis. And this novel is replete with terror.

2) Wallace includes: Major Depression, Anxiety, Mania, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, Hypochondria, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Panic disorder, eating disorders, ADHD, sexual disorders, and multiple pathologic personality traits, including the antisocial personalities of many, if not most, of the characters. He also includes sports psychology, the psychology of the gifted and talented, and characters with cognitive disorders.

3) Wallace describes nearly every sort of addiction and substance abuse known: alcohol, prescription drugs, cocaine, opiates, designer drugs, hallucinogens, inhalants, TV, sex, gambling, and food. His description of marijuana dependence and detox are the most beautifully written that I have ever seen.

This novel is a view from the inside of a much different mind--the reader can experience delusion, psychosis, and recovery while trying to make sense of events that seem both plausible and unreal at the same time. Can't we empathize better with those who struggle with both addictions and mental illness if we can see it through their eyes and feel similar feelings?

One key joke in the book is told by a biker in recovery to Gately: "This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, `Morning, boys, how's the water?* and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, `What the f-- is water?' and swim away."


*Note how often the color blue is present* or described when reading or re-reading this book.


*And enjoy the swim.

2010-08-27 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Too weird
I tried, but I just couldn't get into this story at all. It makes Twin Peaks look straightforward and simple, but wihtout any of the charm and quirkiness of that show. I regret buying

2010-08-10 (Maine) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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IJ: an Internal Journey
In the opening two words of Shakespeare's Hamlet (from which Infinite Jest derives its title), Bernardo cries "Who's there?" having seen the ghost of a tragedy; and Wallace answers, in the first two words of this epic novel - "I am..."

But that's about as attention-grabbing as one can be, here: Infinite Jest is a book that's nearly impossible to review concisely. On one hand it can be critiqued all vague and ornate to try and convey a slap-across-the-face of its brilliance, but therein's the risk of sounding like a disingenuous lit-rag. On the other hand, one could be more expositional, touching on the (subsidiary) plot-line and some of the Info Age/hell-of-addiction themes explored so intricately throughout - problem is, to merely touch on these things would be to wind belly-up inadequate read by anyone who hasn't already experienced the book and thus doesn't yet have a sense of what Wallace is up to here, and the sheer accomplishment he managed in translating it to language.
Though at least I think we can say this in praise: everyone should dedicate, at some point, an hour or so a night for a couple months of his/her life to Infinite Jest. Its ability to whiplash from l-o-l funny to outright emotional is unparalleled in anything I've read outside of Pynchon. He delves into some of the most abstruse philosophical concepts one would hope to know - sociopolitical applied mathematics, doctoral explorations of addiction and depression, to name a few - but does so via poetic metaphor and tongue-in-cheek allegory that never strays into fictively-contrived (junior tennis students playing a "bomb game" on the court - to analogously explore nuclear proliferation - the players as a mathematical diagram: just one example...). What we end up with is a dense and sprawling work, juggling tragic/comedic/philosophic/and practically every other form there is, and at the same time it can be capital-E Entertaining with the right mind looking into it.

Reading IJ gives one the sense that, not just was Wallace a genius, but one of those seemingly rare geniuses whose hearts somehow outweigh their minds; i.e. the author is not merely showing off to us here what he knows, what he can do; it's more like he's...reaching out.
And when you're aware of Wallace's tragic real-life mental struggle - the epitome if there ever was one of the "tortured artist" - you start to hear his voice between every line of the 1,000+ pages; and so then you -want- to understand, you -want- to reach back... Sadly though, it's too late.

Rest In Peace, DFW - you accomplished more with this one book than most writers ever even imagine.


--Jake Wilson; author of Panic and Vomit

2010-08-04 | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 5

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Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Product Details

• Notes: BUY WITH Coolness, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and ceremony to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• Circumstances: New
• ISBN13: 9780316925198

Description

An exuberantly acclaimed collectiontwenty-two stories that com-- bine hilarity and an escalating disquiet as they expand our ideas of the pleasures fiction can afford. Wallace was recently selected by Time as one of the four outstanding young American writers. The hardcover was a bestselleron the Independent, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller lists.

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Amid the screams of adulation for bandanna-clad wunderkind David Foster Wallace, you might hear a small peep. It is the cry for some restraint. On occasion the reader is left in the dust wondering where the story went, as the author, literary turbochargers on full-blast, suddenly accelerates into the wild-blue-footnoted yonder in pursuit of some obscure metafictional fancy. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace's latest collection, is at least in part a response to the distress signal put out by the many readers who want to ride along with him, if he'd only slow down for a second.

The intellectual gymnastics and ceaseless rumination endure (if you don't have a tolerance for that kind of thing, your nose doesn't belong in this book), but they are for the most part couched in simpler, less frenzied narratives. The book's four-piece namesake takes the form of interview transcripts, in which the conniving horror that is the male gender is revealed in all of its licentious glory. In the short, two-part "The Devil Is a Busy Man," Wallace strolls through the Hall of Mirrors that is human motivation. (Is it possible to completely rid an act of generosity of any self-serving benefits? And why is it easier to sell a couch for five dollars than it is to give it away for free?) The even shorter glimpse into modern-day social ritual, "A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life," stretches the seams of its total of seven lines with scathing economy: "She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces." Wallace also imbues his extreme observational skills with a haunting poetic sensibility. Witness what he does to a diving board and the two darkened patches at the end of it in "Forever Overhead":

It's going to send you someplace which its own length keeps you from seeing, which seems wrong to submit to without even thinking.... They are skin abraded from feet by the violence of the disappearance of people with real weight.

Of course, not every piece is an absolute winner. "The Depressed Person" slips from purposefully clinical to unintentionally boring. "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" reimagines an Arthurian tale in MTV terms and holds your attention for about as long as you'd imagine from such a description. Ultimately, however, even these failed experiments are a testament to Mr. Wallace's endless if unbridled talent. Once he gets the reins completely around that sucker, it's going to be quite a ride. --Bob Michaels

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Customer Reviews

Some nice passages but also forced and voyeuristic
David Foster Wallace treats us to fictious interviews with several men. All these have typical male, mostly sexual, flaws, which are distorted beyond all usual bounds.
The stories are written brilliantly, in a laconic male voice, slightly defensive and agressive in their defensiveness, as might be the interview of a criminal offender with a psychologist or journalist.
As mentioned, the stories are mostly sexual in nature, relating to a warped perception of reality. The author, to my understanding, tries to explain the self justifications of sexual predators and offenders. Of males who defend their sexual urges, who might not be actual sexual offenders but who have it within them to be such offenders.
This, is a strange and dark way, is interesting to read, it is the same feeling which one new as an adolescent when one snooped around in the forbidden corners of the newsstand.
Yet we are no adolescents anymore and do not need to play peeping Tom. Therefore the whole book has a sneaky, uncouth, voyeuristic quality to it. Yes, it is is well written, yes, one feels privy to the authors sexual urges, and yet, finally, it leaves only an empty and hollow feeling, the same feeling one had as an adolescent after visiting this newsstands forbidden corner. Interesting, voyeuristic, self indulgent but finally nothing more. Nothing new, just a grotesque shadow of things we knew before.

2010-08-11 (Shanghai) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Painful To Read!
This starts off with two amazing short stories, which I felt were more like long poems, each a few pages long. Both were beautifully written, and made me excited about the rest of the book. Unfortunately what followed after that point was some of the most confusing, intentionally awful series of words I have ever struggled through. I felt as though Wallace wrote this book in this manner as some kind of sick joke to all of us dupes who were tricked into buying it. A good example is "Octet, Pop Quiz #6" where in Wallace replaced the two main character's names with simple "X" and "Y." Awful. And, his use of rediculously long runon sentences were very aggrvating, as well as the enormous footnotes on several stories that were longer than the actual stories they were in.

I get it. It was all probably intentional and meant to be funny. But, it wasn't. It was annoying. I felt as though Wallace knows his audience is of higher intelligence, and wrote this book as an attempt to intentionally confuse the heck out of them because he thought it was funny. He failed miserably.

The odd thing, is that I just watched the movie. It was beautifully written. If the book had been written as the screenplay was, I would have loved the book. It's as if Krasinski painfully sorted through all the unnecessary drivel and pulled out the meat of the story. He crafted a mess of abook into a wonderful movie. I recommend that you skip the torture of the book, and just go straight to the movie.

2010-07-15 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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Don't deny yourself the experience of reading this book
Before I read this book, I thought that post-modernism and metafiction was for the most part just novelty. But DFW uses post-modern and metafictional tricks to enhance his characters and comment on common human experiences, rather than to hide the story from the reader with gimmickry and flash.
Some may fault DFW for being too personal at times and too abstract at others, but these qualities allow the stories in Brief Interviews to achieve a kind of self-executing immursion that allows the reader to get more out of each one. By lifting the vail of "The Author", he is less self-concious than authors of more traditional fiction, not more so. If the purpose of storytelling is to tell the truth through fiction, then this collection hits the nail on the head. Read this book. Even if it isn't doesn't suit your taste, I guarantee you won't forget it.

2010-04-03 | none (Columbus, Ohio) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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someone wake me and 'splain me.
I'm not a literary genius as clearly some of the author's fans are but, I'm bright enough to know this was really self indulgent and asked a whole lot of the reader without giving much back. I did enjoy some of the interviews that revealed the "hideous men" (and a few women as well). And, I found some of what seemed to be total stream of consciousness to be interesting for a bit. But, the gibberish went on forever, the pages and pages of footnotes were annoying, not funny, and the fact that DW felt absolutely no obligation to gift the readers with any kind of resolve to any of it, ever, is a statement in and of itself. If you put 100 avid readers in a room with this book you would have 18 people smiling with their face buried in the pages, 10 people sound asleep, and 72 others intermittently looking around to see if anyone else was as bewildered and bored as they are. Abstract and uppity isn't necessarily genius.

2010-03-30 | Pauli (MA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Read This Book Now!
Funny, funny, funny. And defiantly one of DFW's most accessible. . . good for after a breakup or anytime the men in your life are being giant dicks! Bonus: after you're finished there's an OK movie version to compare it to!

2010-03-22 (Columbus, Ohio USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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