Consider David Foster Wallace (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Consider David Foster Wallace Stephen J. Burn Consider David Foster Wallace. David Hering, ed. Los Angeles, CA: Sideshow Media Group Press, 2010. Pp. 242. $18.99 (paper). While David Foster Wallace's first novel was praised by mainstream reviewers, his work didn't make the critical pages of academic journals until he published his second book, Girl [End Page 465] with Curious Hair (1989), a collection of (mostly) short fictions whose center of gravity held metafiction, minimalism, and creative writing programs in nearby orbit. By my estimate, the first journal article to refer to Wallace appeared just twelve months later, when Arthur M. Saltzman used Girl with Curious Hair to frame an essay for Contemporary Literature. Within a few years the emerging academic interest in Wallace coalesced in the 1993 special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, which gathered perspectives on his aesthetic that have done much to shape the later study of his work. After nearly two more decades of Wallace criticism—including four books (two from academic publishers), and important essays by such major critics as N. Katherine Hayles and Tom LeClair—it's something of a surprise that editor David Hering introduces Consider David Foster Wallace with the claim that his book marks "the commencement of … Wallace Studies" (9). Consider David Foster Wallace collects seventeen essays that stem from a July 2009 conference at the University of Liverpool. While most Wallace criticism has clustered around Infinite Jest, Consider David Foster Wallace's purview is admirably broad—after a keynote address by Greg Carlisle, there are two essays devoted to The Broom of the System, two concentrating on the novella "Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way," five focused upon Infinite Jest, and one each on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, McCain's Promise, and This is Water. In addition, there are three thematically-focused essays that, in turn, view Wallace in terms of contemporary theories of sincerity, his use of footnotes, and the New New Journalism. Clearly this is a great deal of territory to cover in two hundred and eighteen pages, especially since the collection is mostly a graduate student production. The authors' apprentice status does not necessarily mean that the book fails, but while the collection is high on enthusiasm, only a handful of the contributors (Coleman, Phipps, Benzon, Kelly, Ribbat, and Jenner) have mastered the density of thought and condensation of expression that, on a paragraph-to-paragraph basis, characterizes strong academic writing. Again, this doesn't mean that this group of writers are the only ones in the book with insights worth reading, but the recurrent flaws in the book are those that many critics have to iron out early in their careers. Most often there's a tendency for authors to lay out useful evidence without moving dynamically from diagnosis to conclusion—an approach that allows for a series of insights rather than a developed argument. There's also a tendency for these pieces to be dominated by a particular theoretical lens, rather than using it to focus on a problem. Neither flaw is terminal early in a career, but it's unlikely that this book would have passed a scholarly press's peer evaluation, so it doesn't seem appropriate (especially in light of the graduate status of many of the contributors) to rigidly evaluate each essay in strict academic fashion. It may be more helpful to point out some of the collection's best moments, and then to consider the etiology of the broader problems raised by the book. Amongst the strongest observations are Coleman's provocative contention that examining a group of B-men (Berkeley, Burgess, and Barth) reveals that "Westward" is not preoccupied with "the insufficiencies of metafiction in general but the American writer's failure to find a style that actually describes the mysterious 'Way' signposted by Berkeley" (72), and Phipps's very acute attention to the near anagram between Avril and Luria in Infinite Jest (85). Later, Benzon offers a tantalizingly brief connection between Wallace's work and "the tradition of OuLiPo" (108), while Tracey maps neat parallels to Roth and Freud (174–75). At somewhat greater length, Ribbat and Jenner...