The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace ed. by Ralph Clare

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace ed. by Ralph Clare Vernon W. Cisney CLARE, RALPH, ed. The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 284 pp. $89.99 hardcover; $29.99 cloth; $24.00 e-book. This outstanding collection, edited by Ralph Clare, offers a welcome addition to the rapidly growing world of David Foster Wallace Studies. One of the aspects of Wallace’s work that makes it so difficult to compile a comprehensively focused collection of this sort is the sheer range of Wallace’s skills as an intellectual and creative virtuoso. Not only was his development deeply informed by cutting-edge trends in literature and literary theory (trends which he sought to incorporate and transcend), but his writerly comportment was also shaped by his background in academic philosophy. In addition, Wallace’s writing functioned both emotionally and intellectually, with the result that his works have not only connected with professional authors and academics, but have attracted a wide popular audience as well. Finally, while many authors limit themselves to a few primary modes of expression, Wallace was accomplished in a wide array of outlets, from his maximalist Infinite Jest to his work in philosophy of mathematics and his popular essays and short stories. This multifarious breadth makes the excellence of this Cambridge Companion that much more impressive. To address this virtuosity, Clare, taking a lead from philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, describes his editorial approach as oriented by the desire to construct a “Wallace-without-Organs” (6). Taking as his inspirations the collaborative construction of Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, as well as Wallace’s expressed desire to create works that are, by nature, dialogical, Clare’s collection aspires to the constitution of a “Wallace in flux” (6), or, even better, Wallaces in flux, as opposed to the would-be “authentic” Wallace—Wallace as a consciously and collaboratively constructed, multifaceted assemblage, with potentialities constantly emerging and reaching into new directions, rather than Wallace as a unified regulative ideal to which scholarship draws ever nearer. To that end, Clare has assembled a stellar cadre of fifteen accomplished scholars, and together they pull off the difficult task of engaging, with an agile blend of breadth and precision, the majority of Wallace’s corpus. The collection is bookended by a thorough chronology of Wallace’s life, works, and posthumous reputation in the front of the book and a helpful bibliography of secondary literature in the back. The collection itself is broken into four major sections. The first part, focused on “Historical and Cultural Contexts,” contains pieces by Marshall Boswell, Andrew Hoberek, and Lee Konstantinou. Boswell’s piece situates the development of Wallace’s [End Page 344] writing from the perspective of his generational moment, the late 1980s and early 1990s. This moment is marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama’s famous declaration of the “end of history”—the “triumph” of global capitalism. Unlike his contemporaries, Boswell argues, Wallace’s early work embodies the apolitical aimlessness of this moment, allowing him to explore the barrage of “information, entertainment, and the pursuit of pleasure” (30) that accompanies adolescence. Hoberek’s piece examines Wallace’s position as a uniquely American author—“a late exponent of the romance tradition described by Richard Chase as the American answer to the European realist novel” (37). Part I ends with Konstantinou’s piece, which surveys the development of Wallace’s reception in the decade since his death— from the demiurgic “Saint Dave” and the icon of the so-called “lit-bros” to the vilified manipulator decried by critics such as Amy Hungerford. Konstantinou’s piece explores a multitude of ways of conceptualizing the relationship between Wallace-the-person and Wallace-the-author, ultimately siding with Jennifer Egan in viewing Wallace’s contribution to modern literature as monumentally important, but as one among others, acting as a powerful inspiration but nevertheless an object of honest criticism, avoiding the Scylla of beatification and the Charybdis of demonization. Part II is titled “Early Works, Story Collections, and Nonfiction.” Of the four major sections, Part II appears to be the least cohesive. This likely derives from...