A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997) by David Foster Wallace

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997) by David Foster Wallace, containing the following essays:


"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" (Harper's, December 1991, under the title "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes"): Wallace reviews his youthful tennis exploits (he was pretty good) within the context of the flat Midwestern landscape of his childhood and his own obsessive relationship with geometry. 

Interesting, but at this point in his writing career, he's still irritatingly obtuse at point, a man who's swallowed a thesaurus and isn't afraid to barf it up on the page. Also, on a personal note, Wallace's essays on tennis are the least interesting part of his catalog for me. It's his favourite sport, so beneath all the sarcasm and pith, one is still stuck with a writer telling one why the sport he or she prefers is also the greatest sport that ever was. 


"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993): Wallace makes a number of fascinating and worthwhile critical observations about how TV influences contemporary fiction. 

As in a lot of Wallace's more theoretical work, the main flaw is his tendency to equate the tastes of himself and his friends with everyone's tastes, everywhere. Here, that means Wallace believes everyone in the late 1980's and early 1990's was watching TV in as cynical and 'meta' a fashion as the people in his living room, all of whom were graduate students in literature and creative writing. Um, no. Gross generalization.


"Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All" (Harper's, 1994, under the title "Ticket to the Fair"): Wallace travels to the 1993 Illinois State Fair, and the trip gives us the first of Wallace's sublime pieces of reportage. A fine, funny, sympathetic piece.


"Greatly Exaggerated" (Harvard Book Review, 1992): A review of Morte d'Author: An Autopsy by H. L. Hix, including Wallace's personal opinions on the role of the author in literary critical theory. Boring but short.


"David Lynch Keeps His Head" (Premiere, 1996): Wallace makes a number of interesting observations about David Lynch's body of work. He also got to visit the set of Lost Highway, a fact that allow for observations about how Lynch's compulsive coffee drinking leads to a lot of bathroom breaks so the auteur can micturate. Really good work.


"Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness" (Esquire, 1996, under the title "The String Theory"): Oh, God, more tennis. Though Wallace is at the 1995 Canadian Open, which at least allows for a lot of sarcastic culture shock, the Open being in Montreal. 


"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (Harper's, 1996, under the title "Shipping Out"): Wallace goes on a Caribbean cruise. Hilarity and misanthropy results. Wallace's ability to be agog at both the weirdness of others and the weirdness of himself is in full flower here, producing one the the great travel pieces I've ever read. 


Overall: David Foster Wallace is not for everybody, but those who like him, like him a lot. An uneven but rewarding collection, and "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All", "David Lynch Keeps His Head", and especially "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" elevate it to Highly Recommended. Even with those goddam tennis pieces.

Porn, Kafka, and Talk Radio

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace, containing Big Red Son; Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think; Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed; Authority and American Usage; The View From Mrs. Thompson's; How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart; Up, Simba; Consider the Lobster; Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky; Host (1996-2005; Collected 2005): Brilliant, wide-ranging collection of previously published essays from the late Wallace, who remains best known for his massive modern classic of an American novel, Infinite Jest.

David Foster Wallace was something of a polymath when it came to his interests as both an essayist and a writer of fiction. In this collection, he assesses the American porn industry as a fly on the wall at its annual awards convention; John Updike's solipsism; Kafka; a new volume on Standard Written (American) English; the events of 9/11 as experienced while Wallace was living in Bloomington, Indiana; sports autobiographies; John McCain's 2000 run at the Republican preisdential nomination; the annual Maine lobster festival; a new volume of Joseph Frank's exhaustive literary biography of Dostoeevsky; and a conservative LA talk radio host. Whew!

Wallace may be the smartest man in the room, but he's also humane and sympathetic and often self-deprecating. His cultural insights will make one pause at points, especially his outsider's view of McCain's campaign experienced as a temporary insider on the campaign bus. It's not that McCain and his 'Straight Talk Express' were or were not 'authentic' in a way few politicians are -- it's the complex nature of 'authenticity' on the campaign trail that Wallace investigates both generally and in detail.

Wallace also deploys an encyclopedic array of facts about his topics like a discoverer describing the culture and habits of a new country. I learned more about the nuts and bolts of American talk radio in the early 21st century here than everywhere else; I learned way more than I really wanted to know about the history of lobsters as a foodstuff. Thankfully, I'm allergic to lobsters already or I'd be ideologically allergic to them as a menu item after the title essay.

Do any of the essays suggest the long-standing bipolar disorder that would eventually help cause Wallace's suicide only a couple years after this collection was published? No, not really -- Wallace seems fully engaged with the world, his demons almost completely hidden except for a September 12, 2001 panic attack in an Indiana convenience store as he realized he couldn't find an American flag to buy for his house, American flags having sprung up everywhere after the attacks. Otherwise, though, Wallace's accounts of his interactions with the broad spectrum of people and places in this collection suggests someone intelligent, highly analytical, earnest, witty, and thoroughly engaged with the world. Highly recommended.