Brief Interviews With Not-so-hideous Guys
A Critique of the Writing of David Foster Wallace

It has been an ironic accident of history that most of the supreme stylists of the English language in North American fiction and literature over the past centuries have been non-native English speakers, who have first learned the angular limitations of writing in a spiky language like English, and have then forced their curved and billowing European or Asian sensibilities and imaginations upon the language. Think of Joseph Conrad, a native Pole, whose florid but gorgeously written HEART OF DARKNESS convincingly described a powerful and intelligent man’s descent into self-righteous madness, or of the Russian Vladimir Nabokov, whose impish delight in the flexibility of language made a (relatively) sympathetic character out of the stuffy pedagogue/pedophile Humbert Humbert, and whose PALE FIRE remains one of the towering achievements of experimental fiction.

Meanwhile, America can seemingly do no better than to spit out such accomplished, but terse, native sons as the barely-expressive idiot savant Ernest Hemingway and the rat-a-tat explosive sentence bursts of literary thug Raymond Chandler. It would seem that we Americans and Canadians would be hard-pressed to find any native writers who are capable of luxuriating in the possibilities that language affords. That is why it is such a relief to discover that one of the most giddily loggorheic verbal gymnasts in the world today is not some flashy European dandy with a white mink coat and a bully pulpit, but a decent, unassuming, yet WICKEDLY intelligent Midwesterner, a former Illinois farmer and tennis prodigy, who has churned out in the past decade no less than one shining example of the Great American Novel and four other tours-de-force of modern writing.

David Foster Wallace, author of the astounding INFINITE JEST and current Roy Disney Professor of Creative Writing at tiny Pomona College, is proof positive that gems of hard, sparkling intellectual brilliance can be found among the cornfields and cow-pies that make up the vast ignored Middle Section of the American Nation. While his too-clever, too-precious Gen X contemporaries such as Dave Eggers and Elizabeth Wurtzel hover pretentiously close to either of the two coasts looking for self-validation among the intelligentsia, Wallace takes as his literary stomping ground the same swampy, humble, hard-baked, blue-collared ground that spiritual predecessors Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner trod over, and makes it his own.

Wallace is that peculiar, poorly understood creature known as the “Midwesterner”, and he delights in writing about the Midwest with all of its monster-truck shows and chewing tobacco and massive Republican “family values” enclaves. In doing so, he is, above all, unabashedly FUNNY, and he damn well wants his readers to know it. In his collection of essays, A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN, he takes such proletarian “why-would-we-want-to-read-about-this” events as a county fair (complete with livestock shows) and a 7 night Caribbean cruise (practically OOZING with rampant crass commercialism), and makes them hysterical, rollicking, delightful testaments to the good-old-American shaggy dog story. And the amazing thing is, he does so without ever once insulting either the intelligence of the reader, or the rough integrity of the unsophisticated middle-class “locals” who are characters in his storied and who he gently but fondly tweaks and parodies without ever becoming condescending toward their foibles.

While Wallace’s fiction is equally astounding, even he admits that he isn’t nearly as good at writing convincing endings to his stories as he is in writing their beginnings and middle parts. Both INFINITE JEST and his first novel, THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM, suffer from the same (some might say fatal) flaw of not so much ending as just sort of petering out. But really, isn’t this just a testament to the fact that a “Middle”-American writer shouldn’t concern himself with the endings, because to do so would be to acknowledge that there is a dropping-off point, an Edge Of The World, and that all good stories must eventually come to an end.

Both of Wallace’s novels have been accused by some critics of possessing a rather annoying sense of climaxus interruptus (most notably by Michiko Kakutani of the coastal New York Times, who shouldn’t be expected to understand the values of Middles vs. Ends anyway). In this way, his novels look less like traditional fiction, and more like true interactive META-fiction, of the hypertext-besotted sort which is becoming more and more popular on the World Wide Web, where stories start as a tight little ball of causes and effects and rapidly explode outward into a spiral of interlinking mini-societies and blurring of boundaries between “characters” and real-life individuals. One read through of the sprawling INFINITE JEST, with its 850+ pages of narrative, more than thirty main characters, and Altman-esque interlinking plot threads, and one feels like one is less in the middle of a story than in the middle of a tiny community, where characters begin to feel less like Ideas or Symbols and more like Family.

Other writers, working in other, more experimental genres, have taken up the torch originally lit by Wallace. Sometimes these writers construct worlds with better, more roundly-developed Middles, and somewhat necessarily-rushed Endings, as well. (The science fiction authors Neal Stephenson and Sean Stewart come immediately to mind.) However, this does not make their work any less satisfying. After all, if one takes the time to let the language and the characters marinate and develop full-bodied flavors, perhaps the endings to their stories will ultimately resolve themselves, in time.

Adrian VEIDT, industrialist