6 ms·

The Journalistic Legacy of David Foster Wallace

56 points by samclemens 9y ago

ashark 9y ago
I'd agree with the more critical takes. I've read something like 3/4 of his collected short non-fic at this point and it's very uneven, and the gems one does find among the rest tend to be of the semi-precious sort.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  Who do you like for short non-fiction? Just collecting recommendations.
  - jjxw 9y ago
    The below probably fits your criteria. Probably the best piece of sports writing that I've read, DFW's love and knowledge of the game really comes through without being overwhelming to those who don't have much knowledge about tennis. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20fede...
  - majos 9y ago
    Not the parent, but I like String Theory [1], which is about non-superstar pro tennis, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again [2], which is about a vacation on a cruise ship. The second one looks a lot like snarky "I'm the only cool person here" journalism, but IMO that sort of (typically bad) journalism exists in large part because Wallace could do it really well. Oops, I misread your comment as "what", not whom. For whom, I dig George Saunders. Here's a piece he wrote about a visit to the mysterious "Buddha boy" a while back [3]. Saunders to me is pretty much Wallace's spiritual successor as far as style and tone goes. [1] http://www.esquire.com/sports/a5151/the-string-theory-david-foster-wallace/ http://www.esquire.com/sports/a5151/the-string-theory-david-... [2] https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi... [3] http://reprints.longform.org/the-incredible-buddha-boy http://reprints.longform.org/the-incredible-buddha-boy
    - mohn 9y ago
      I'll second George Saunders! I highly recommend his "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" (a novella plus a collection of shorts). I have not heard him compared to DFW before. Maybe I should give DFW another try.
      - majos 9y ago
        Please do. They're similar to me as adept mixers of high (both are plenty virtuosic/"pretty" when they want to be) and low (both are great at slapstick) style and write with a kind of scientific eye for details. Saunders has described this as "if you put a welder to work making dresses". And there's almost always a basically earnest emotional core underneath everything.
  - ashark 9y ago
    I don't usually read a bunch of short non-fic by a single author, and I'm really bad at remembering who wrote a given piece. Wallace is one of the few exceptions. I like Orwell and Twain, but I think everyone does. I'm a bigger fan of E.M. Forster's non-fic than he perhaps deserves, because his prose feels really familiar and comfortable to me—and maybe he's better than the credit I'm giving him, but I recognize him as a possible blind spot for me and so downplay my recommendation. Asimov's short non-fic is of a very different sort (to put it mildly) from, say, Wallace, and isn't at all impressive by some measures, but I like it anyway. The pieces are well constructed and competently written, like his fiction, but neatly avoid requiring much in the way of characters or dialog, which is a very good thing for Asimov. They're mostly descriptive rather than "thinky" or philosophical. It's like reading really pleasantly-written and didactically-minded Wikipedia articles with short, silly, mostly-unrelated anecdotes prefacing each one. I've attempted Huxley but didn't make much progress. Then again I've also twice failed to finish Brave New World so the problem may be mine, not his. I liked "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold". Non-fic that makes it into Lapham's Quarterly is usually great, with the exception of Lapham's own introductions to each volume, which I usually set out intending to read and ultimately don't. Wallace is the only recent author whose short non-fic I've read in significant quantity. His writing is certainly engaging, which is why I made it through so much. The prose is top-notch, in that one's eyes pass effortlessly down the page, interrupted only by Wallace's footnote fetish. He's mostly really fun. However, some of his best pieces come off like drafts of sections of longer, better works, which is to say the thinking's a little rough and they seem incomplete. I'm far from an advocate of minimal, straight-to-the-point writing, but most of Wallace's short non-fic works are longer than any insight they contain justifies (notable exception: the piece on Kafka) while also managing to leave a bunch of dark corners one wishes Wallace had explored—they're good at making you want to read something better on the same topic. He's often kind of mean for little reason other than pandering to the reader, as best I can tell, which is both compelling and off-putting in a car wreck sort of way. To be fair, he's also sometimes mean for a good reason. Still, when my kids are old enough for this kind of stuff I'll recommend a few pieces to them, though some for only narrow purposes ("gee dad, what was being in the Midwest on 9/11 like?", "here, read DFW on the topic, it's a weak piece but captures some of the details of the experience really well") or only reluctantly ("Host"—the bizarre style rarely improves the article, which is otherwise one of his better ones).
- cadlin 9y ago
  The Turkish writer Elif Batuman has a trio of essays about Turkey in The New Yorker that are excellent. I like all of her writing, but they are especially good. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/12/19/the-sanctuary https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/12/19/the-sanctuary https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/03/07/the-view-from-the-stands https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/03/07/the-view-from-... https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-big-dig https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-big-dig
pklausler 9y ago
Read Wallace's fiction, especially his novels, for serious (but laugh-out-loud funny) literature. The non-fiction is somewhat hit-and-miss, with the glaring brilliant exception of his nearly-always-overlooked book on mathematics ("Everything and More"), which should be required reading.
- StefanKarpinski 9y ago
  Everything and More is a delight... right up until the last chapter where he manages (iirc) to misstate the continuum hypothesis and generally garble a lot of modern set theory. To be fair that’s where the theory of infinity really crosses over from what a competent amateur can understand to something that requires fairly deep mathematical knowledge.
- sanderjd 9y ago
  Absolutely loved "Everything and More". It went waaay over my head at a lot of points and I studied a lot of (applied) math in college. I believe it shows more respect for its reader than any other book I've read. I do think it works better for people who have read DFW's fiction - some people I've recommended it to put it down pretty quickly due to finding its style of prose pretentious.
- laxatives 9y ago
  String Theory is one of my favorite essays of all time. Discusses the incredible gap between journeymen, low-ranked tennis pro's and the elite players in both ability and quality of life, as well as the gap between journeymen and highly competive amateurs. Definitely recommend Infinite Jest like probably anyone else in this thread, but would recommend reading his non-fiction first. Jumping into Infinite Jest, I thought Wallace was some wierdo crank for a long time before I "got" his style and what he was going for. Even then, it took a long time before I enjoyed it and he very quickly became one of my favorite authors. I think Infinite Jest and GEB are two of the only epic books that accomplishes so much, but in two entirely different contexts. They both build intense, well founded and well structured frameworks that lead up to epic resolutions, despite being respectively fiction and non-fiction.
simen 9y ago
I've heard a lot of bad things about Wallace's journalistic ethics - basically misrepresenting the actual story, not the big lines but lots of the details, for stylistic effect. He was not a rigorous searcher of actual truth, just some kind of idealized "emotional truth", and in an era where "alternative facts" is considered an acceptable way to respond to an outright lie, that's not something to emulate. It's been a while so I don't have the exact links to the articles that mention this. (I think some of it was in the biography of Wallace by DT Max.) Also, that cruise ship essay makes him look like a complete asshole. It kind of reminds me of that book, The Lifespan of a Fact, about the protracted struggle between "literary journalist" John D'Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal. This kind of thing pisses me off, even if it's considered great writing. I've personally been interviewed by a rather well-known journalist (my only interview of my life, I am neither famous nor notable), and in the resulting piece there were questions I was never asked and answers I never gave. Thankfully the false words he put in my mouth were not so bad, but what if it had been something actually important? So this kind of stuff leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
- jackstraw14 9y ago
  Have you read David Lipsky's "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" or seen The End of the Tour? It may not change your opinion of DFW much, but it shows what it was like trying to get answers from him on some of the stuff you mentioned (not the ethics stuff as much as what his style means, maybe). It's a pretty detailed account of a Rolling Stone writer (Lipsky) following and interviewing him right after Infinite Jest was published, but it ends up mostly being about the stuff in the last few lines of your comment.
everybodyknows 9y ago
On a trip to coastal Alaska some years back, I saw a small launch packed shoulder-to-shoulder with cheerless, unprosperous looking people, motoring along the shoreline -- but away from the harbor. A local explained that these were cruise ship workers out for a sightseeing tour, a perk of their jobs. The boat would however never land on shore, because the workers had no visas. And might perhaps try to escape. "Supposedly Fun" brought that moment back for me in a rush. Wallace could not feel at ease being "pampered" by workers themselves forced to maintain a facade of permanent delight. Such a feeling could only make alien to him most of his fellow passengers. Unlike them, he had to see the workers as complete human beings coequal with himself every way, except for what opportunity the world had denied them. With such empathy, he joins Dickens, Melville, Orwell -- and in other ways as well, Hunter S. Thompson. So yes, DFW chooses sides, and his contempt for callous, oblivious passengers shows. But the real vitriol he reserves for interviewees in the management class, none of whom will give a straight answer to his plain questions about the crew's welfare. A certain whip-wielder in the officer's quarters -- "I wish him ill". And best of all, the Press Liaison at corporate who tells him "The people on board -- the staff -- are really part of one big family..." To which DFW responds: "...the preterite staff lived in mortal terror..." (footnote 13)

56 points by samclemens 9y ago

I'd agree with the more critical takes. I've read something like 3/4 of his collected short non-fic at this point and it's very uneven, and the gems one does find among the rest tend to be of the semi-precious sort.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
Who do you like for short non-fiction? Just collecting recommendations.
- jjxw 9y ago
  The below probably fits your criteria. Probably the best piece of sports writing that I've read, DFW's love and knowledge of the game really comes through without being overwhelming to those who don't have much knowledge about tennis. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20fede...
- majos 9y ago
  Not the parent, but I like String Theory [1], which is about non-superstar pro tennis, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again [2], which is about a vacation on a cruise ship. The second one looks a lot like snarky "I'm the only cool person here" journalism, but IMO that sort of (typically bad) journalism exists in large part because Wallace could do it really well. Oops, I misread your comment as "what", not whom. For whom, I dig George Saunders. Here's a piece he wrote about a visit to the mysterious "Buddha boy" a while back [3]. Saunders to me is pretty much Wallace's spiritual successor as far as style and tone goes. [1] http://www.esquire.com/sports/a5151/the-string-theory-david-foster-wallace/ http://www.esquire.com/sports/a5151/the-string-theory-david-... [2] https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi... [3] http://reprints.longform.org/the-incredible-buddha-boy http://reprints.longform.org/the-incredible-buddha-boy
  - mohn 9y ago
    I'll second George Saunders! I highly recommend his "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" (a novella plus a collection of shorts). I have not heard him compared to DFW before. Maybe I should give DFW another try.
    - majos 9y ago
      Please do. They're similar to me as adept mixers of high (both are plenty virtuosic/"pretty" when they want to be) and low (both are great at slapstick) style and write with a kind of scientific eye for details. Saunders has described this as "if you put a welder to work making dresses". And there's almost always a basically earnest emotional core underneath everything.
- ashark 9y ago
  I don't usually read a bunch of short non-fic by a single author, and I'm really bad at remembering who wrote a given piece. Wallace is one of the few exceptions. I like Orwell and Twain, but I think everyone does. I'm a bigger fan of E.M. Forster's non-fic than he perhaps deserves, because his prose feels really familiar and comfortable to me—and maybe he's better than the credit I'm giving him, but I recognize him as a possible blind spot for me and so downplay my recommendation. Asimov's short non-fic is of a very different sort (to put it mildly) from, say, Wallace, and isn't at all impressive by some measures, but I like it anyway. The pieces are well constructed and competently written, like his fiction, but neatly avoid requiring much in the way of characters or dialog, which is a very good thing for Asimov. They're mostly descriptive rather than "thinky" or philosophical. It's like reading really pleasantly-written and didactically-minded Wikipedia articles with short, silly, mostly-unrelated anecdotes prefacing each one. I've attempted Huxley but didn't make much progress. Then again I've also twice failed to finish Brave New World so the problem may be mine, not his. I liked "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold". Non-fic that makes it into Lapham's Quarterly is usually great, with the exception of Lapham's own introductions to each volume, which I usually set out intending to read and ultimately don't. Wallace is the only recent author whose short non-fic I've read in significant quantity. His writing is certainly engaging, which is why I made it through so much. The prose is top-notch, in that one's eyes pass effortlessly down the page, interrupted only by Wallace's footnote fetish. He's mostly really fun. However, some of his best pieces come off like drafts of sections of longer, better works, which is to say the thinking's a little rough and they seem incomplete. I'm far from an advocate of minimal, straight-to-the-point writing, but most of Wallace's short non-fic works are longer than any insight they contain justifies (notable exception: the piece on Kafka) while also managing to leave a bunch of dark corners one wishes Wallace had explored—they're good at making you want to read something better on the same topic. He's often kind of mean for little reason other than pandering to the reader, as best I can tell, which is both compelling and off-putting in a car wreck sort of way. To be fair, he's also sometimes mean for a good reason. Still, when my kids are old enough for this kind of stuff I'll recommend a few pieces to them, though some for only narrow purposes ("gee dad, what was being in the Midwest on 9/11 like?", "here, read DFW on the topic, it's a weak piece but captures some of the details of the experience really well") or only reluctantly ("Host"—the bizarre style rarely improves the article, which is otherwise one of his better ones).
cadlin 9y ago
The Turkish writer Elif Batuman has a trio of essays about Turkey in The New Yorker that are excellent. I like all of her writing, but they are especially good. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/12/19/the-sanctuary https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/12/19/the-sanctuary https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/03/07/the-view-from-the-stands https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/03/07/the-view-from-... https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-big-dig https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-big-dig

pklausler 9y ago

Read Wallace's fiction, especially his novels, for serious (but laugh-out-loud funny) literature. The non-fiction is somewhat hit-and-miss, with the glaring brilliant exception of his nearly-always-overlooked book on mathematics ("Everything and More"), which should be required reading.

StefanKarpinski 9y ago
Everything and More is a delight... right up until the last chapter where he manages (iirc) to misstate the continuum hypothesis and generally garble a lot of modern set theory. To be fair that’s where the theory of infinity really crosses over from what a competent amateur can understand to something that requires fairly deep mathematical knowledge.
sanderjd 9y ago
Absolutely loved "Everything and More". It went waaay over my head at a lot of points and I studied a lot of (applied) math in college. I believe it shows more respect for its reader than any other book I've read. I do think it works better for people who have read DFW's fiction - some people I've recommended it to put it down pretty quickly due to finding its style of prose pretentious.
laxatives 9y ago
String Theory is one of my favorite essays of all time. Discusses the incredible gap between journeymen, low-ranked tennis pro's and the elite players in both ability and quality of life, as well as the gap between journeymen and highly competive amateurs. Definitely recommend Infinite Jest like probably anyone else in this thread, but would recommend reading his non-fiction first. Jumping into Infinite Jest, I thought Wallace was some wierdo crank for a long time before I "got" his style and what he was going for. Even then, it took a long time before I enjoyed it and he very quickly became one of my favorite authors. I think Infinite Jest and GEB are two of the only epic books that accomplishes so much, but in two entirely different contexts. They both build intense, well founded and well structured frameworks that lead up to epic resolutions, despite being respectively fiction and non-fiction.

simen 9y ago

I've heard a lot of bad things about Wallace's journalistic ethics - basically misrepresenting the actual story, not the big lines but lots of the details, for stylistic effect. He was not a rigorous searcher of actual truth, just some kind of idealized "emotional truth", and in an era where "alternative facts" is considered an acceptable way to respond to an outright lie, that's not something to emulate. It's been a while so I don't have the exact links to the articles that mention this. (I think some of it was in the biography of Wallace by DT Max.) Also, that cruise ship essay makes him look like a complete asshole. It kind of reminds me of that book, The Lifespan of a Fact, about the protracted struggle between "literary journalist" John D'Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal. This kind of thing pisses me off, even if it's considered great writing. I've personally been interviewed by a rather well-known journalist (my only interview of my life, I am neither famous nor notable), and in the resulting piece there were questions I was never asked and answers I never gave. Thankfully the false words he put in my mouth were not so bad, but what if it had been something actually important? So this kind of stuff leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

jackstraw14 9y ago
Have you read David Lipsky's "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" or seen The End of the Tour? It may not change your opinion of DFW much, but it shows what it was like trying to get answers from him on some of the stuff you mentioned (not the ethics stuff as much as what his style means, maybe). It's a pretty detailed account of a Rolling Stone writer (Lipsky) following and interviewing him right after Infinite Jest was published, but it ends up mostly being about the stuff in the last few lines of your comment.

everybodyknows 9y ago

On a trip to coastal Alaska some years back, I saw a small launch packed shoulder-to-shoulder with cheerless, unprosperous looking people, motoring along the shoreline -- but away from the harbor. A local explained that these were cruise ship workers out for a sightseeing tour, a perk of their jobs. The boat would however never land on shore, because the workers had no visas. And might perhaps try to escape. "Supposedly Fun" brought that moment back for me in a rush. Wallace could not feel at ease being "pampered" by workers themselves forced to maintain a facade of permanent delight. Such a feeling could only make alien to him most of his fellow passengers. Unlike them, he had to see the workers as complete human beings coequal with himself every way, except for what opportunity the world had denied them. With such empathy, he joins Dickens, Melville, Orwell -- and in other ways as well, Hunter S. Thompson. So yes, DFW chooses sides, and his contempt for callous, oblivious passengers shows. But the real vitriol he reserves for interviewees in the management class, none of whom will give a straight answer to his plain questions about the crew's welfare. A certain whip-wielder in the officer's quarters -- "I wish him ill". And best of all, the Press Liaison at corporate who tells him "The people on board -- the staff -- are really part of one big family..." To which DFW responds: "...the preterite staff lived in mortal terror..." (footnote 13)