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I had a similar experience. People had really pumped him up for me, and yet essay after essay left me either cold or disgusted. As someone who has struggled wit

by djur 11y ago

I had a similar experience. People had really pumped him up for me, and yet essay after essay left me either cold or disgusted. As someone who has struggled with lifelong depression, I still didn't recognize anything familiar in his description of watching hours of television a day, and I couldn't agree less with his moralizing attacks on irony. And his piece on prescriptivism vs. descriptivism is basically nonsense. But it was the 9/11 essay that made me give up on him. Not just its stunning lack of insight as to what America's reaction to the attacks was and would lead to, although that was bad enough. But there's this point where he mentions that the people he was staying with didn't know where various buildings in NY were in relation to the Twin Towers; he explicitly describes his hosts' ignorance of the layout of the NYC financial district as a sign of their parochialism and isolation. What amazes me is that the eternally self-reflective Wallace apparently never considered that the vast majority of Americans, parochial and cosmopolitan alike, never have had any reason to know anything about the layout of the NYC financial district. In that moment the parochial viewpoint was _his_. DFW was a fine stylist and made the occasional apt observation, but the man doesn't even begin to live up to the myth. The best thing I can say about him is that he would have been the first to admit that, too.

Cushman 11y ago
> As someone who has struggled with lifelong depression, I still didn't recognize anything familiar in his description of watching hours of television a day Since I wrote elsewhere that I feel DFW's writing captures depression well, this might be a good place to clarify: I don't mean that his characters act the way I might act when I'm depressed, except maybe in caricature. I mean he writes in a way I might think about things when I'm depressed. To put it another way, I don't agree with much of what he has to say, yet it resonates.
cjf4 11y ago
The Midwestern-NYC ignorance was a minor part of a minor work, but have you ventured into his fiction? Despite the caricature/myth he's turned into, you don't get to that point without delivering the goods, and Infinite Jest certainly did. Stylistically it's an achievement, but moreover it had some pretty concrete and incredibly relevant things to say about modern life's alienation and addictions and the need for raw, earnest, emotional connections with other people.

by djur 11y ago

Cushman 11y ago

> As someone who has struggled with lifelong depression, I still didn't recognize anything familiar in his description of watching hours of television a day Since I wrote elsewhere that I feel DFW's writing captures depression well, this might be a good place to clarify: I don't mean that his characters act the way I might act when I'm depressed, except maybe in caricature. I mean he writes in a way I might think about things when I'm depressed. To put it another way, I don't agree with much of what he has to say, yet it resonates.

cjf4 11y ago

The Midwestern-NYC ignorance was a minor part of a minor work, but have you ventured into his fiction? Despite the caricature/myth he's turned into, you don't get to that point without delivering the goods, and Infinite Jest certainly did. Stylistically it's an achievement, but moreover it had some pretty concrete and incredibly relevant things to say about modern life's alienation and addictions and the need for raw, earnest, emotional connections with other people.