Word Count: 3,124 (buckle up)

Background

Here you go: Here is Nicole’s first (and perhaps last) bona fide, full-effort Goodreads review [this, for context, is linked to from a Goodreads review].
As just a quick note, I think David Foster Wallace was a talented writer and is an undeniably space-occupying cultural figure. I’m not sure I’d go as far to say I love him or his work, but I do think it is captivating to study and read his nonetheless interesting work in the way one might study, say, Ian Curtis or André Gide. He also has interesting takes on mental illness, which is an area of literature in which—and by which—I am both interested and affected. (Just wanted to clarify this for the people who have seen a torrent of DFW on my feed recently.)

The Method

I’ve listed the parts of the Reader and my brief thoughts on each of them below. For length reasons, I’ve truncated the selections from his novels (Broom, Infinite Jest, and Pale King) and the Teaching Materials” section (I’m sure you don’t care about the difference between his “English 64A First-Day Pop Quiz” vs. his “English 183D, Spring 2008 Syllabus”) into one entry each. I hope this is at least semi-comprehensive, given the whole tome is almost 1,000 pages and comprises over fifty excerpts. Only going to give summaries/premises if the review truly needs it. (Will try and edit this whenever I find typos after posting.)
If you want a Cliff Notes version, skip below to the “Conclusion”. It’s like a couple sentences.

The Content Itself

Fiction

“The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” (1984)

Wallace’s first short story (ever, if I remember correctly), and never really published till now. Really devastating and gut-wrenching little piece. Very Salingerian (and as Kevin J. H. Dettmar notes in the Afterword, inconsistent) voice-wise, upsetting in the context of Wallace’s life. If nothing else, an important precursor to a lot of the content and themes DFW would explore in his later fiction. “Trillaphon”, though, exhibits Wallace’s great skill: communicating beauty and pathos even in (and through) the most upsetting, mortifying situations: suicide attempts, friends dying, face-mutilation… and more, all lit from within by beautiful explanations of mental illness and the state of in-betweenness. One of the strongest pieces in this book. A really strong start.

The Broom of the System (1987)

I will admit (OK, not a great way to begin this review) that I’ve not actually read this whole novel on its own. But the 40ish pages and three chapters that make up the Reader’s excerpts seem… representative enough? All very entertaining and lucid (written, originally, around the time of “Trillaphon”, so not as frustrating and meandering as much of his work after this novel). Gerald Howard, Broom’s editor, nicely helps situate the reader in his tongue-and-cheek Afterword (worth reading even if you don’t want to read three out-of-context chapters from a novel).

Girl with Curious Hair (1989; henceforth GWCH): “Little Expressionless Animals”

It seems that, at the time of its release, Girl with Curious Hair was largely regarded by critics as sort of a Pynchon/DeLillo ripoff. Which I get, I guess, but what famous writer hasn’t emulated their literary heroes? I do agree with the critics, though, in that this volume is underwhelming in itself (Reader aside). It’s DFW at his most pretentious—and that’s a word I try to employ sparingly. But, truly, most of this book has such a mismatch of content and style it’s almost saddening to read. By that I mean: I don’t personally believe that there is content in this book meaningful or complicated enough to necessitate the neurotic and convoluted narration and voice Wallace employs in almost every story in Girl. (And that’s not to mention his tasteless and often incomprehensible use of dialect; I’m thinking “John Billy” here. None of this, problematicness-wise, augurs particularly well for his future writings.) I think this was the stage in DFW’s life and writing, where he was still stuck in his “self-obsessed MFA grad” persona and not yet at his “snowboarder with a PhD”, as Peter Grier described him in a review of Consider the Lobster.
This story, though: It’s fine. I like it more than the other stories in the collection. It doesn’t try as hard and is honest and sincerely emotional in a similar way to “Good Old Neon” and “Trillaphon.” The frequent perspective-switching, though, is symptomatic of that “trying-too-hard”; I just don’t think the story is complex or dense enough to necessitate that narrative gimmick. But queer themes—so, like, cool. He’s also pretty good at describing clouds.

(GWCH): “My Appearance”

Much of the same almost-there feeling as “Little Expressionless Animals” above, though this time a different, more yuppie and McInerneyified version of corporate America. Ties in well thematically with “E Unibus Pluram” and is an early (if not the first) full exposition on Wallace’s thoughts on entertainment. Obviously going to become a theme with him. And though I strongly disliked much about GWCH, DFW does really funny and unrealistic portrayals of celebrities in both this story (Letterman) and “Animals” (Alex Trebek, Pat Sajak, and whoever Bert Convy was).

Infinite Jest (1996)

Don’t know what to say that hasn’t already been said a thousand times over. It seems impossible to give any opinion about this book and not come off as cliché. In terms of the selections from the text, I’m glad the eds chose what they did. I’d recommend reading the book first instead of diving into these excerpts—but if you’ve already finished it, these excerpts do serve as nice little thoughtfully curated reminders. Though if you want a good introduction to the book, I’d guess you can read the “If, by the…” excerpt out of context. It runs from pp. 200–211 in IJ and is one of my favorite passages of any book ever. I even have the pages memorized; it’s the reason why I tell people, somewhat facetiously, that “the book really picks up around page 200.” Reminiscent of the best parts of “Trillaphon,” “Good Old Neon,” and “Incarnations of Burned Children,” but there’s truly nothing like it in all of Wallace’s writings. I believe that this is the most crushing section of IJ and also the most unique and moving, perhaps in competition only with some of the sections involving Joelle’s drug history (cf. pp. 234–240, 736–747 in original volume).

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999; henceforth BIWHM): “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life”

Even in these radically condensed mini-reviews I’m doing here, it seems that what I say is probably going to match or exceed this story’s word limit. Though even in its brevity, this story—much like his “Incarnations of Burned Children”—packs as much, if not more of a punch than a lot of his other material. DFW at his most burned-out and least self-conscious.

(BIWHM): “B.I. #14 & #40”

I’ve always been very conflicted when thinking about how I feel about these “interviews.” On one hand, they’re lively and animated and lifelike—almost like a real screenplay, I guess. (John Krasinski made it into a movie in 2009 so I guess that makes sense.) On the other hand, much of what DFW says and illustrates here is symptomatic of the exact kind of thing he’s trying to critique in this collection.

(BIWHM): “Forever Overhead”

D. T. Max had noted that this story “received great praise” when Wallace wrote it in grad school at the University of Arizona; though it was later chosen for Best American Short Stories 1992, but Wallace “dismissed it in his contributor note as ‘straining to make a personal trauma sound way deeper and prettier and Big than anything true could ever really be’” (Love Story, p. 90, 313). I think this conflict is representative. “Forever Overhead” is undoubtedly one of DFW’s more candid pieces, not as shrouded in layers of irony as are Girl with Curious Hair and portions of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Definitely a weirder one, though. Something something Freud.

(BIWHM): “The Depressed Person”

So I only later learned, after reading Max’s biography, that this story is meant to be satire? It seemed sincere enough to me, and—Every Love Story in mind—parallel enough with Wallace’s life to be autobiographical. I don’t know; I enjoyed it, though it felt like a more diluted, somewhat more self-conscious and cagey version of “Good Old Neon”.

Oblivion (2004): “Good Old Neon”

D. T. Max was right when he opined that this story “is the most uncomfortable of the stories in an uncomfortable volume” (Love Story, p. 277); it is, and very much so. Usually I’m the first one to lambast DFW’s self-indulgent rambling—but in this story it just works, self-referentially and stylistically. I think it’s one of Wallace’s best pieces, both in terms of personal enjoyment and also in the context of his output. It’s hard-hitting, really funny, cringey, and mind-boggling. Premise: A man writes about taking his own life after he took his own life.

(Oblivion): “Incarnations of Burned Children”

More in the avenue of DFW’s voice working. The whole thing is like three pages, so I don’t really want to say much about it, so as not to ruin the paralyzing nature of the piece. Disturbing, moving, terrifying, cathartic. Wallace can do short-shorts, albeit rarely.

(Oblivion): “The Suffering Channel”

In much the same way the consistent and polarizing voice worked with “Neon” and “Incarnations”, it pretty much fell flat (for me!) here. I just don’t think Wallace’s “Dickensian scope” (as Max described it; Love Story p. 279) works in these short stories/novellas. Too much to process, too many people to meet, too little space. Same goes for his “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” from Girl with Curious Hair, which suffers the same issue. And the story itself felt thinly veiled, which is something I rarely ever feel with DFW. It felt almost like low-hanging fruit. Which is sad. Not a great choice for the Reader, I don’t think.

The Pale King (2011)

This is the only other piece in the collection I haven’t read in full: just the selections in the Reader. But, for what it’s worth, they were as enjoyable, honest, and moving as Girl with Curious Hair was self-indulgent and hyper intellectualized. Interesting in the context of Wallace becoming obsessed with the IRS at that point in his life. Odd. Interesting.

Teaching Materials

This was just really fascinating. The whole § contains both a selection of his emails, presumably verbatim, to his mother, Sally Foster Wallace (who also wrote the §’s Introduction) and a listing/transcribing of some of his course syllabi from over the years of his teaching at various colleges. What is, I think, coolest about this is just that it’s a biographical itch that most information with which we try to get a look into DFW’s life (short stories, interviews, biography) can’t scratch. Very interesting to look at what books he’d teach, how he’d teach, what the classroom praxis of his grammar anality looked like. This 36-page stretch of the book is perhaps its best part—both because it’s wholly original material, but also because it’s only interesting to people interested enough in DFW to archive-dig, who are as it happens the only people who’d probably even be interested in buying this huge Reader.

Nonfiction

“Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” (1990)

Not a huge tennis fan, as I’ll get into below in the “Federer” essay review, but this one is, at least for me personally, anodized by the tie-in of math. But even then this feels like the disingenuous aw-shucks persona Wallace was known to put on throughout his life. This essay felt just very cutesy and hyperbolized in a way that I: A.) Just don’t enjoy, personally, and B.) Cannot relate to, having been brought up in the Midwest, OK at math, and semi-OK at tennis, and having never thought about any of this. If there is such a thing as unrealistic Midwest fetishization, I’d gander this is it.

“E Unibus Pluram” (1990)

More the Business District of DFW’s corpus: the body of texts for which he’s most well known. And for this essay, as with Infinite Jest, it’s difficult to come up with anything at all that hasn’t already been said. I mean: What he was is true (or, at least, was true, as David L. Ulin wryly notes in the Afterword). And this piece is definitely where Wallace puts forth his thoughts on entertainment-and-fiction most directly and lucidly (as opposed to his fiction and other, similar, essays, like his 1988 “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young”, part of which I guess is also in this essay?). But I’m no real elegant writer, and I don’t possess some fancy cultural-/media-studies degree, so I won’t pretend to be able to comment on the salience of “E Unibus Pluram”. But it surely was riveting, if only just as a window into the world that birthed Infinite Jest.

“Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All” (1993)

Feat. a pretty cool Afterword by Anne Fadiman, one of my favorite writers. She does this essay more justice than I probably ever could; so +1 for the Reader, I guess. The essay, as Fadiman comments, exemplifies Wallace’s skills (in much the same way he did in “Supposedly Fun Thing”) as the human-camera, relayer-of-all-details, painter-of-life. Which is I think a valuable and interesting skill and angle here—especially since the essay was written when nobody yet knew whether TV or fiction would “win out,” as it were. Just an entertaining piece, an ode to the Midwest Wallace would return to repeatedly throughout the rest of his writing career.

“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” (1995)

In the introduction to the mass-market edition of David Foster Wallace’s senior philosophy thesis, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, James Ryerson quotes out of context (of course) a dense line from said thesis, and then quips after doing so: “There are reasons that he’s better known for an essay about a cruise ship” (Fate, p. 2). That, he is: known for that essay, but also known for his relative lucidity within that essay. Though that’s not to say his encyclopedic narrative quality is lost in this piece: Oh it’s there, and with a vengeance. As I noted elsewhere in this review, my lukewarm reaction to a lot of DFW’s nonfiction is just a taste thing. For a lot of people, the human-camera thing is a real kicker. But for me it just works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t. And this is one of those times. Perhaps that’s because I’ve never once in my life wanted to know—nor cared—what cruise ships are like, but also probably because there are other times in Wallace’s writings (I’m thinking “Good Old Neon,” “Trillaphon”) where that voice, that narrative thing he does, works much better. But alas, the essay is a classic, and I do not blame the editors for including the piece.

“The Nature of the Fun” (1998)

I guess interesting—and if it’s not too conceited to say, somewhat relatable—but ableist in a way I couldn’t get past. Truly abhorrent and upsetting handicapped infant metaphor he didn’t have to include—and nor did he have to incorporate into his overarching “analogy” as much as he did. Felt, overall, insensitive and trite.

“Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed” (1999)

Yeah I mean he’s right, I suppose. I’ve never read any Kafka so I’ll just have to take Wallace’s word on this one.

“Authority and American Usage” (1999)

Mostly apt and comprehensive overview of the ongoing prescriptivist–descriptivist “Usage Wars,” but begins to fall flat, miss the point, and generally guarantee its own eventual irrelevance once it begins to bring race and AAVE-vs.-SWE into the discussion. No fault of the eds here, though; this essay is also fairly well known. But if you want some more good commentary on DFW, grammar, and race/racism, check out Chapter VIII (“Persuasion and Pretension”) of Cecelia Watson’s Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark (citation below; and also, as an aside, that is my all-time favorite book, and I highly recommend it).

“The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” (2001)

The sentiment is already somewhat apparent in some of his other essays and stories, e.g. “Authority”, “Suffering Channel”, and “Up, Simba”, but David Foster Wallace really was one of those guys who, not as self-consciously as he seemed to think, would make the American/unAmerican distinction. Nice thoughts in this piece, I suppose, but almost unforgivably nationalist and problematic most of the time.

“Consider the Lobster” (2004)

Along with “E Unibus Pluram” and “Supposedly Fun Thing,” one of his more strictly pop-pieces for which he’s most well known. A lay primer on animal/food/environmental(?) ethics that somehow doesn’t come off as headache-inducing as the rest of his nonfiction (of which, I either indicated or should have more clearly indicated earlier, I am not a huge fan). It’s just kind of a fun essay. Characteristically DFW in that he transforms such a macabre topic into something light(ish) and entertaining.

“Federer Both Flesh and Not” (2006)

Just a matter of personal taste here, so don’t take this review right here as scripture. I despise watching tennis. I do not particularly enjoy playing it, either. And so despite DFW’s uncannily skillful human-camera who-what-where-when-why barrage-of-detail narrative style, I just found the whole thing one big yawn. Personally.

In Conclusion (and How the Reader Actually Is)

Though at times flawed and slightly misrepresentative, the Reader more or less hits the DFW nail on the head. The selections were across-the-board and wide-ranging, but I think the incorporation of more secondary sources (e.g. Max’s Love Story and Lipsky’s Although of Course…; or even also Wallace’s philosophy senior thesis, which was despite its abstruseness interesting and philosophically significant) would have been worthwhile.
Perhaps I wasn’t as claim-making or straightforward as I should have been in a review of this size and ambition. That seems to have been inevitable, though. Maybe I’ll expand this more in the future and add some more thoughts to each review as they come to me.

Sources

Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. New York: Broadway Books, 2010.
Max, D. T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. New York: Penguin, 2012.
Wallace, David Foster. The David Foster Wallace Reader. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014.
Wallace, David Foster. Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Watson, Cecelia. Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark. New York: Ecco, 2019.