A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments Paperback – February 2, 1998

I'm left once again in sort of pseudo-envious awe of David Foster Wallace. This being my first encounter with the man's writing since Infinite Jest—and the first overall with his non-fiction—I was not quite sure what to expect of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. I say not quite because of course being familiar with him at all will give a reader at least some idea of what his writing outside of fiction might be like. And while Wallace is, in my opinion, notoriously difficult to summarize—not to mention more than occasionally difficult to follow, his intellect being what it is—I will nevertheless try to say a little about each of the essays contained within this neurotic mish-mash of journalistic assignments and literary musings.I don't think that David Foster Wallace's casual brilliance can be overstated. He seems more able than any other writer I've read to simply transform human observation into written language; it's uncanny. He never misses a detail. In fact, he seems somehow able to produce even more detail when writing about his experiences than there seemed to be even while originally experiencing them; which makes no sense but I guess it's just a sense I get. But this is Wallace's superpower. This seemingly-magical ability to observe, process, and reproduce. He can make the supposedly banal, ordinary, uninteresting seem the opposite. State fairs, luxury cruises, tennis rankings; you may not be interested in reading fifty to one hundred pages about any of these things, and yet Wallace will make you so. And not just interested, but invested. You may even find yourself laughing aloud, as was often the case for this reader.Now, every superpower has a downside, right? Every superhero his kryptonite, at the risk of sounding dramatic. And so I must mention that Wallace can be a little insensitive in the way that really smart people are sometimes insensitive. He passes judgment quickly which, admittedly is often funny and even seemingly accurate, but it sometimes leads to an underlying—outdated, one hopes—attitude when it comes to women. But when someone is this good you basically take the "bad" with the "good". And he is this good, mind. But taking the "bad" doesn't mean ignoring it.So I'll say a bit about each of the seven essays in the collection. Each brings something to the table and each sees Wallace displaying his almost-aerial detachment and keen sense of the absurd, but are somehow never without a little sentimentality. Some kind of inherent good-naturedness that seems to say, "We're in this together."derivative sport in tornado alley (1990)On tennis and, in some ways, mathematics. Details Wallace's junior tennis career and his general slide from grace, largely attributed to the sterilization of the sport at a higher level, caused mostly by quality of life improvements that negated Wallace’s mastery of external variables. This one was good, if not a standout.E Unibus Pluram — television and U.S. fiction (1990)A deep, deep dive into television culture over the ages and how postmodern fiction (and fiction writers) relate to, steal from, and give back to that culture; and how we might all combat our obsession with/possession by television. Beyond having some minor difficulty parsing all of it, an extremely thought-provoking essay. It makes me sad that Wallace is not alive today to write something similar on the Internet's golden age and the reign of social media.getting away from already pretty much being away from it all (1993)On assignment for Harper's covering the 1993 Illinois State Fair, and a more perfect distillation of the Midwest there is none. An absolute riot. Read this.greatly exaggerated (1992)The shortest of the bunch by far, and the hardest to relate to. An examination of Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” and the deconstructionists like Hix who have come to combat it.David Lynch keeps his head (1995)On assignment for Premiere, David is allowed on the set of Lost Highway (a watching of which pairs extremely well with the essay, by the way.) I think this essay did more for my appreciation of Lynch's films and what his art is trying to do than anything else I've ever read on him. Read it.tennis player Michael Joyce’s professional artistry as a paradigm of certain stuff about choice, freedom, limitation, joy, grotesquerie, and human completeness (1995)If the first one was about tennis but more so about Wallace's mental makeup and Midwestern idiosyncrasies, then this one really is about tennis. I ended up getting so sucked into the tennis world I barely even took any notes on it. It is always a pleasure to read about something someone is very passionate about.a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again (1995)And finally, the eponymous essay. On assignment for Harper's again, Wallace sets sail on a 7-night Caribbean cruise on the m.v. Zenith (a.k.a the Nadir). The funniest essay by far, full of his signature footnotes, Wallace explores the side-effects of total pampering, the nature of despair, and the fantasy that human dissatisfaction can be erased with a sufficient amount of luxury. Brilliant, hilarious, and worth the price of admission all on its own. Read this.So there the seven essays are, any one of which could be read to reader-satisfaction on its own, especially the state fair one, the Lynch one, and the eponymous essay itself.

A Supposedly Fun Book That Is Occasionally Fun (for select audiences):"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley": DFW has the kind of self-effacing charm that allows him to forge an instant bond with readers. When he discusses relatable things like athletic ability, being a late bloomer, and the strange connection he feels (and then does not feel) toward his natural environs, the reader is instantly hooked. The fact that DFW resents nature for not endowing him with more physical strength & beauty is plenty interesting, but DFW also has another quality that is just the opposite of self-effacing and not nearly as charming, and that's his excessive brainyness. DFW often ruins perfectly good essays with excessive brainyness (apparently his revenge for not having enough brawn or beauty). The math babble threaded throughout the essay just reads like intellectual showboating. Luckily, in this essay, the brainyness doesn't spoil whats good, but in other essays it sometimes does. Some readers seem attracted to the brainyness, the learned references, the intellectual display (which becomes a kind of replacement sport for the tennis that he so loves), but to me those are not the qualities that make him worth reading."E Unibas Pluram: Television and US Fiction": If you are interested in answering the question of whether DFW was a postmodernist or not, this is an essential essay. This 60+ page essay is a ramble about alienation and irony. DFW admits that like many writers of fiction he is a compulsive watcher/observer and that this habit makes him feel alienated. TV, he says, seems to offer a release from alienation and so many alienated writers are tv addicts, but he decides that tv does nothing to alleviate the problem. He also contends that writers of his generation (the ones he mentions are all postmodernists) incorporate tv (and other pop references) into their work because its part of modern/postmodern life, but that this replicating of modern/postmodern life in fiction still offers no relief from the alienation that it explores/configures. DFW claims that irony/ironic detachment was a favorite writerly device/attitude for the early postmodern writers (a group that he sees as his forebears) but that irony which is also a favorite device/attitude of his generation of writers also offers no relief from alienation. Although he does make a Marx joke (in the State Fair essay), which may or may not indicate that he sees alienation as a universal condition, it would seem that his own alienation is due more to a personal than a sociological pathology. Reading between the lines (as well as the other essays in this collection), one gets the feeling that DFW is not particularly interested in connecting to any of the communities that he describes, nor that he is particularly interested in connecting to other alienated artists. Quite the contrary. It seems that DFW is rather fond of his alienated status as its the subject of virtually everything that he writes, and his trademark. Even though the essay eventually morphs into a call for a new kind of art that would deliver writers & presumably readers from their alienation, one wonders if relief from alienation (the very thing that provides the impetus for his writing) is really what he seeks. So is he a postmodernist? I think the answer is yes. Even though he often voices nostalgia for a time before the postmodern, this nostalgia is itself a key component of postmodern consciousness/writing. DFW is very good at mapping the impasse where postmodern writing leads, but the reason that he knows this impasse so well is because it is his own."Getting Away from Being Pretty Much Away from It All": Another extremely long 60+ page essay that is more consistently enjoyable than the previous essay, but so full of filler (endless descriptive passages of cows & horses & pigs) that one finds oneself wondering whether DFW ever cuts or deletes anything. This along with the cruise ship essay are the author at his most accessible, and his funniest. DFW is a reluctant traveler (some of the funniest bits are about his own discomfort) but he is very entertaining when summing up human types."Greatly Exaggerated": As in 'the rumors of my death have been...'. Despite that title, this is a humorless synopsis/review of H.L Hix's Morte d' Author: An Autopsy. The book & the book review summarize and assess the long battle over whether authorship as a concept is alive or dead. Hix is not on either side of the fence really, and believes that the argument revolves around a misuse of the word "author." Authors, Hix argues and DFW echoes, are not completely autonomous agents (no one ever really thought they were), but are influenced by culture, language, and even tv. So, as Hix explains it, there's no real side to be on. Ok, I went to grad school a few years ago and remain somewhat interested in this kind of grad school inquiry, but like many (not all) academic exercises/arguments this essay takes a very long time to say very little and certainly nothing new and most readers will do well to simply skip this one."David Lynch Keeps His Head": Premiere magazine asked DFW to visit the set of Lost Highway and although the author never says one word to David Lynch, he writes nearly 70 pages about him. Instead of talking to the director, DFW analyzes each and every one of his films. The interesting thing here is not the film criticism which is not particularly insightful but watching one alienated artist watch another albeit from a distance. DFW admires the work, but he is suspicious of the man behind the work who he describes as creepy. But what makes Lynch "creepy" is the same thing that makes many artists "creepy"--the strange distance they keep.Accompany this essay with the earlier one about TV & US Fiction and you have two very interesting meditations on alienation. Again, I would say that this is DFW's main theme. Even in the travel pieces, its the author's alienation from his subject that gives the work its unique charm (we all love someone who feels even more alienated than we do) and force."Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry...": Tennis reportage that is really a meditation on the price paid for being obscenely good at one thing. Although DFW admires their art, he decides that Joyce and pros like him are "grotesques" ie., freakishly one-dimensional creatures."A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again": This near-100 page essay deserves its reputation as a masterpiece of travel literature, and is the reason most people buy this book. If these essays prove anything its that DFW is a masterful and witty observer of humans at their most absurd (I only wish that DFW had a sense of humor about some of the topics that he treats seriously because when he's funny he is sublime and when he's serious he sounds just like any other academic/critic). If you've never been on a cruise ship this will make you book a cruise just to see whether DFW is exaggerating or not. All of these essay will appeal to the DFW fan, but this is the only "must read" for the general reader.