There is a new David Foster Wallace story online at The New Yorker’s site this week, and it’s a nice illustration of some of the points made by Dave Eggers in his foreword to the 10th Anniversary Edition of Infinite Jest:
David Foster Wallace has long straddled the worlds of difficult and not-as-difficult, with most readers agreeing that his essays are easier to read than his fiction, and his journalism most accessible of all. But while much of his work is challenging, his tone, in whatever form he’s exploring, is rigorously unpretentious.
Eggers goes on to relate how intensely “normal” a person DFW is, and yet how extraordinary his works of fiction can be. For a person (like myself) with fairly strong analytical and/or philosophical tendencies, Wallace’s style makes an incredible amount of sense. He *needs* the 1,067 pages of IJ or the paragraphs of unbroken interior monologue in the New Yorker piece because, even though the emotional content of his works is often quite basic, he wants to approach it in an incredibly difficult way; stopping time, in a sense, to let us appreciate how deeply weird and mysterious the workings of the mind can be. Sure, the subjective nature of consensus reality makes this an ultimately frustrating pursuit, but what makes Wallace’s work so inspiring is just how fucking close he gets to success.
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