DFW (Part I)

I started this blog four weeks ago with the plan to post one piece a week; obviously I've fallen behind. I knew that I'd be going on my book tour for BAD TEETH last week, but what I didn't realize was that I would simultaneously be dealing with the very early arrival of my second kid, Petra Barbauld Durfee Long (born April 7 and doing very well). So maybe I'll play catch up and post more than one piece this week. We'll see.

Anyway, Petra's arrival has me thinking back to the arrival of her older brother Quentin a couple years ago. And soon after my wife gave birth to him, while they were both still in the hospital, I decided to reread "Incarnations of Burned Children," by David Foster Wallace. That was a bad idea. It really upset me.

It upset me because I was newly a father, and the story is about parents who fail a child, so at the time that sort of worry just hit a little too close to home. Understandable, yes? But this was the second time I read the story, and I didn't like it the first time either. So I decided to read it again yesterday to try to get some sort of handle on my reaction to it.

Now, this blog is mostly supposed to be devoted to close reading. The crux of the first post could be boiled down to a paragraph break. The crux of the second could be boiled down to the use of the second person voice. And I'll get to a close reading of "Incarnations of Burned Children" in my next post. But first a bit of context:

I mostly like the work of David Foster Wallace. I think that he was a great thinker and often a great writer--particularly in his essays, but also in his fiction. His fiction is full of great writing, in fact, but my main problem is that I feel that it often doesn't come together well. INFINITE JEST, for instance, seems more like a collection of riffs on a theme than it does a novel. And most of the riffs are amazing, but a few are downright embarrassing (that ghetto-speak chapter is the worst offender, but it's far from the only offender). His short stories are hit and miss; "Lyndon" is probably one of my top ten favorite short stories of all time, but I find "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" almost unreadably bad. His essays are pretty universally great, though. But maybe I'm not the ideal reader.

I think I was born at the wrong time to fully appreciate DFW. By the time I discovered him, I had already discovered his influences and was trying to synthesize them in my own way, and our respective modes of response put us at odds in my mind. He still managed to influence me, to be sure; the use of quoted ellipses to signify a pointed silence in ICELANDER, for instance, was ripped directly from his work; and the book I'm writing now has some Q. and A. in a format taken from "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." But I think if I were born a little later he would just be among those influences that I had discovered as opposed to being someone else who was influenced by them, and I would probably look at his work in a different way. And if I'd been born earlier I might have seen him as a contemporary grappling with the same influences and topics as me. Instead, I saw him as someone who was ten years out of date (obviously I was better at interpreting the modern world, as I was younger; hey, I was an undergrad) and someone who didn't have the formal rigor of Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, or any of the other postmodern writers to whom he was often compared (again, I was an undergrad)...

But anyway, this post is getting long, and splitting it in two is a good way to play catch-up on the low post-count. Preview for next time:

The use of capital letters! Poignant details and the issue of POV! The importance of a title! Also, the story of how I once wrote a book called INFINITE JEST!

Tomorrow, I hope.

See you soon.

And welcome, Petra.