The Man Who Began To Suspect He Was Made Of Glass

or pontificating on how I have a huge literary hard-on for David Foster Wallace.

When you finish a novel that’s more than 1,000 pages you tend to feel accomplished.  That’s how I felt when I finished David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest less than one month ago.  I wasn’t doing the Infinite Summer thing, because the sad fact is I started reading it last winter.  Is it sad?  I don’t know, I don’t think so.  I literally MISS reading that book, it consumed me, and maybe I should be proud to say I read it at a snail’s pace.

—D.F.W. (March 9, 2009 — New Yorker)—

—The Masterpiece (Published February 1st, 2006)—

The book was incredibly difficult, but not in the way where I’m trying to sound out Burgess’ Nadsat, Welsh’s cockney, or Joyce’s Irish.  This is it, the American masterpiece that in time will be going toe to toe with all the greats.  Yes we’ve got Twain, and Hemingway, and Salinger: All beautiful writers.  I’m certainly not arguing some kind of point that puts DFW on some tier above them.  Certainly he’s been compared to Barth or Pynchon, but even the seductively mindboggling Gravity’s Rainbow doesn’t quite fit into this school of true challenge.  I don’t think Wallace and Pynchon are very comprable.  I think Wallace offers more of his soul, which is why the book is perhaps as dangerous as the fictional film it alludes to.  This is a Bible of a meta-human singular, a real death defyer.  If I end up putting my head in a microwave some beautiful fall evening I will perhaps in my final note mention Wallace’s unrepeatable genius, and an attempt to emulate the only way I might have a chance to.  If you get through the book and think you have any right to criticize it (like it or not) my suggestion would be to give Jay McIerney a call and ask for a private audience in which you can share your mutual retardation as he sucks his own dick, no doubt doing his best to give Bret Easton Ellis an HJ simultaneously.

—The less polarizing essay collection—

—Coming Soon.  (Please don’t suck.)—

Aside from Jest there are plenty of Wallace imprints that are here to stay, and much less terrifying.  My favorite non-Jest fare is an essay called E Unibus Plurum: Television and U.S. Fiction in which Wallace looks at his own reflection from the cable infused screen and tries to get at something.  The man was not afraid to admit he loved Bewitched.

The most famous Wallace short story collection is easily B.I.w.H.M. which, yes, will soon be viewable in filmic form for all us peons that couldn’t make it to Sundance.  How appropriate it is that a character from a television sitcom that looks pretty much exactly like Wallace did in his college years (Jim from the Office) use the piece as his springboard into adapting/directing.  I’m hoping it doesn’t blow, but the reviews showing up are already split right down the middle.  I guess it’s not Harry Potter, but I still hold to the fact it’s better than Eggars.