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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again:
David Foster Wallace
the only completely untrue sentence in David Foster Wallace's new nonfiction collection occurs on page 241, midway through a profile of rising tennis pro Michael Joyce. "This article," he writes, "is about Michael Joyce and the untelevised realities of the Tour, not me." The truth is, every David Foster Wallace piece is about DFW first, its subject second. That's not meant as a priggish J-school putdown. It's just that Wallace's wildly heightened senses — sight, smell, taste, irony — and his over-the-top reporting and writing style overwhelm the subject at hand, turning it from Michael Joyce to My Perceptions, Observations, Intuitions and Analysis of Michael Joyce and the Milieu in Which He Works, With Witty Asides About Brooke Shields and Canada. Wallace is so good at this that I fear a whole generation of writing students may adopt his style and give typesetters footnoting fits for the next 10 years. "A Supposedly Fun Thing" mixes Wallace's highly entertaining magazine pieces with some lit-crit stuff that probably impressed the author's colleagues in the creative writing department, but that you can just as well skip unless you're really jonesing for phrases like "fusing theories of creative discourse with hard-core positions in metaphysics." In the opening piece, "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley," Wallace recalls his formative years spent bashing tennis balls across nets in downstate Illinois while analyzing the sport's strategic calculus and dodging twisters. After a long but not inaccessible exegesis on television's impact on fiction, Wallace returns home as an adult to experience the Illinois State Fair. Experience it he does, in all its barnyard-stenching, carny-pissing glory: 50-plus pages (a version originally appeared in Harper's) of pure 1990s heartland Americana as seen through the eyes of a cynical, East Coast writer so full of smart observations he could probably stand to pop a few dumb pills to give his readers a break now and then. It's a masterpiece, a perfect balance of irony, humor, reportage and cultural analysis. If you want to know what happens when that balance gets out of whack, read on to the title essay, which serves as the book's concluding article. Magazine readers will recognize it as The Cruise Piece, in which Wallace "plows the Caribbean" on an obscenely plush seven-day cruise. Trapped on the m.v. Zenith (which Wallace quickly dubs m.v. Nadir), the author goes a little buggy. His head turns into a human IMAX camera, recording every shipboard sight, smell, taste and quirk with indiscriminate abandon. From the masturbatory possibilities of the cabin shower to the satisfying thickness of porthole glass to the hairline crack in his vanity to the joke-telling ability of his suppermates, it's all, emphasis all, here. Sometimes it's too much, and you feel like Wallace's head is spinning like George Jetson's treadmill — Somebody turn this crazy thing off! — so you put the book down, but never for long because after a while "A Supposedly Fun Thing" becomes like this funny chatfriend who's always ready to liven up a scene with some incredibly dead-on description. He makes the rest of us feel hollow for being so unoriginal in our writing and in our lives. — Bruce Barcott
Bruce Barcott is a staff writer for Seattle Weekly.
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