I’ve been on a bit of a Jonathan Franzen bender lately. I frequently write about him on my other site. The kickstart for all this was a book club meeting about Crossroads for which I not only read the book, but also watched and read a dozen or so Franzen interviews. Older and newer interviews.
What really struck a chord with me was not so much the specific Crossroads discussions in these interviews, but the things Franzen says about reading and literature in general.
And I noticed similarities in interviews that are sometimes decades apart.
I created a supercut video of two specific Franzen interviews that are 20 years apart. In this video a younger and older Franzen talks about reading, literature and love. See if you can spot the commonalities.
David Foster Wallace kicks off the video (who else?). If you didn’t already know that Franzen and Wallace were friends you can tell by just watching them converse. It’s a delight.
In the YouTube description I also link to the two original videos, which are much broader and interesting in their own right (do watch them!) but this supercut specifically highlights ideas Franzen has about reading and literature.
Here is a list of questions (one of these is rhetorical*). The questions serve partly as a videoguide as they are answered in the video. But you can also try and discuss them beforehand, or even after watching the video (e.g. for your own book club).
Questions
What good is reading anyway? Why read?
What does Wallace say about it, what did Franzen’s mother say about it (fiction)?
What are we missing nowadays (according to Wallace)?
Are people that read “a priori not of the mainstream”? How do you feel about that?
Do you have examples of a text where: the more you look at it, the more you find in it?
Should reading be entertaining, what does ‘entertainment’ mean?
What is the only driver of change (according to Franzen)? Do you agree or not (if so why)?
What should come first in literature (according to Franzen)?
How does this match up with what Wallace says about this?
Will the power of technology be so strong that fewer people will able to find a private space in which to develop a relationship with books?
What is love other than pleasure in the company of?*
The video ends with 2016 Franzen making remarks about technology. Remarks that perfectly tie in to what Wallace — in 1996 — says at the beginning of the video about the influence of technology on reading.
If you read this blog, you know DFW is one of my favorite writers. I even named my book app, in part, after him. So I could be short about String Theory — it’s a absolute pure delight to read — but, of course, I won’t.
String Theory – David Foster Wallace (2016) – 150 pages
String Theory is a collection of 5 DFW essays about tennis. It mostly covers 90s era tennis — Sampras and Agassi — but it closes with 2006 Federer. With DFW’s untimely death in 2008 I find it rather pleasing that by attending the 2006 Wimbledon final, Wallace got to witness, and write about the phenomenon that Federer is. And writing this in 2020, it is even more remarkable that Federer is still playing and competing with the best. Think about that for a second will you.
That said, his piece on Federer is not the best in this collection. But with Wallace that doesn’t mean it’s bad, because for any other writer such an essay would still be the summit of their writing career.
Though it seems with Federer that Wallace was, understandably, genuinely awestruck and smitten in such a way that he finds it hard to describe what makes Federer so special. And that probably says more about Federer’s remarkable talent than it does about Wallace’s.
But it is not just that what sets this essay apart from the others for me, but it is that there is less of Wallace himself in this specific piece. His surprised, bemused and bewildered observations of sometimes unrelated random events or encounters, sprinkled trough his essays, either in footnotes or the main body, are what make his writing so enjoyable. You can find this in most essays, but just a little bit less in the Federer one.
Take his complete letdown by the bland biography of famous tennis player Tracy Austin. I find it hilarious because it bothers him so much. Even though that (hilarity) was not the goal. Because, mind you: in the end, even from such a dull an uninspiring sport biography, Wallace manages to ask valid questions about genius and talent and let’s you know the premise was not to be agitated and write amusingly about that, but to ask questions.
The essay about Michael Joyce might as well be the greatest thing ever written about tennis (or dare I say, sports in general?). It’s a complex and nuanced, highly technical, hyper personal but still general analysis of what constitutes greatness. He makes you see things with different eyes, while he is learning to see it for himself. Just amazing.
The lack of this personal observations with the Federer essay are a breeding ground for questions. Was this deliberate? Does this mean he was bored with this style? Was it a style? Questions you can endlessly debate.
Fact is never has their been a greater collection of stories about the game of tennis than what you’ll find in String Theory.
Today is February 21st, David Foster Wallace‘s birthday. So it’s rather fitting that today I finished reading his magnum opus: Infinite Jest. The notoriously long and difficult book from 1996 with visionary insights on modern life. Infinite Jest is one of the biggest books ever written, and it certainly is the biggest book I have ever read.
It took me somewhere between 50 and 60 hours over the course of four months and I — had to — read several other books in between to cool off. So, it was quite the experience. I will try to write some of those personal experiences and observations down here. This post will not discuss or try to dissect the work and themes itself. Many, many, many books and articles have already tried to do that.
I knew about Wallace and his challenging writing style, and he always looked intimidating. But last year I picked up ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ and it was one of the greatest and funniest things I have ever read (specifically the title essay). And while I was reading that book I tracked down a copy of Infinite Jest. I clearly remember my hesitation. It looked terrifyingly dense. Over 1100 pages in the smallest possible font and hardly any line breaks. And this was just the typesetting, let alone the content! But I bought it anyway, with no real plan to actually read it, yet… But in October I watched ‘The End of the Tour’ — which I greatly enjoyed — so I just had to know what this was all about.
There it was. Fresh.
Did I enjoy it?
Infinite Jest is not your typical enjoyable reader-friendly book. It is also definitely not a funny book. And it certainly wasn’t intended to be. There are multiple horrific scenes of rape, incest, mutilation and drug abuse (and their consequences i.e. faceless babies). Overall it has a very serious tone and message and I don’t think I expected that.
So whether I enjoyed it in the traditional sense is the wrong question, but I am still glad I read it.
Why am I glad?
Infinite Jest is unlike anything else I have ever read.
Not only has Wallace an utterly uniquely distinctive style which is impossible to copy, but above all — this book makes you work! Some books you can read in one sitting, with Infinite Jest I could do 20 pages per hour at most, before I was spent. I could not read this book for hours on end. Because it demands your complete and undivided attention. And this can be exhausting. And at times it felt my life was on hold reading it (would I be able to finish it, where is this going?).
Nothing in the story is left unexplored and Wallace’s vocabulary is unmatched (there are over 20.000 unique words in Infinite Jest, this is only rivaled by the dictionary I would think…). And on top of that, he makes up his own words to fit a specific mood or sentence. This makes the reading experience draining.
However, no word seems wasted. Every word seems vital. It is verbose but still perfectly tight prose.
All these things make it a different, but rewarding, reading experience.
A book book
I was also left with the idea that this experience can only exist on paper (or at most maybe an audiobook). There is no other way to convey the meaning — which just happen to be expressed by words — of this book. You cannot retell the story, you cannot film the scenes, you would lose everything. I know there are also translations, but I worry that a translation wouldn’t provide the same experience.
Wallace demonstrates and justifies with Infinite Jest that writing is an art form of its own and that reading is a different experience from anything else.
Hey, me too Bill! Just read it.
All this seems difficult
On top of all this, it is also mostly a non-lineair story, jumping from the ‘Tennis Academy’ to the ‘Recovery House’ and all over the place. The story seems like loosely connected collection of shards. And you could almost crack it open anywhere and have the same experience as when you start on page one. I think this is deliberate: it makes your brain work. You have to make the connections yourself. Just like there are no explainers or introductions anywhere.
But I suspect this also aided Wallace’s writing? I sense these fragments, sometimes only separated by a double space, are different writing days (?) because they sometimes differ heavily in tone, ideas and intensity.
So what’s it all about then?!
There are many, many different themes and many different ideas in this book. Just as there are a couple of general commonalities. One commonality that stood out specifically for me is that every character in this book is flawed. And trust me, there are many characters. Drug addicts, wheelchair assassins, rapists, dealers, handicapped, deformed, talented athletes who threw their life away, you name it: but every character is flawed.
Suffering
This brings me to what I personally derived as one of the main recurring subjects of the book: suffering. Everyone and everything is suffering from something. The human condition, and in particular its flaws, are at the center of what drives the story.
Wallace himself states that one of the main messages of Infinite Jest is that “pleasure is dangerous“. Specifically: too much pleasure. We are flawed human beings with little to no self-control and a need for pleasure. And this causes problems.
Maybe that’s why he makes the reader work so hard in what could have been a self-referential book title. Pleasure should always be balanced out by hard work.
Breaking its back!
This Wallace guy is quite the character!
Yes, you are nothing short of a genius when you can write like this. And from his collection of essays I had already concluded, he was a chameleon, able to effortlessly jump between different styles. But I have often wondered how deep he had to go as a writer to write Infinite Jest. Because whoever wrote this must have balanced on the brink of madness and peered over (I had the same experience with Virginia Woolf).
But this is also what kept me from enjoying the book to its fullest I think. I don’t mind working hard for a book. But when I read Infinite Jest I was 50% of the time immersed in the story and 50% of the time thinking: how did he do this?! How does his brain work? How can someone write this? It really threw me off.
But either way, in the end, just that may be one of the most rewarding experiences from this book. It’s like you get to spend some time in the mind of a genius, and you may not fully understand the machinery and mechanism but you are certainly in on the outcomes.
Now what?
I heard a great quote: “you might just finish the book and see hints of Infinite Jest in everything that is around you“. I think that is true, this book cannot but leave a mark, and make you see the world through a different lens. And I am glad I am in on it now. And yes, Wallace in 1996 was able to foresee and extrapolate developments with regards to humans and their relation to pleasure (whether this is technology or drugs) that raise questions that are alarmingly relevant today.
At times I thought: when I am finished I am never reading this again! But at other times I thought: this is exceptional I should reread this every so often. (Somewhere in the first few hundreds pages is a story of an addict waiting for a hit. It is quite something). I also made hundreds of yellow marks I want to revisit for various reasons and I want to read more by Wallace. Also there are many Infinite Jest resources I want to read to see what I might have missed (I suspect quite a bit). However, there are also many more books I also want to read of course.
Yeah? Well, you know, that’s just like uh, your opinion, man.
Should *I* read it?
Yes. However, I can’t promise you will enjoy it. And it is an expensive investment of your time (then again, finishing a great video game costs the same amount of time). But the experience of Infinite Jest will be rewarding because it will be unlike anything you have ever read.
Lock the door, turn off your phone and enter the mind of David Foster Wallace.
David Foster Wallace on being alone, silence, reading, and our culture of instant gratification (2003).
David Foster Wallace could write. And not just write, he could really write extraordinarily well. In related news: water is wet.
Wallace’s writing struck me as an epiphany, a beacon of light, a clear and unmistakable differentiator between merely good writing and exceptional writing.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again – David Foster Wallace (1997) – 353 pages
I have known about DFW for some time now, and I have seen his famous commencement speech several times. It strongly resonates with me. As some other interviews do. But his writing? It seemed intimidating.
Infinite Jest, his magnum opus, is this famous thousand page multi-layered beast of a book. So I thought I start with something lighter. ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing…’ is a collection of essays and so it seemed like a good starting place.
It is a collection of 7 stories and essays on tennis, state fairs, TV, irony, David Lynch and a very entertaining cruise among other things. (Each story could validate a blogpost by itself — there is just so much there). Wallace demonstrates with academic skill his philosophical insights on modern life with the essays about other writers, TV and irony. But he is, just as easily, able to make you scream with laughter when he describes a highly anticipated and ultimately disappointing experience with the dessert tasting booth at the state fair. This man could seemingly do anything with a pen.
The words, and sentences (and footnotes!) all just seem to ooze effortlessly out of him. His voice is radically clear and distinct and his vocabulary and attention to detail are unmatched. It is very obvious Wallace operated on a different level, intellectually and talent wise. And I often stopped reading and wondered about how his depression got the best of him in the end, and whether this much talent and severe depression are somehow two sides of the same coin. Because judging by his writing, I don’t think he experienced the world the same way most people do (whatever that is).
The first thing I did after finishing this book, was head to a bookshop where I bought Infinite Jest. It still looks intimidating, but I can now only assume it must be a definitely fun thing to read.
