A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

For those new to DFW, perhaps aware of him due to the tragic news of his recent death, this is a great place to start. This book collects essays he wrote for Harper's, Premier Magazine, and others. After DFW made his fiction bones, some genius editor (Lewis Lapham maybe?) guessed that he would make a very interesting journalist, which was an inspired call. The first, best known, reporting effort by Mr. Wallace is also the title essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" which recounts his experience and observations during a week spent on a cruise.

Not to be missed though, is the article DFW wrote on assignment for Premier magazine involving 3 days spent on location with David Lynch during the shooting of "Lost Highway". DFW does his usual genius take, hilarious but totally without snark, on the experience of being on a big budget movie, but also, along the way, he dissects, with brilliance, David Lynch's entire body of work, and slowly reveals how crucial one Lynch film, "Blue Velvet" was to his own artistic development. It is a genuine classic, one artist describing the clear debt of gratitude he owes to another. This book is not to missed.

David Foster Wallace's short essays can be amusing at times, but the descriptions can get tedious (see 500 footnotes for examples) and he rarely seems to connect with the people he's describing.

I haven't read the DFW novels, but for hilarious and cringe-inducing non-fiction commentary, Sedaris is THE master, with Dave Eggers, Sloane Crossley and others far ahead of DFW.

Sorry, I wanted to like the book more, especially with his untimely death.

David Foster Wallace--may he R.I.P.--is one of my very favourite non-fiction writers. I'd categorize his style as a sort-of literate new journalism; while DFW is definately the main character of every essay here (even when he's purportedly talking about, say, David Lynch, DFW's distinctive voice makes you think about more him as the writer than about Lynch as the primary subject matter), you still have to respect his effort not just to stay inside his head. Each essay is crammed with interesting details, whether it takes place at the Illinois State Fair, a luxury cruise line, or, in the case of this volume's only book review, the abstracted world of contemporary literary criticism. Some essays are a little dated--his essay concerning television, for instance, was written before the large-scale expansion of computer entertainments--but even then, it's fascinating to hear what an alert mind was thinking about such matters in a somewhat different media era.
While I'm plugging this book, I should also reccomend his book on math history, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries). It's quite a bit more difficult than 'A Supposedly Fun Thing,' but if after reading 'aSFTINDA' you find yourself wanting some more intellectual entertainment, EaM is a grand tour through many of the important mathematical ideas of the last few millenia. Of course, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays is a nice companion if math isn't your thing.

David Foster Wallace's irreverence and genius really comes through in this collection of essays. Everytime I read another one I can't help but feel sad that we've lost such a talent. My favorite is the rant on Television.

Critics often cry "genius" when they don't understand something, especially when it is presented in such a serious academic way, it can't possibly be trash. It must be so good, we're just not on the same level to appreciate it.

Right after I finished this book, I read the Rolling Stone article on his death by hanging, where almost from the first thing he wrote, he was declared the voice of his generation. Alas, a very hard thing to live with. How do you go anywhere but down after that?

I tried to read every essay in this book, but some of them were just so dense with nothingness disguised in tight cocoons of words, I couldn't fight through it. It's no surprise he has a fascination with David Lynch, the subject of one of his essays and another "genius" I don't appreciate. The essay which lends itself to the book's title, the long discourse on his luxury cruise, is the most accessible. The State Fair essay is the second most accessible. But it seems that Wallace's overall theme is that all people are stupid, and woe on him for being mentally superior to everyone else, and thus, a lonely stranger in a strange land.

But in a way, I understand that since I sometimes feel that way myself. And yeah, it leads to the noose because the stupid people turn out to be the happiest ones.

Reading Wallace is like being adrift at sea on a raft, and debris keeps passing by, and you're supposed to be able to tell from each piece of debris the story behind it and where it came from, even though most of the time you will have no idea. It's just debris. Yet if Wallace were on your raft, he would provide the history of each piece of debris, he just wouldn't tell you.