The Nature of Things

Are you a David Foster Wallace fan? Most literary critics are it seems; most of his fellow writers, too. Whenever his name comes up, they wax rhapsodic about his prodigious talent and bemoan the tragic loss of that talent that occurred when Wallace was finally overcome by his depression and killed himself in 2008. I admit that I totally missed out on the Wallace worship of the late 1990s and early 2000s. I was entirely ignorant of him. Obviously, my head was somewhere else at the time. In fact the first time I really became aware of him was in late 2010 when I saw an article entitled "13 books that everyone says they have read - but haven't." I wrote a blog post about it in which I said that I had no intention of reading Infinite Jest,  Wallace's book that was on the list.  But I felt bad about cavalierly dismissing a book that so many people seemed to adore and the next year my conscience - and my curiosity - got the better of me and I committed to reading it.  I ...

Graduation season is almost upon us. All over the country, students are finishing up years of study and will be going into the world to begin their adult lives. But before they can do that they have to endure the tradition of the commencement speech. Most of those speeches are instantly forgettable. I certainly can't remember anything about mine that I heard all those years ago. But occasionally someone makes one that is worth remembering. In 2005, the writer David Foster Wallace made such a memorable speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College. It has become something of a phenomenon and has been widely disseminated through audio tapes and videos. Now someone has made a short movie utilizing long excerpts from the speech and, frankly, it's a gem. There is a lot of wisdom there. Watch and enjoy. Hearing these words and watching the film make one even sadder to contemplate that wisdom from this man, juxtaposed against his own tragic end as a suicide three short years later....

I will freely admit that I may just not be smart enough to understand this book. I've read a few reviews of it by people who obviously are more versed in modern literature than I, and, for the most part, those reviews have ranged from mildly positive to raves. Moreover, looking at Mr. Wallace's biography, one sees that he won multiple prizes for his writing and some of them were for this book. That biography also tells us that the themes and style which he used in his writing were metamodernism and hysterical realism. I would have to say that the emphasis was more on the hysterical than the realism. The events of this book take place in the not-too-distant future, when Canada, Mexico and the United States have come together in an organization of North American states, abbreviated as O.N.A.N. (Wallace makes a fetish of using abbreviations, often without explaining what they mean.) It is a time when vast herds of rampaging feral hamsters overrun the wastelands of the Northeast. T...

Last year, I wrote a post here about a list I had seen of thirteen books that everyone says he/she has read but hasn't . One of the books on that list was Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. At that time, I admitted my literary ignorance of the book and maintained that I would probably never read it. I didn't even know who David Foster Wallace was. That was the depth of my ignorance. After writing that, I felt bad. Who was I to dismiss a book and an author that I didn't even really know anything about? So, I decided to learn about Wallace and his work. I looked him up on Wikipedia and was appalled to learn that he had killed himself in 2008. He had suffered from severe depression for many years and had only been able to function with the help of medication. I discovered some of his essays and found them to be well-written and interesting and to express sentiments with which I could agree. To make a long story short, I decided to put Infinite Jest on my "to...

Recently, I wrote a post here about the 13 books that everybody says they have read but haven't . I had actually read seven of the books on the list, but one of the remaining six was a book that I could not remember having heard of. In fact, I could not remember having heard of the author either. That writer was David Foster Wallace and the book was Infinite Jest . It had been published and evidently made a big splash back in the mid 1990s when I, apparently, wasn't paying attention. I commented in my post that I had no intention of reading the book, but I felt guilty about that. How could I dismiss a book and a writer that I didn't even know? So, I decided to find out about the writer and his work. Reading about Wallace, the man , gave me a lot of empathy for him. He was almost terminally shy and suffered from depression. He was also quite a prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction, much of it highly praised and award-winning. He had a philosophical turn of...