Having said that I love everything I have ever read by him.

Cheers,
Dougie

Very often what is dismissed by an artist’s contemporaries as too much, more of the same, too little, or some combination of the three is discovered to be his or her most daring and innovative work by subsequent generations.

the obvious comparison is to pynchon. after “gravity’s rainbow,” there wasn’t anywhere to go — it took him over many years to get a novel of similar import ( “mason & dixon”) after missing the target with “vineland.” i wouldn’t count out dfw by a long shot — most writers produce their best work in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, in any case.

Angela Gerst: You don’t enjoy interviews.
John Barth: As a rule, no.
G: Why do you suppose so many writers feel that way?
B: No doubt because our business is the considered word, not the spontaneous. We care as much for the *how* as the *what* gets said, in print. Talking with audiences can be enjoyable. Talking tete-a-tete can be enjoyable. But talking tete-a-tete for the record . . .
G: Yet you’ve agreed to this tete-a-tete for the record. . . .
B: The rules, as Jesus says about the Sabbath, are made for us, not we for them. I have a big new novel done [LETTERS], which I’m excited about and may now speak of without risking the muse’s disfavor. Finally, you’re both a student of mine and an old friend. Shoot.
G: Even so, you’ll want to review the transcript?
B: To put it gently.
G: My questions as well as your responses?
B: Inevitaby. Otherwise it all comes out late-Eisenhower. Another reason for interviewing rarely: it’s work.

To my mind, a great writer will constantly shift and evolve. I realize that this is largely an instinctive reader response and individual preference I am espousing. But I don’t have DFW’s books at my side right now to single out specific examples. So bear with me.

It all boils down to that third or fourth book, in which an author is able to encapsulate an idiosynchratic and demanding voice without drawing attention to his artifices or his tricks (see David Mitchell, who I believe is the perfect example of this). This is not unlike the principle of “the elegant variation” — the title of your blog. After X number of books, a writer should be fully aware of his voice and be actively honing it. And by “honing” it, I don’t mean just writing a conventional narrative, but taming the beast in a way that conveys nuances operating with pyrotechnics.

Writers who do this for me: Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, William Gaddis, Margaret Atwood, Gilbert Sorrentino, Carol Shields, WTV, Sarah Waters, Jonathan Lethem, T.C. Boyle, Kate Atkinson.

Writers who don’t (but who I nevertheless admire): John Barth, DFW, John Updike (sometimes), Dave Eggers, Colson Whitehead (I fear the fourth novel), Harlan Ellison, China Mieville (maybe, “The Iron Council” is perilously close), Bret Easton Ellis, Stephen Elliott, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen.

Again, I applaud “Host”’s experiment, but I still feel that pushing formatting is not enough, that there are deeper ethical issues about the radio industry that DFW is holding back on. Perhaps, as you suggest, a essay sans footnotes is the answer.

I’m going to have to mull over this a bit and get back to you and everybody else.

You know all to well that I’m no fan. So it doesn’t surprise you that, when you cite Oblivion as being “cold, needlessly dense, mired in academese and marketing jargon, and are, for the most part, all fixated on the same cartoonish emotion of detached anxiety” you hit on the problem with (in my eyes) everything he’s ever wrote.

The tennis piece seemed no worse than, say, his lobster essay. It was just more of the exact same thing all over again. (And I dare the NY Times to commission him but to insist NO FOOTNOTES. I honestly don’t believe either side could do it – ask or comply.)

Maybe DFW’s little bag of tricks has finally run dry for you? Because, to these eyes, the new DFW is the old DFW.

Just a thought.

You may not know this, but as it so happens, I wanted to get the interview so I could put these sentiments to him directly. If you are offended by my opinion, that’s your business. I don’t set out to placate everyone. But I have to ask why you are offended by the notion of quibbling over DFW’s direction.

I’m wondering how you feel DFW’s style has been strengthened by these respective stories. I will have to revisit the two tales you cite, but I will agree with you that the empathy is there, but I believe it to be more passive and less dimensional than the heights of IJ’s Hal Incandenza.

To be fair to your opinion (and a few others), I will try and serve up a post that clarifies (with specific supportive examples) the “wash out” assessement.

This post really bothers me for some reason. I am not interested in getting into the finer points of your criticism of Wallace because that is a matter of opinion, but I am curious about what the point of this post is supposed to be. I know that you don’t shy away from confrontation (or at least blog-frontation) but this just seems like needless (and perhaps unjustified) muckraking.

What do we gain by proclaiming an extremely talented and still relatively young author “washed-up?” It sounds to me like you are basically saying:

Dear Mr. Wallace, If you are not going to write any more mind-blowingly awesome novels of incredible depth and skill, please just stop writing altogether. Regards, Ed

You have complained often on this site about DFW’s reluctance to be interviewed by anyone including yourself and I can’t help wonder if this post would have ever appeared if there was a forthcoming DFW appearence on the Bat Segundo show.

If you care to explain how your comments are useful or constructive in any way, I would welcome it.

I recently finished Oblivion and I thought is was really great, really sad and really touching. In particular I found “Good Old Neon” and “The Suffering Channel” to be particularly great. It strikes me that though Wallace may have sustained his style for the most part over the years, I find the stories in Oblivion to have refined his technique greatly. Yes, the stories are wordy and opaque and full of jargon, but they are incredibly fluid–and still the core of empathy for people in terrible situations is there–that core that made IJ so wonderful. (On the other hand, I enjoy Brief Int. much less than other people I know. I have a harder time getting into those stories).

Of course, some of this is entierly dependant on the person reading–what strikes me as sad and moving may seem stupid or off putting for another–and also I imagine that this probably largely is a matter of timing. I read IJ last Christmas–and had only read a few stories before that–and since have read almost everything else he has written, so I don’t have the same sense of his writing over time having taken it all in one lump.

Maybe that is the difference.