OMG DFW, U R GR8

Dylan once said, "I could have written 'Satisfaction', but you couldn't have written 'Tambourine Man.'" - Mick Jagger, to Rolling Stone, 1968

Despite what your thesaurus may tell you, pretty, beautiful, lovely, gorgeous, and hot* do not mean the same thing. I've had, on more than one occasion, discussions with my friends to hash out this very fact. A girl can be hot, but certainly not beautiful. A girl can be gorgeous, but not necessarily lovely. Now, before this starts sounding too much like a pathetic attempt at a George and Jerry conversation...

* Okay, that one's probably not in the same part of the thesaurus.

Artists, in this case authors, can be (to use a generic, broad word) good in different ways, that don't necessarily overlap. This too is, of course, obvious. John Steinbeck is masterful. Michael Ondaatje is graceful. John Irving is majestic. Jonathan Safran Foer is innovative. Bill Watterson is imaginative.

David Foster Wallace is brilliant.

Wallace is singularly brilliant in a way that I have never encountered in an author before. That's not to say I don't find, for example, Steinbeck brilliant (I do), but DFW is so brilliant that he practically toys and plays with his brilliance, sometimes perhaps to his detriment, though he's brilliant enough that he must be well-aware of this, but sometimes to such staggering success that the conclusion of a story resulted for me a dazed state of shock, where I had to take literally a minute or two to process the literary brilliance I had just been treated to.

But let me take a few steps back.

A of couple weeks ago I wrote this unbrilliant post about DFW's fantastic graduation speech. Naturally, I was inspired to get my hands on some of DFW's essays or stories (the only novel of his I was familiar with, Infinite Jest, was far too large an undertaking to test if I liked DFW) and after a couple of trips to different libraries, I obtained a copy of Oblivion, a book of his short stories published in 2004.

To be clear, DFW is not for everybody. I call him brilliant and, for a few of these stories I just read in particular, I doubt anybody could convince me otherwise. However, for others, I think words/phrases like ostentatious, pretentious, brash, and intentionally convoluted would be their first choices.

Here's is what I like about DFW. Or, more accurately, what I like about this specific collection of DFW short stories that I just read:

1. Harkening back to his graduation speech, Wallace is a person that sees the water. As an aspiring writer who would like to have a fraction of DFW's observational skill or an infinitesimal amount of his brilliance, I try to see idiosyncrasies of life that are often overlooked. I try, sometimes more successfully than others, to be entertained by the small, funny slices of the world. So, as would be expected, I admire those who can find water in places I've never looked. Wallace's stories are oceans.

2. The layering, structure, and non-compartmentalization of DFW's stories are so fascinating and challenging that they generate interest in their own right. For example, "The Soul is Not a Smithy" is a story that is, at first glance, about a substitute teacher who takes a class of kids hostage. But, it's told from the adult perspective of one of the students in the class, who also has attention problems and is daydreaming out the window and concocting his own narrative about what he sees outside. Then, through this narrative and reflecting on his childhood, the story is really revealed to be about his father and the monotony of his father's life. Furthermore, this elaborate structure is not merely a construct for DFW to show-off, as it provides for the hilarious brief moments when the narrator snaps out of his fantasy to gather pieces of evidence about the teacher devolving into murderous derangement, as well as illustrates how it's difficult to look back on a time period of one's life without the domino-effect of recalling more and more feelings and impressions.

3. Brutal honesty. This could tie into #1, but I think it warrants its own thought, as the underlying reminder that Wallace killed himself can never drift too far away. In "Good Old Neon" DFW takes into the mind of a successful, popular businessman who knows himself to be a complete and utter fraud* who has suicidal tendencies. At the end, the structure is flipped on its head when Wallace suddenly brings himself (referring to himself in the third person as "David Wallace") envying this narrator in high school and thinking he had it all. So, this is NOT just to say, "Oh, DFW killed himself and he talks about a character wanting to kill himself, he's a genius." It is merely the most salient example in a collection full of such reflections. This is a trait of many a talented writer, but he addresses the universal insecurity of people head-on, making it one of the most moving and effecting elements of his stories.

* This, like the father's grind of daily life in "The Soul is Not a Smithy," is one of the many times that Wallace touches on ideas that he discusses in his graduation speech. This cooperation makes each a little deeper as well, the fiction and non-fiction sides of the same coin in a sense.

4. His creativity, not just in his structure, is very distinct. "Another Pioneer," likely an allegory for a few different things, tells of the story--which in DFW fashion is one unbroken 25 page paragraph, which is being relayed to the reader second-hand as the narrator overheard it retold by someone else on a plane--of a boy born in a remote, prehistoric (?) village who was blessed with a seemingly infinite wisdom. Then, how the evolution of that wisdom transformed his life, his relationship with the villagers, and the village itself. It seems part mythology, part Vonnegut science-fiction, and yet the logic of it is so inevitable and flawless that the reader is left with a sense of, "Yes. That would be what happened. That would be exactly how it would play out," and, in turn, that acceptance allows for it to be wonderfully thought-provoking. It is, in a word, brilliant.

Now, back to my labeling of David Foster Wallace as "singularly brilliant."

Like the boy in "Another Pioneer", escalating brilliance does not necessarily entail triumph as a teacher or a communicator.

1. Wallace's vocabulary is famously (okay, "famously") advanced. This is--to borrow a phrase that Wallace would probably put a red pen through had I been lucky enough to be one of his students during his professorship at Pomona--a blessing and a curse. I need to read Wallace with my laptop open, ready to type in to my Apple Dictionary the multitude of words I do not know the definitions of. This is a blessing in that he often chooses the perfect word, even if it was one I had never heard/read until then. On the other hand, it not only slows down the reading but he will periodically make up a word, either by inventing a derivate for a familiar word, or by manufacturing it all together. These occurrences can range from inconsequential to annoying to baffling. This is perhaps the most obvious example of his brilliance perhaps superseding common-sense, tradition, and rules, and thus maybe ceasing to be brilliance. Which leads us to...

2. Wallace hates rules. This manifests itself in him birthing his own words, using confusing abbreviations, and redefining punctuation; but these are all minor pitfalls that I can deal with. What is harder to deal with, especially for one who likes a good story and a satisfying ending, is that DFW will eschew any pretense of wanting to tie things up. There are really only two stories in the entire anthology that get "deserving" endings. In the others, Wallace intentionally ends too soon or without resolution. I begrudgingly learned to accept this as well, convincing myself that reading (cliche alert!) is more about the journey than the destination. It's difficult to remember all the scenes and dialogues in a novel, even as you're reading it. An ending can ruin/make a story, but Wallace doesn't seem to care; or possibly (and I would assume even probably) he thinks his atypical endings are superior. And maybe on some level he's right, but, for a non-brilliant like myself, I will admit that the endings are rarely the best part of the story.

If you think yourself immune to these requirements, I would highly, highly recommend reading some DFW. However, if you are quite understandably among the group that likes words you can understand and endings that make sense, he may not be for you. Furthermore, his prose is not beautiful or poetic. At times it is easy and conversational (this predictably varies greatly by story as well) but at other times it has more in common with a biology textbook than it does The English Patient.

Nevertheless, love him or hate him, Wallace was a brilliant man, undeniably born to be a writer and a thinker. These stories are as memorable and powerful as any short stories I've read, and I know that I will read at least a couple more of his books, despite his resistance of literary regulations, so that I may further bask in his brilliance.