A short review of the new David Foster Wallace nonfiction collection argues that Wallace's reviews and journalism might be the fastest route to figuring out what he thought mattered. (House Next Door/photo by Janette Beckman)
For years we waited for the author's next book, only more so after his death, but what we received was a ghost of a story, a reminder equally of Wallace's tremendous gifts as a writer and the constant challenge of cultivating them over and over again, an artifact both satisfying and incredibly not. Suddenly the intensely weird and almost perfect late-career short stories and the wonder that is Infinite Jest were made to seem that much more worked-on, coming less from the heavens than from spiral notepads not unlike anyone else's, just when the fervor of Wallace-saint and Wallace-genius had reached its pitch. Reading through the long, dreary hours of tax accounting and made-up IRS administrative history, you could never tell whether the way a certain section was structured pointed to the author's growing views about the purpose of fiction or if that was just how the ideas happened to occur to him this time. I even found two punctuation errors. In the end it was an appropriate mess for an author who so enjoyed spotting paradoxes in everything he wrote about.
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