A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

David Foster Wallace's book of "essays and arguments" is, if nothing else, a fantastic way to enrich one's vocabulary. Luckily, reading Wallace is much more than a lexical exercise -- he's engaging, wryly funny, insightful, prone to digression, and given to self-examination and introspection. In other hands, the consistent footnotes and self-glossing could be distracting, but all of these essays flow quite well.

The collection is without a unifying theme, although there are two essays on tennis -- one on Wallace's experiences as a regional junior player from roughly twelve to eighteen (from twelve through fifteen, he was "near great"), and the other on Michael Joyce, at the time ranked in the 80s in the world. The latter is dated several years later, and Joyce so impresses Wallace that Wallace resolves not to mention his experiences on the junior tennis circuit, where he (Wallace) had been highly ranked in his small corner of Illinois.

The capstone and eponymous essay uses copious footnotes, and is an extremely in-depth followup to the previous essay on the Illinois State Fair (a magazine had sent Wallace to the Fair the previous year, and had liked the results so much that he was sent on a luxury cruise to attempt to duplicate his hyperliterate-fish-out-of-water act). Unfortunately, it's also the only essay in the collection where Wallace moves from wry observer to neurotic complainer, as his interactions with the crew (and his reflections upon these interactions) display paranoia. He is able to laugh at himself, but it's a little unsettling.

Overall, this is an extremely engaging and diverse collection of essays. While two (television and literary criticism) can be a bit dense, they're all worth reading. It's also interesting to see the differences in style -- the early essays lack footnotes, the television essay uses them for their ordinary intended purpose (cites), the Lynch essay uses them extensively (and is delivered in vignetted form), and the title work uses them on nearly every page, with occasional sub-notes (!). Extremely engaging and thought-provoking.