"Everything and More" by David Foster Wallace

Cafe Society
1

Has anyone else read this book? Any thoughts?

I had read the occational essay or story by Wallace, plus his lucid accounts of vacationing in “A Supposively Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”, and I quite enjoyed them. I also happen to be very interested in math, and in fact, just prior to getting this book, had been doing some cursory research online about Cantor and the mathematics of infinity. When I discovered this book in the math section at the book store, needless to say I was excited–an author I like on a subject I like. Then, I read it.

And I don’t think I’ve ever been more pissed off at an author.

First off, instead of giving us chapters we get “§1.a” and “§1.b”, separated only by a textbreak, etc ("§"=“Sections”, apparently). I was a little thrown off at first, but you know, these crazy post-modern writers. Since I’m really interested in the subject matter, I thought, “Oh, well, just a little quirk. I’ll go on.”

And then the footnotes begin to flow. I had expected as much, having read Wallace before, but damn, when they appear on nearly every page it gets rather irritating, especially in an informative setting when you’re trying to focus the ideas at hand.

Oh, yeah, and the abbriviations. On page 8 first appears, “W/r/t”, which I have to use the context to guess what it means (“With respect to”). Later on we see that “Galileo Galilei” becomes “G.G.”, “If Your Interested” becomes “IYI” (which adorns most of the footnotes), “General Convergence Problem of Fourier Series” becomes “G.C.P.F.S.”, followed by countless others. Wallace actually acknowleges this, or more likely his editor does, by making a list at the beginning of 30 or so abbriviations used regularly throughout the text. Note I said regularly, those that he uses conditionally aren’t listed, and if they were I suppose he would have to add 100 more entries to that list.

But then he throws me a curveball: some new Wallace typography. Every 25 pages or so comes an “INTERPOLATION”, marked in bold and centered lettered, and a few pages later come the “END INTERPOL.”. Pretty much a glorified footnote, and might I say, very distracting. But that’s not all, the “INTERPOLATION” has a few buddies, like the “EMERGENCY GLOSSARY”, the “EMERGENCY GLOSSARY II” (or E.G.II), the “QUICK IMBEDDED INTERPOLATION”, and the “QUICK FOREST-V.-TREE INTERPOLATION” (Wallace, apparenlty fond of choose-your-own-adventure novels, ends this section with: “END Q.F.-V.-T.I. RETURN TO §7c AT THE ¶ ON p. 256 W/ASTERISK AT END”)

So, after starting over twice, I read to about the 2/3rd point and just gave up. No, it wasn’t the concepts–I intend to major in math and have made it up through Differential Equations. I won’t blame myself any longer. It was the lazy, stream-of-conscious, intellectual wankery that Wallace considers writing.

Perhaps I’m just old fashioned, but I feel the job of an author is to be as clear as possible, and if your subject matter is inherently esoteric, one would expect the author to try being even more explicit. To be fair, it’s obvious Wallace has interest and enthusiasm in the subject, and occationally puts down a good line. But Christ, would it have killed him to write an outline first?

2

I haven’t read “Everything and More,” but I’ve thought since I first encountered him that David Foster Wallace has a wildly inflated sense of his own cool. His writing is often needlessly roundabout and elaborate.

I can’t speculate on why he does this: whether it’s for some genuine literary purpose that eludes us poor lunkheads that only got an M.A. or, like so many academics I’ve been around, to disguise the fact that his entire point could be stated in about two sentences.

(On preview, I suppose my previous paragraph was worded in such a way as to make my speculations absolutely clear. Oh well.)

3

Funny, I loved this book. I agree that DFW (see, I’m giving him initials) can go over the top with his footnotes and zany abbrevations and arcane text symbols. It’s one of the reasons I don’t enjoy his fiction very much – Infinite Jest, his meganovel that more or less established him as the darling of current intellectual fiction (which I thought was highly overrated, and let me tell you, I read every darn page so that I could make that statement with some degree of authority), simply goes to town with overuse of this stuff.

Somewhat recently, I saw an interview with him where he mentioned that he was trying to tone down that particular aspect of his style, because it was coming across as too gimmicky for his tastes and he didn’t want to become known as merely “that guy who writes with a lot of footnotes.” Good point, Mr. Wallace!

However, one of the things about him is that as a writer, he’s very interested in the text itself, and I can see how this particular topic lends itself well to this style. Math is chock full o’ arcane symbols, and crafting the language of the book to match up with this is deliberate and to me, interesting. I should add that the math dealt with in the book is over my head, and that the parts that most interested me dealt with the philosophies of the concepts presented. The very notion of using mathematical language to articulate very abstract ideas that are difficult to express in traditional prose is central to the theme of this book. The fact that it almost looks like a math text book as one thumbs through it is, well, cool IMHO. It makes the structure reflect the subject matter.

That said, I completely agree it’s not for everyone! I’m not trying to argue with the opinion of the OP, I’m only trying to explain why I personally liked this aspect of the book.