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The Pale King
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Wednesday, 07 December 2011 |
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I’ll offer two reasons for why you should definitely read The Pale King, directed at two different groups of people: those who don’t have a particular love for Wallace, and those who cherish him. To the first group: this is the most readable, the most mature, and the most focused fiction David Foster Wallace ever wrote. If you’re of the opinion that Broom of the System is some precocious, waffling, meandering text written by a too-smart college senior, or you think Infinite Jest is a slog not worth the slogging through, then The Pale King might just be for you. The individual vignettes are poised and confronting and jarring; they may not come together in the most graceful way, but there are moments in The Pale King that are just plain great, the moments that make Wallace fans go, yep, that’s why. And to the latter, who I guess needs no reason to read The Pale King other than the fact that they love him, that they miss him, and that they will read anything by him: you ought to know that The Pale King features multiple characters who might as well be Wallace; and not David Foster Wallace, but Dave Wallace. You know, the guy we all spent time reading about after David Foster Wallace committed suicide? There’s David Cusk, who suffers from a majorly distressing sweating disorder. There’s Meredith Rand, who despite her seeming normality, ended up in the looneybin. There’s David Wallace himself, who resents Philo, Illinois for its IGA groceries and reminders of his less-than-stellar high school years.
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General Updates
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Monday, 05 December 2011 |
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Jeffrey Eugenides spoke to Michael Silverblatt on the most recent radio episode of Bookworm and acknowledged that elements of the Leonard character from The Marriage Plot are based on David Foster Wallace. The important part of the interview starts around the 23 minute mark. I've added a quick transcript of it below (apologies for any errors): Silverblatt: Now, I want to ask because at a certain point I couldn't help it. There's a character who I felt I knew from life who is dipping into a tobacco tin and chewing tobacco and wearing a bandana and dealing with manic depression and I liked this person very much in life. And I know that you, to some extent, were drawing on this person as well. Yes?
Eugenides: In a few places it's been much discussed and for a while I wasn't talking about it because it seemed to give too much weight to it, we're obviously talking about David Foster Wallace, and this book is not a roman à clé. As I said I began it in the late '60s and I didn't know David Wallace very well. I had some correspondence with him in the '90s and then in 2006 when this book was already well advanced I spent a week with him in Italy. When I make up characters I try to draw on every person that I know that has some of the qualities of the character I'm trying to create. So in this case with a manic depressive I put every depressive person that I'd had met or heard about into that character and some of the things that Leonard does have nothing to do with Wallace. The tobacco chewing was actually very rampant at Brown when I first got there. All of my friends chewed tobacco and I had him chewing the tobacco. The thing that comes from him, however, from Wallace, is that he used to keep his Skoal can, I noticed, in his sock when we were in Italy and Leonard's always sticking it down in his boot. So there's a few things that I will admit to, but it was never an idea, I just didn't know him well enough to recreate him.A most interesting (compared to previous answers), but not really surprising, turn of events. I hope this will stop speculation (for everyone involved, but particularly Eugenides) so that the focus will be The Marriage Plot, and not the Wallace stuff. [Thanks, Adam]
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General Updates
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Saturday, 03 December 2011 |
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Hi everyone, this has come to my attention: On Monday, Dec. 5, from 1 to 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, there will be a show about David Foster Wallace on The Colin McEnroe Show, Connecticut Public Radio.
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General Updates
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Monday, 28 November 2011 |
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@SalmanRushdie: The return of #LiterarySmackdowns, at least for a day. Thomas Pynchon v David Foster Wallace, masters of 2 generations. Go! As of four hours ago: #LiterarySmackdowns Thomas Pynchon still leads David Foster Wallace, but not by much. Close contest. In my mind too... If you have a twitter account it might be time to get your vote in...
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The Pale King
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Monday, 28 November 2011 |
(Busy couple of weeks and end of semester reports looming explains the lack of updates here. Here's the first in a series of catch-up posts, based on some of my tweets over the last week or so.)
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Upcoming Publications
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Friday, 11 November 2011 |
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Updated link to paperback ($16.50 vs $65.00) New details. Across two decades of intense creativity, David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) crafted a remarkable body of work that ranged from unclassifiable essays, to a book about transfinite mathematics, to vertiginous fictions. Whether through essay volumes (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster), short story collections (Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion), or his novels (Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System), the luminous qualities of Wallace's work recalibrated our measures of modern literary achievement. Conversations with David Foster Wallace gathers twenty-two interviews and profiles that trace the arc of Wallace's career, shedding light on his omnivorous talent. Jonathan Franzen has argued that, for Wallace, an interview provided a formal enclosure in which the writer "could safely draw on his enormous native store of kindness and wisdom and expertise." Wallace's interviews create a wormhole in which an author's private theorizing about art spill into the public record. Wallace's best interviews are vital extra-literary documents, in which we catch him thinking aloud about his signature concerns--irony's magnetic hold on contemporary language, the pale last days of postmodernism, the delicate exchange that exists between reader and writer. At the same time, his acute focus moves across MFA programs, his negotiations with religious belief, the role of footnotes in his writing, and his multifaceted conception of his work's architecture. Conversations with David Foster Wallace includes a previously unpublished interview from 2005, and a version of Larry McCaffery's influential Review of Contemporary Fiction interview with Wallace that has been expanded with new material drawn from the original raw transcript. Check out Burn's volume after this below... letters: Since his 2003 book appeared, Burn has edited a collection of interviews with Wallace, forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi, and he is editing a volume of Wallace's letters in collaboration with the writer's estate.
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