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Competitions
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Thursday, 24 March 2011 |
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A couple of comps have popped up:
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The Pale King
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Tuesday, 22 March 2011 |
Reviews are out, final print copies of The Pale King are arriving all over (for reviewers and the like), and I've now got the all clear to share... after having to bite my tongue for a couple of weeks! and... It's pretty good so far. I'd even hesitate to say very good. I'm not finished but I'm close. Some edges are a bit rough (I sometimes get the feeling Wallace would have honed some parts more - but I know I'm thinking that because all along we've been told it is unfinished), yet for the most part it is surprisingly polished, much more so than I expected. There's a great Editor's Note by Michael Pietsch that explains some things that shed new light on the editing process in ways that will certainly help to answer some critics' questions about the process. But I'd advise you not to read it until you're done with the novel.
I'm not going to include any spoilers here, not yet anyway, but I will say that if you're passionate admirer of David Foster Wallace's work there will be moments when you cry. Your partner might even walk into the room while you are sitting there with tears rolling down your face, book on your lap, because right-at-that-moment-you-just-could-not-read-one-sentence-more. Tears because the physical book is a constant reminder of the events that have resulted in its unfinished publication, and also because, from what I've read so far, this novel is most certainly a work by David Foster Wallace. In every respect. Thus far The Pale King does not read like something haphazardly edited together by a money hungry publisher. It is a work of love. And honestly? Some parts of this are close to, if not the best, things he's ever written. This is David Foster Wallace, the matured author. If you are familiar with the breadth of his work you'll realise this not long after you begin. I do think you'll get a lot more out of this novel if you've read some David Foster Wallace already, the wider the better, fiction AND non-fiction. The Pale King brings with it a tangible development of themes he'd been addressing his whole career, and to read the novel with these things in mind makes it infinitely more rewarding. I should be off to bed, it's past 3am, but I've got one more chapter I want to read... I'm 3/4 through. I don't want this to end.
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The Pale King
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Tuesday, 22 March 2011 |
Donna Seaman's review of The Pale King over at Booklist Online is a positive one but includes enough spoilers that I would recommend avoiding it for the time being: The overture to Wallace’s unfinished last novel is a rhapsodic evocation of the subtle vibrancy of the midwestern landscape, a flat, wind-scoured place of potentially numbing sameness that is, instead, rife with complex drama. The Pale King is a feverishly encompassing, sharply comedic, and haunting work painstakingly assembled out of pieces rough and polished by Wallace’s longtime editor, Michael Pietsch.
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The Pale King
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Tuesday, 22 March 2011 |
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Josh Rothman over at Boston.com's Brainiac has a great article responding to David Friedlander's recent article [previously] in The New York Observer, The David Foster Wallace "Industry". Why is there a popular posthumous surge in David Foster Wallace's reputation? Rothman writes, There's a more obvious explanation, to my mind: David Foster Wallace was actually a great novelist, and Infinite Jest was one of the most unique, and possibly the best, American novel of the last two decades. People love Wallace because he was a genius, and because he wrote about American life better than anyone else. The Observer's story sees Wallace as "big business," and that's certainly true. But before he was big business, Wallace was a big thinker; in his combination of analytical rigor and empathetic fervor, he recalled Dostoevsky. (Dostoevsky is big business, too.) Continue reading.
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DFW Remembrance
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Monday, 21 March 2011 |
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On Wednesday night Rick and I went to the Lannan Foundation’s moving tribute to David Foster Wallace, a writer of verve and passion and genius. The passages read aloud by Rick Moody, David Lipsky, and Joanna Scott from his new book, his old work, and from his interviews were exuberantly intelligent, achingly sensitive, and, from a craft perspective, brilliant, innovative, and for lack of a better word, new. Even the interview responses had craft; the man was an epic stylist even when he was casually riffing about war, art, writing, or American Psycho. After the readings (“spellbound” doesn’t begin to capture it) Michael Silverblatt, long-time host of the radio program Book Worm, asked each of the readers to recount personal anecdotes about Wallace, who hung himself in 2008. Wallace, we learned, was someone others had the urge to call when things went wrong, a guy who saw the world intimately, in almost painful detail, and who tried to bring everything into the experiences rendered in his essays and novels, all that was absurd and profound, all that made us human and horrible, without aligning himself with a particular ideological position that excluded some and exalted others. (As he said in the interview, “I’m not going to line up behind Tolstoy and Gardner.”) He could describe the sky and the weather in ways you’d never think possible (David Lipsky’s chosen excerpts were especially powerful in the ways in which they showed the magic Wallace could make with words). His penetrating insights into all that was weird and wonderful, his obvious genius, his status as a true original with no literary heir — all were celebrated. That there exists a big fat hole in the literary world where his voice once spoke so eloquently and honestly and outrageously was acknowledged. Let's hope, like many of the Lannan Foundation events, that the audio and/or video is eventually posted over at their podcast page. |
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Critical Analysis
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Monday, 21 March 2011 |
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There's some great stuff buried in here including this one from “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes: A Midwestern Boyhood” (Harper’s, December 1991): But the biggest, most amazing excision comes on page 70 (article). Three paragraphs which basically tell the origin of the “mold” story in IJ. (Remember, this was published in 1991–IJ in 1996). The entire story is told almost exactly as it will be in IJ including what the mold eater says and his mother’s reaction. It is a FASCINATING look at how a true story turns into a novel. And for that reason alone, it is worth checking out this article.
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