Zac Farber (author of the excellent Editing DFW article contributed to the Fantods last year) let me know about his review of David Lipsky's book about David Foster Wallace, A road trip through the mind of David Foster Wallace.
As a book, "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace" is extremely odd and occasionally mesmerizing. It may be a valuable resource for scholarly appreciation of Wallace's work, but it is often tedious to read. Consumed, as it is, with Lipsky's reportorial needs--to nail down facts, to elicit colorful quotations, etc.--the transcript is as much an exploration of the exigencies of magazine journalism as of the contours of Wallace's mind.
His review is a more much more critical of the format that I am (after I adjusted I found it compeling) but I do agree when Farber writes:
Lipsky's transcript makes pleasant reading for academics, the literati, and hard-core Wallace disciples, but the more casual reader may be better served by reading Lipsky's Rolling Stone profile.
I'm guessing a lot of Fantods readers might be part of the DFW hard-core...I loved it.
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