Quote:
Originally Posted by FlyWf
The zeitgeist on Wallace is extremely complicated right now, which is I think what he'd want. It seems that it is both cool to make fun of people who like him but also the correct opinion about him is that he's good and you should like him.
Looking around, I found this quite interesting -- the idea that he was a 'sweet guy' or even a 'secular saint', which is obviously deluded.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-secular-saint
When I had to review Infinite Jest, the author bio on the jacket flap, which said practically nothing about him except that he 'was once placed on suicide watch,' bothered me. (The jacket bio is usually written by the author in original-language editions.) You will know how JD Salinger, and many of his readers, sentimentalised the character Seymour Glass, who shot himself in the story 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish,' having only just decided not to shoot his wife.
Wallace was very talented, but his best-known novel is an absurdly extended stylistic homage to Thomas Pynchon -- the very title tells you that's it meant to be 'beyond a joke', it's nothing to do with what Hamlet meant. And Wallace was seriously ill -- Major Depressive Disorder is not an amusing quirk, and he was never able to find effective medication -- and hanging yourself, when you know that your wife will be the one to find the body, is quite aggressive. And people just shouldn't sentimentalise that kind of thing.
That said, Infinite Jest is a clever Pynchon-voiced fictional spin on Neil Postman's non-fiction book Amusing Ourselves To Death, and it remains notable on that account.
I don't think I'd ever make the cut into the American middle class, though. I've got a half-decent Anderson & Sheppard suit and I can witter about Chateau Chasse-Spleen and Leoville-Barton, but I just don't own, think or do enough of the 'right things.'
Last edited by 57 On Red; 07-19-2017 at 02:41 PM.