“What I mean is that a lot of stuff that I thought were weaknesses of mine turned out to be strengths. And one of them is that I am not, I’m not a particularly exceptional person. I think I’m a really good reader, and I’ve got a good ear. And I’m willing to work really really hard. But I’m more or less a regular person. – David Foster Wallace”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JUL 20, 2011)

There is that question we asked one another in college: Who in history, if you could meet and talk to whomever you wished, would you select? Depending on orientation and background the answers are all over the place: Jesus is a regular; Buddha, and other spiritual luminaries frequently show up. Second tier options, Nietzsche, Thoreau (personal favorite), St. Francis. No surprises there. Aside from a small collection of history’s heavyweights, answers are typically–and sophomorically–idiosyncratic. (More recently, at a dinner party that included a bunch young adults, one answer was, oddly, Jeff Buckley.) I wouldn’t easily toss aside posterity’s world-making worthies, but if I were so inclined, I’d turn to the great creative artists. Shakespeare certainly would be a contender. Homer too. Rimbaud would be fun over a couple of beers. Joyce was a good singer, I understand. I’m sure he’d light up a room. Reading Lipsky’s book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, reads like a contemporary answer to the “who would you choose” hypothesis. Wallace is gone now, but what if you could just spend a few days with him, even a few hours? What was the man like, really? By his work, he will be remembered. But what of the man?

In March 1996 David Lipsky was assigned to interview David Foster Wallace by Rolling Stone Magazine. Wallace was coming off a book tour, promoting his ground-breaking–and best-selling– tome, Infinite Jest. Wallace, uncharacteristically, agrees to the interview. It will span several days, with Lipsky riding along with Wallace to book readings, NPR interviews, coffee-shop breaks, pit-stops and dog walks. Lipsky writes of Wallace in the introduction, “David had a caffeine social gift: He was charmingly, vividly, overwhelmingly awake–he acted on other people like a slug of coffee–so they’re the five most sleepless days I ever spent with anyone.” The book reads accordingly. Wallace is a brilliant raconteur, breathlessly intelligent, informed, thoughtful and entertaining in that way we once thought we’d be, after we got out of college.

The premise is simple: Ride around with Wallace for five days, tape recorder running and ask him questions. This is the raw stuff of Lipsky’s journalism, though it a properly massaged transcription. For example, on smoking pot: “I stopped smoking pot–I think I stopped smoking pot right about the time I got out of grad school. You know, it wasn’t any kind of big decision. I just, it wasn’t shutting the system down anymore. It was just making the system, it was just making the system more unpleasant to be part of. My own system.” On watching T.V.: “I also, there’s the–like the thing that’s killed it recently for me, is the channel-surfing thing. Is because, I always have this terrible fear that there’s something even better on, somewhere else. And so I will spend all this time kind of skating up and down the channel system. And not be able to get all that immersed in any one thing.” The book is raw in that stream-of-consciousness way.

The project was shelved and Lipsky never wrote the article. Now, fast-forward a dozen years to the height of the David Foster Wallace posthumous creative industrial complex and someone thinks: Hey, what about those Lipsky’s tapes with Wallace? Surely there is a buck or two to be made there! That is the cynical dark-side opinion one might suspiciously hold of this endeavor. That is, here lies yet another exploitive American money-making scheme, cashing out on a brilliant dead writer’s extemporaneous ramblings. But there are two sides to this coin. The good news, setting aside this reader’s apprehension to slink through the graveyard, is that the rambling is brilliant, insightful, funny and, most of all, human. Magnificently human, that is, if one might be capable of being human on the scale of the magnificent. And as if the writer’s works themselves where not sufficient evidence, we now have Lipsky’s record. Let there be little doubt, David Foster Wallace had the capacity to be magnificently human. That is, I think, at the core of what draws so many legions of readers. His brilliance was tempered through the filter of his humanity. Here in Lipsky’s ride-along, we enjoy the genius–and the man.

For example, here Wallace, sipping on a Diet Pepsi, lays out his simple belief on art: “I have this–here’s this thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like a five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic….And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.”

Or cultural survival: “At some point, at some point I think, this generation’s gonna reach a level of pain, or a level of exhaustion with the standard, you know….There’s the drug therapy, there’s the sex therapy, there’s the success therapy. You know, if I could just achieve X by age X, then something magically…Y’know? That we’re gonna find out, as all generations do, that it’s not like that.”

There is a terribly sad and poignant scene Lipsky shares in the afterword. Wallace’s condition has deteriorated. His depression medication has lost its punch and he is reeling. He calls his parents and they come to visit. The story, as a family member shared it with Lipsky, is that “one afternoon before they left, David was very upset. His mother sat on the floor beside him. ‘I just rubbed his arm. He said he was glad I was his mom. I told him it was an honor.’” It sounds blithely naive, but reading this book gave me a feeling of being honored as well, a sense that the man had carved out a bit of time for me. By the end of the book my cynicism had evaporated and I was grateful for this record and the insights it contains.

On a practical note, Becoming Yourself is a good David Foster Wallace reader companion. The copy I read was loaned to me by a friend who has never read his fiction, though she aspires to. Her copy was underlined and dog-eared. It will serve her well once she dives into the works. She will have a foundation of understanding the currents that carry his narrative. Conversely, I’ve read his fiction and coming to the book after that experience, I found it illuminating. It underscored what I found in the readings and nicely dove-tailed into the universes he had so carefully constructed. For the stand-alone experience, that is, the reader who has not read Wallace and has no intention of doing so, the book provides a worthwhile and insightful peek into the world of a modern creative genius.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 45 readers
PUBLISHER:	Broadway; 1 edition (April 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on David Lipsky
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Infinite Jestby David Foster Wallace The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Bibliography:

• Three Thousand Dollars : Stories (1989)
• Art Fair (1996)
• The Pallbearer (1996)

Nonfiction:

• Late Bloomers: Coming of Age in Today’s America: The Right Place at the Wrong Time (1994)
• Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point (2003)
• Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (April 2010)

“It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (MAY 11, 2011)

If a book has received more ink or been more anticipated in recent times I can’t recall it. So much has already been written about The Pale King that it seems arbitrary and irrelevant to add to the chatter. A quick Google search–”the pale king”–reports over 29 million hits. Twenty-nine million! A similar search of War and Peace, less than six million. It is, sadly, a fact that the David Foster Wallace industry is cranking along to a tune the author never realized. Indeed, his untimely demise has fed the engine of that industry in a way no living author can expect to enjoy. If for no other reason but my cynicism regarding exploitative posthumous money making I wanted to dislike this book. That was not the case. I did not dislike it. To the contrary, I liked it very much. But not without reservation.

In case you’ve been living in a cave or lost on a Pacific island, let me summarize how this book came to be. At the time of Wallace’s death in the fall of 2008, it was known that he was working on a novel. “I’m deep into something long…” Wallace told his editor at Little Brown, Michael Pietsch. A couple of the book’s chapters had been published in magazines, and his literary agent, Bonnie Nadell, sent word that Wallace was taking accounting classes and that the novel was set at an IRS tax return processing center. After Wallace’s death, Nadell and Pietsch, along with his widow, Karen Green, went “through his office, a garage with one small window at their home in Claremont, California.” Pietsch continues: “On David’s desk Bonnie found a neat stack of manuscript, twelve chapters totaling nearly 250 pages. On the label of a disk containing those chapters he had written ‘For LB advance?’” As they combed his office, they discovered “hundreds and hundreds of pages of his novel in progress, designated with the title ‘The Pale King.’ Hard drives, file folders, three-ring binders, spiral-bound notebooks, and floppy disks contained printed chapters, sheaves of handwritten pages, notes, and more.” In the months that followed, Pietsch, who also edited Infinite Jest, pieced together the work. “Doing so has been a challenge like none I’ve ever encountered,” he writes.

Consequently, a plot summary of the book is for all practical purposes, irrelevant. Indeed, referring to the hundreds of notes Wallace left behind, Pietsch comments “Some of these asides suggest where the plot of the novel might have headed.” Let me repeat that: where the plot of the novel might have been headed. So in picking up The Pale King, the reader must be prepared for five hundred and thirty-eight pages of brilliant writing which at times seems purposeless and disjointed. That does not mean one cannot explore the ideas at work here–that reading pleasure is not to be found. Nor does it imply that themes, the vehicles upon which the ideas are transported, are absent. Indeed, the book is rich in ideas and themes are abundant.

As has been widely reported, The Pale King is a meditation on boredom and the effects of boredom. It is not as simple as all that, but that is a starting point. As one character, a new IRS examiner, observes, “Try as he might he could not this last week help envisioning the inward lives of the older men to either side of him, doing this day after day….This was boredom beyond any boredom he’d ever felt.” Lest there be any question, the book is not boring–at least most of the time it is not boring. Granted, there are stretches which are punishing. They serve to remind the reader that this is, as the sub-title declares, “An Unfinished Novel.” Presumably, Wallace would have spared us the problematic stretches. He was, after all, a perfectionist.

Among the themes of Wallace’s previous novel, Infinite Jest, is the notion that modern society is addicted to entertainment. In that book a film exists which is so entertaining as to be literally deadly. The Pale King picks up the opposing side of that coin. That is, should entertainment be beyond reach, how does one survive? There is a minor character in The Pale King, an IRS examiner, who is writing a play in his spare time. “The setting is very bare and minimalistic,” he says, “–there’s nothing to look at except this wiggler [an examiner], who doesn’t move except for every so often turning a page or making a note on his pad.” He continues his description: “He sits there longer and longer until the audience gets more and more bored and restless, and finally they start leaving, first just a few and then the whole audience, whispering to each other how boring and terrible the play is. Then, once the audience have all left, the real action of the play can start.” Ironically, he confesses, “…I could never decide on the action…” That life is boring, a Beckettian experience spent waiting for something to happen, is evident. But the it never arrives, the action is lacking. Elsewhere, in perhaps the most profoundly idea-laden chapter, IRS examiners and management talk while trapped in a stalled elevator. One offers the following observation: “Sometimes what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes the important things aren’t works of art for your entertainment…”

If, as Nietzsche observed, meaningfulness cannot be achieved without self-knowledge, Wallace seems to argue that that knowledge is to be found after entertainment is proved false and boredom is redeemed. However, as the playwright discovers, there is a twist. How does one penetrate to the (meaningful) action? Where is self-knowledge to be found? The book does not contain the answer. (Or, if it does, it escaped me.) There are clues, however. Perhaps the most articulate hint is not found in the book at all, but in a collection of Wallace’s notes the editor has included at book’s end. I quote at length:

Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss–a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious–lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in wave, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.”

This end note mirrors directly a comment Wallace made in his Kenyon College commencement address, collected and published as This is Water. There he says:

If you really learn how to [ay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

The empathetic reader cannot help but wonder if–and how–this knowledge, the ability to find “bliss in every atom,” was to be integrated into the work. If there is to be found a path to the sacred in modern existence, Wallace seems to be say, it cannot be meaningfully articulated; but perhaps can be shown. The trouble is, not only is existence threatened by crushing boredom, but we cannot even focus long enough to realize it. Even the most gifted of artists might fail in the showing. “The most obvious, important realities,” he said at Kenyon, “are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” Can individuals who are subject to immutable boredom find redemption and meaning; in short, can a meaningful modern spiritual journey be realized? It is a tall order and answers are in short supply. But at least one examiner apparently succeeds: “Drinion is happy,” Wallace wrote in a notebook.

I cannot but read this and reflect on Wallace’s demise. He was obsessed by the challenges of modern existence. Even the word “boredom” is a tell-tale marker, a modern word, not used until Dickens’s Bleak House in 1852. Profound boredom, Heidegger observed, “reveals being as a whole.” Wallace was a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard before dropping out and his love of ideas are very close to the surface in this book. Yet, as his best friend Jonathan Franzen recently wrote in the New Yorker, “…it was harder to ignore the circumstance that, arguably, in one interpretation of his suicide, David had died of boredom and in despair about his future novels.” No doubt, Wallace knew his Heidegger, but nonetheless seems not to have escaped the pulsing super nova of boredom, despite his emphatic notes otherwise.

The Pale King is, because of the circumstances surrounding it, an emotionally laden book. The author is absent, yet he is not. For readers who care about what the man wrote and how he wrote it, there is no escaping the fact that the man no longer exists outside the writing. I will leave it at that. It is not natural for me to skip down this turning path of interpretation. Suffice it to say, that the ideas contained in this book are timely and portentous, but open-ended. They are conveyed in a fashion that, while still masterly, does not overwhelm the reader such as the pyrotechnics found in Wallace’s previous work often does. As a reading experience, it is rewarding beyond that of other important posthumously published works, such as, Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream; certainly more so than Nabokov’s skeletal The Original of Laura. As noted above, this is not accomplished in full bloom. This work is not whole, yet it is not, oddly, lacking. The struggle is apparent and that is something altogether insightful. But, so as not to be carried away, it is good to recall that, as one character in the book declares, “Telling the truth is, of course, a great deal trickier than most regular people understand.” Tricky indeed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 57 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company (April 15, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Foster Wallace Wikipedia page on David Foster Wallace
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Infinite Jest This is Water Consider the Lobster

Bibliography:

• The Broom and the System (1987)
• Girl with Curious Hair (1989)
• Infinite Jest: A Novel (1996)
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997)
• Oblivion (2004)
• The Pale King (April 2011)

Essays:

• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
• Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003)
• Consider the Lobster (2005)
• This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (2009)
• Both Flesh and Not: Essays (November 2012)

Related:

• David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide by Stephen Burn (2003)

“How do trite things get to be trite. Why is the truth usually not just un-but anti-interesting?”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (MAY 12, 2010)

I’ve thought a great deal about this review, since beginning the book, in fact. (I wonder if even the word “review” is the right one. A review implies more than I think I can deliver.) This is no ordinary book and writing about it is not a normal experience. This book is big and thick and juicy and full of complexities, ripe with humor and allusion, digressions and insights. For this reader, it is the book of a dream. I mean that in two ways. First, if one were to conjure up in a dream-state, a book perfect in balance of challenge and entertainment (a loaded word, entertainment, applied to this book, as I will demonstrate in a bit), pleasure and frustration, this is the book. An exact yin yang (reading) experience. (I say reading parenthetically because this book and the universe it describes turns on the reader such that the reader inhabits it, not so much reads it.) And second, if one wants to dream of the perfect experience one can dream with a book, this is it, at least for this reader. That is, in a search for the book to inhabit, this reader dreams of challenge, humor, weight and reach. Here it is, and so very much more. So, all that noted and affirmed. Onward we somehow must march.

Here are a few particulars you might want to know. Including footnotes (essential to the book and the reading thereof) Infinite Jest has 1079 pages and weighs almost 3 pounds in the paperback edition. There is no fluff, big spaces, wide margins, pictures or spaces. The font is small and the font for the 388 footnotes smaller still. David Foster Wallace wrote it when he was thirty-three. Thirteen years later he took his own life. There is no “essence” of the book, no Platonic IJ-ness. That is to say, it is like spilling mercury onto a tile floor. The book spreads out and rolls in a million self-contained little drops, all born from the same container, each perfectly formed and independent, yet containing part of the whole. But that is silly talk. And I should be serious. I’m trying to give you a sense, and not be too breathless about it. (But I am, I confess, rather breathless at even finishing the thing, not to mention, I think, “getting it” just ever so little bit.)

This was my second go at IJ. I took a swing at the book about a year ago and walked away from it. I am in a lot of company in this regard. (Famously, Lisa Schwarzbaum was assigned to review it for Entertainment Weekly and didn’t, or couldn’t. Regardless, she did not review it, but instead wrote about not reviewing it, even wondering if it was readable.) With the help and insight of a web resource, Infinite Summer, I outlined a sensible reading schedule of only ten pages a day. The web site, Infinite Summer, a sort of internet IJ book club, is filled with comments and information for the reader. The site got me off on the right foot, however, ultimately, I found it–the site–confusing and too littered with spoilers. The value I gleaned, though, was the pace, the ten pages a day, minimum, that and the net-peer ground postings.

Every reader is different, and I think I can be a pretty solid guy with a book in my hands, able to get through most anything, but not so with this book. With this book, I had to be careful. It required a structure and a commitment, gaming that the effort would be worthwhile. I needed a pace, which I could maintain. And I needed insight. Early on, in that regard, I picked up a reader’s companion, specifically, A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest by Robert Bell and William Dowling. There are lots of resources to assist the serious IJ reader. Mainly, I was seeking a source that would help me keep the characters straight, provide a dictionary of acronyms (there are about 450 sort-of-recognized slash known and totally-fabricated acronyms underlying the narration like a grid upon which a foundation is poured) and a plot outline. With Bell and Dowling at my side I set sail upon the deep waters of Infinite Jest. (I should mention too, Bell and Dowling were much more important at the beginning of the effort. As the themes developed, the characters fleshed out and the style absorbed, their guide became an infrequent resource.)

There are three main story lines to IJ. Each offers mini theme-within-the-theme story lines, and occasionally they crisscross, making things a bit more than interesting. The main story lines involve a tortured tennis prodigy, Hal Incandenza; a former Demerol addict, Don Gately, who works at The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House; and a bunch of wheel-chair bound Canadian terrorists who are trying to get their hands on a movie reputed to be so entertaining it renders the viewer interested in nothing but viewing it. Eventually the viewer grows listless, loses all interest in eating, sleeping, in life then dies. This movie, incidentally, was made by Hal’s father, James Orin Incandenza (referred to by many monikers, including JOI–which some take as a nod to James JOIce.) James Orin Incandenza is dead as the book takes place, having committed suicide by jurry-rigging a microwave oven and inserting his head. The backdrop to the novel, North America, a few years hence, is a depressing place, toxic and so commercialized that even the years have been sponsored, or more properly, subsidized, as in “Subsidized Time.” This is why sections of the book take place in the “Year of the Whopper” or the “Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad.” There are nine Subsidized Times, plus a smattering of BS (Before Subsidization) time events. The novel opens during the “Year of Glad” (as in bag) and ends, completing a loop, the same year.

It is worth noting too, that the movie referred to above, called the “entertainment,” carries a logical argument to its extreme. That is, a culture so intent on being entertained, that if it gorges itself it will perish–at least its soul perishes. The movie, by the way, is produced by Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited, in one of many nods to Shakespeare (Prince Hamlet: “Alas, poor Yorick…a fellow of infinite jest…”). Here is this reader’s suggestion: Brush up on your Hamlet.

I’ve wondered quite a lot about the lasting nature of this book–or lack thereof. David Eggers says this in his introductory essay: “…this is his extraordinary, and irregular, and not-normal achievement, a thing that will outlast him and you and me, but will help future people understand us–how we felt, how we lived, what we gave to each other and why.” I hope that is true. But I’m not so sure. I’m not sure Wallace would agree either. In a letter to his friend Jonathan Franzen he wrote of the book, “I don’t think it’s very good–some clipping called a published excerpt feverish and not entirely satisfying, which goes a long way toward describing the experience of writing the thing.” Time magazine called it one of the most important books of the last one hundred years. I don’t argue with that. There are lots of things, however, that are important but are ignored, or worse, forgotten.

When something of consequence is accomplished one hopes–one who notices, that is–that something will come of it. But one of the themes present in this book is the progression of culture to a cliff and documenting the falling off of that cliff by said culture. It is part of the humor found here. I mean, who doesn’t laugh at a well choreographed pratfall? That doesn’t mean it will last, the book, that is. Ultimately, it is a question that cannot be answered from this distance, only guessed at. I guess it is less than fifty percent. I don’t say that because I don’t believe in the text, I do. I doubt we have the capacity to embrace something like this and bless it with immortality (as if we had such a capacity, go figure), even if it were worthy. Look at our culture so acutely defined in this book.

(I am talking here about the big arena. There is, in this big arena, present tonight, Beethoven and Bach, Picasso and Matisse (you get the idea), Hemingway and Joyce, Proust and Tolstoy. Yes, yes, I know I am missing a lot. But the room is dark. Oh, there’s Homer and back there, at the bar, I think I see Sibelius. Yes, that’s him, having a tottie with Bill Shakespeare. Those two, they’re a hoot. At the ticket gate are any number of others elbowing one another to get in. Ginny Woolf and Nabokov and, geezz, so many. But if you take a moment and look across the street you’ll see, standing there under the street light Mr. David Foster Wallace, wearing his bandana and taking notes. He is very deliberate that way. I have him in my sights and it seems he is making his way through the crowd. But who knows? It’s a rowdy bunch, that’s for sure. Not sure if he’ll make his way in…)

Jocularity aside, this is an important work. Seriously important and worthy. Maybe even lasting. That should entice one enough. Take a swing at it, but don’t force it. It took a few hundred pages to find a rhythm and then it was like a glider finding an updraft. You soar and the view below you is both frightening and exhilarating. Regardless, it’s a hell of a experience.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 575 readers
PUBLISHER:	Back Bay Books; 10 Anv edition (November 13, 2006)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	The Unoffical David Foster Wallace fan site Wikipedia page on David Foster Wallace
EXTRAS:	Excerpt The Infinite Summer fan site DFW’s Personal Files
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Pale King This is Water Consider the Lobster

Bibliography:

• The Broom and the System (1987)
• Girl with Curious Hair (1989)
• Infinite Jest: A Novel (1996)
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997)
• Oblivion (2004)
• The Pale King (2011)

Essays:

• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
• Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003)
• Consider the Lobster (2005)
• This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (2009)
• Both Flesh and Not: Essays (November 2012)

Related:

• David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide by Stephen Burn (2003)

“But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the general outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (OCT 4, 2009)

Disclaimer, I start this review with unabashed over-the-top hyperbole.

David Foster Wallace is not God, but close, maybe. That would be the only way to explain the current DFW hysteria: the web sites, a new movie, the buzz, the sales, YouTube. After reading this little book, no bigger than a long letter home from camp, I must conclude that, yes, DFW is–was–perhaps if not God, than a god. One that tragically no longer walks among us. That said, I extend my apologies at such discourse. Surely the first to rush the exit after such a flamboyant silliness would be Wallace himself.

David Foster Wallace, DFW, was not a recluse, but he was shy, and especially shy talking about himself in public. His public image was looming large when Kenyon College asked him to address the 2005 graduating class on a subject of his choosing. In simple and precise prose, in a little over 2400 words, he distilled a wisdom that is lasting and accessible–a friend called it a book full of “brutal truth.” This is a twenty minute read that can change a life.

Refreshingly, DFW does not set himself up to pontificate. In fact, to the contrary. The essay starts with what he calls “…a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories.” What follows is a little parable of two fish, swimming mindlessly along. They encounter an older and presumably wiser fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” A while later, as the two young fish continue on, one of them turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?” DFW immediately knocks the audience off their standard of anticipation: “I am not the wise old fish.” he says. And yet what follows is raw wisdom of the ages.

While reading this essay, I played a little game with myself. Vladimir Nabokov, among others, taught that reading should be a hermeneutic experience, that a “text” should be approached free from extraneous information. In other words, read a book setting aside your knowledge of what the author did with his life, or what the critics said, or what was going on politically or socially when the book was written. Experience it singularly. I read This Is Water as if we do not know who the author was, or what fate was in store for him. Rather, I read as if it were a dusty tome, discovered on the shelf of a remote monastery, as if it were a fragile scroll found in a pot by an ancient dead sea. And you know what? The words are worthy of that sort of edification. There is lasting truth here–maybe even capital T truth.

The fish parable is set to alarm us to what is, but forgotten, that we are fish not aware of the medium in which we exists, the medium of noise between our ears. This Is Water is a plea to remind us that life becomes habit, that as adults we grow to assume the most important of voice to be our own, ignoring and dismissing the “outside” world as a result. This is what DFW calls the “default setting.” He writes: “Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.” The challenge is to switch off the default setting. “What you don’t yet know,” he tells the graduates, “are the stakes of this struggle.”

This little book deserves a place on your shelf next to the I Ching, or the New Testament, the Four Nobel Truths or the Torah. But don’t put it on your shelf. Keep it on your night stand or next to your reading chair. This is a working text, a simple and humorous reminder of how a life can be carved out and lived truly. But it’s not easy.  “It is unimaginably hard to do this–to live consciously, adultly, day in and day out.” This is not a self-help book. It is more of a wise life companion.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 30 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (April 14, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Foster Wallace Wikipedia page on David Foster Wallace
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of: The Pale King Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays Infinite Jest

Bibliography:

• The Broom and the System (1987)
• Girl with Curious Hair (1989)
• Infinite Jest: A Novel (1996)
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997)
• Oblivion (2004)
• The Pale King (2011)

Essays:

• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
• Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003)
• Consider the Lobster (2005)
• This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (2009)
• Both Flesh and Not: Essays (November 2012)