David Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Further cements Wallaces reputation as probably the most ambitious and prodigious literary talent of his generation, an erupting Vesuvius of prose and ideas and intellect.

John Marshall, Seattle Post Intelligencer

The title essay is worth the price of the book irrefutable proof of comic genius. Yes, hes a great writer, get used to it.

Adam Begley, New York Observer

Wallace puts enough energy, attitude, thought, fun (in and out of quotes) and sheer information into any single page to wear me out. But they dont. As long as hes willing to get down and rassle with this stuff, Im glad to sit here and read all about it.

David Gates, Newsweek

You dont want to miss out on reading David Foster Wallace. Yes, hes that good.

Kane Webb, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

He has Gore Vidals biting wit, Christopher Hitchenss ability to disrobe intellectual impostors, and Pynchons sense of the bizarre. Not just refreshing, its downright exhilarating.

David Daley, Hartford Courant

Wallaces sheer verbal precocity and versatility stun.

Joan Hinkemeyer, Rocky Mountain News

DFW is smart and funny, a man from whose word processor flows a torrent of brilliant observations and hysterical wit. Do your disposition and your mind a favor: Read this book.

Steven E. Alford, Houston Chronicle

A marvelous book. Sparkling reportage. If one wants to see the zeitgeist auto-grappling, in all its necessary confusions, one must read every essay in this book.

James Wood, Newsday

Funny as all get-out. This guy uses words like a Ninja uses throwing stars. Wallace proves that cutting edge is a term that neednt be reserved for fiction only.

Jef Leisgang, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

What hes doing in these essays is rather extraordinary: Treading chin-deep in postmodern waters, hes constructing an exceptionally funny, viable, open-minded, openhearted voice, and he gives some of the rest of us new ways to think about how to navigate our own perilous waters.

Cornel Bonca, OC Weekly (Orange County)

Engagingly bizarre thinking and gleefully uninhibited writing. Wallace is smart and funny to about the same extent that Bill Gates is rich. He leaps exuberantly from one original observation to the next.

Margaret Sullivan, Buffalo News

This volume not only reconfirms Mr. Wallaces stature as one of his generations preeminent talents, but it also attests to his virtuosity. His novelists radar for the incongruous detail and the revealing remark along with his hyperkinetic language and natural storytelling gifts make him a remarkably able reporter.

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Hes funny, actually. Read him.

Maureen Harrington, Denver Post

When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dads alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. Im starting to see why this was so. College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterners sickness for home. Id grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, childs play.

In late childhood I learned how to play tennis on the blacktop courts of a small public park carved from farmland that had been nitrogenized too often to farm anymore. This was in my home of Philo, Illinois, a tiny collection of corn silos and war-era Levittown homes whose native residents did little but sell crop insurance and nitrogen fertilizer and herbicide and collect property taxes from the young academics at nearby Champaign-Urbanas university, whose ranks swelled enough in the flush 1960s to make outlying non sequiturs like farm and bedroom community lucid.

Between the ages of twelve and fifteen I was a near-great junior tennis player. I made my competitive bones beating up on lawyers and dentists kids at little Champaign and Urbana Country Club events and was soon killing whole summers being driven through dawns to tournaments all over Illinois, Indiana, Iowa. At fourteen I was ranked seventeenth in the United States Tennis Associations Western Section (Western being the creakily ancient USTAs designation for the Midwest; farther west were the Southwest, Northwest, and Pacific Northwest sections). My flirtation with tennis excellence had way more to do with the township where I learned and trained and with a weird proclivity for intuitive math than it did with athletic talent. I was, even by the standards of junior competition in which everyones a bud of pure potential, a pretty untalented tennis player. My hand-eye was OK, but I was neither large nor quick, had a near-concave chest and wrists so thin I could bracelet them with a thumb and pinkie, and could hit a tennis ball no harder or truer than most girls in my age bracket. What I could do was Play the Whole Court. This was a piece of tennis truistics that could mean any number of things. In my case, it meant I knew my limitations and the limitations of what I stood inside, and adjusted thusly. I was at my very best in bad conditions.

Now, conditions in Central Illinois are from a mathematical perspective interesting and from a tennis perspective bad. The summer heat and wet-mitten humidity, the grotesquely fertile soil that sends grasses and broadleaves up through the courts surface by main force, the midges that feed on sweat and the mosquitoes that spawn in the fields furrows and in the conferva-choked ditches that box each field, night tennis next to impossible because the moths and crap-gnats drawn by the sodium lights form a little planet around each tall lamp and the whole lit court surface is aflutter with spastic little shadows.

But mostly wind. The biggest single factor in Central Illinois quality of outdoor life is wind. There are more local jokes than I can summon about bent weather vanes and leaning barns, more downstate sobriquets for kinds of wind than there are in Malamut for snow. The wind had a personality, a (poor) temper, and, apparently, agendas. The wind blew autumn leaves into intercalated lines and arcs of force so regular you could photograph them for a textbook on Cramers Rule and the cross-products of curves in 3-space. It molded winter snow into blinding truncheons that buried stalled cars and required citizens to shovel out not only driveways but the sides of homes; a Central Illinois blizzard starts only when the snowfall stops and the wind begins. Most people in Philo didnt comb their hair because why bother. Ladies wore those plastic flags tied down over their parlor-jobs so regularly I thought they were required for a real classy coiffure; girls on the East Coast outside with their hair hanging and tossing around looked wanton and nude to me. Wind wind etc. etc.

The people I know from outside it distill the Midwest into blank flatness, black land and fields of green fronds or five-oclock stubble, gentle swells and declivities that make the topology a sadistic exercise in plotting quadrics, highway vistas so same and dead they drive motorists mad. Those from IN/WI/Northern IL think of their own Midwest as agronomics and commodity futures and corn-detasseling and bean-walking and seed-company caps, apple-cheeked Nordic types, cider and slaughter and football games with white fogbanks of breath exiting helmets. But in the odd central pocket that is Champaign-Urbana, Rantoul, Philo, Mahomet-Seymour, Mattoon, Farmer City, and Tolono, Midwestern life is informed and deformed by wind. Weather-wise, our township is on the eastern upcurrent of what I once heard an atmospherist in brown tweed call a Thermal Anomaly. Something about southward rotations of crisp air off the Great Lakes and muggy southern stuff from Arkansas and Kentucky miscegenating, plus an odd dose of weird zephyrs from the Mississippi valley three hours west. Chicago calls itself the Windy City, but Chicago, one big windbreak, does not know from a true religious-type wind. And meteorologists have nothing to tell people in Philo, who know perfectly well that the real story is that to the west, between us and the Rockies, there is basically nothing tall, and that weird zephyrs and stirs joined breezes and gusts and thermals and downdrafts and whatever out over Nebraska and Kansas and moved east like streams into rivers and jets and military fronts that gathered like avalanches and roared in reverse down pioneer oxtrails, toward our own personal unsheltered asses. The worst was spring, boys high school tennis season, when the nets would stand out stiff as proud flags and an errant ball would blow clear to the easternmost fence, interrupting play on the next several courts. During a bad blow some of us would get rope out and tell Rob Lord, who was our fifth man in singles and spectrally thin, that we were going to have to tie him down to keep him from becoming a projectile. Autumn, usually about half as bad as spring, was a low constant roar and the massive clicking sound of continents of dry leaves being arranged into force-curves Id heard no sound remotely like this megaclicking until I heard, at nineteen, on New Brunswicks Bay of Fundy, my first high-tide wave break and get sucked back out over a shore of polished pebbles. Summers were manic and gusty, then often around August deadly calm. The wind would just die some August days, and it was no relief at all; the cessation drove us nuts. Each August, we realized afresh how much the sound of wind had become part of the soundtrack to life in Philo. The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal. It was months after I moved to western MA before I could really sleep in the pussified whisper of New Englands wind-sound.