David Foster Wallace is considered one of the great American writers of the late 20th century. My introduction to him came through his now-famous Kenyon State graduation address, This Is Water, which was gifted to me by a friend (please read it!). I’ll admit to being intimidated by his most famous book, Infinite Jest. I’ve started it more than once, but know I will get through it one day! That said, I have always loved his essays, which appear in multiple collections.
Wallace was an amateur tennis player, and wrote about the topic many times in his career. Recently those essays were collected in a stand alone volume, String Theory. Although I’d read a couple of the essays printed here in other collections, most I had not read, and those I had were a pleasure to re-read. Wallace is witty, insightful, humble and honest. His attention to detail, and the humor he often finds in it, is wonderful.
Besides being an exceptional non-fiction writer, Wallace has a style all his own, two aspects of which are worth pointing out. One is his use of footnotes. They are not used to reference anything, but expand on the essay itself, or go on more-or-less related tangents. They are meant to be read with the essay itself, with the footnotes as a parallel and related narrative. The second is an approach he also used in his visit to the Illinois State Fair (found in one of his other collections), which is a kind of moment-by-moment narrative of his surroundings that are both significant and seemingly unimportant. The result is a feeling of immersion in a space, all through Wallace’s ironic and satirical lens.
This is a good entry point into Wallace’s delightful writing.
Just Because I Liked It:
- I found this interview with Morgan Housel on the Knowledge Project fascinating. Housel writes about personal finance with a lens towards the value of money, not just how to make, save or spend it.