ashthomas//blog: UK Prospect on Wallace

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Saturday, August 07, 2004

UK Prospect on Wallace

Jonathan Keats takes David Foster Wallace and bashes him around the ring for twelve rounds in "The Jester of US Fiction", in the August 2004 issue of the British Prospect magazine. "His reputation is spectacular. His fiction, however, is execrable", Keats begins, before criticising almost every aspect of Wallace's fiction:
One cannot but be dazzled by the range of ways in which Wallace mangles his native tongue. His plots achieve a giddying balance between banality and incoherence; his characters are as black and white as the pages on which their stories are printed. But to eviscerate all standards of fiction so completely demands skill and control. David Foster Wallace is not the Charles Manson of American fiction, but rather its Dr Mengele.

And Wallace is not the only one to be dragged across coals by Keats -- fellow big-novels-of-ideas writers, Richard Powers and William T. Vollmann, come under some extremely harsh criticism. Vollmann's work, which Wallace's most closely resembles, is described as being like "the bubonic plague, an epidemic of verbiage with no apparent function other than to consume ever more ink and paper."

Powers gets slightly better treatment. Powers' masterpiece, The Gold Bug Variations, is criticised for "conjuring a world of ideas in which characters were second-class citizens, and the same can be said of most of his fiction, which encourages comparison to the soulless novels and stories of the cerebral Wallace."

Keats is willing to concede Wallace's talent in other areas, however. Wallace's essays are praised for being exemplars of the form. Keats advice is that Wallace should permanently forsake fiction in favour of essays:

Wallace has refused to accept ... that the essay can be as significant, and sustaining, a literary form as the novel. He doesn't need fiction. In fact, before the world catches on to his literary zero sum game, he needs to let it go.

I love Wallace's fiction -- I am continually dazzled by his erudition and surprised by his experimentation with narrative. That said, if I was forced to choose between keeping one and expelling the other of Wallace-the-novelist and Wallace-the-essayist, the essayist would stay.

On a related note, the editor Gourmet magazine talks with the Boston Globe in "Lobster tale lands writer in hot water" about the experience of hiring Wallace to write an article.

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