There’s a bookshop in my favourite part of the city in which I live in which marauds an unshaven man with dishevelled hair. I know nothing about this man, but he is the tool with which I measure the aptness and the good sense of my taste in literature. Usually, he is found to be in one of two positions: either lying on the sofa looking angry, or deliberately disordering the books on his shelves (he owns the shop, and he’s entirely right to think that people will stay longer if his books aren’t alphabetised. It’s because of wisdom like this that I use him as my tool). It was from this man that I bought the only book I own by David Foster Wallace – and when I bought it his features reassembled themselves from a look of slight fury into a look of slight misery. This is what he does when he thinks you have made an excellent choice of book. I promptly congratulated myself.
Wallace is a much talked about author. He is also an author whom I hadn’t read, and knew nothing about. I began reading Oblivion, which I discovered was the last work of fiction to be published before his death, and was suspicious. To my closed and inattentive ears, Wallace is one of those writers who inspires an untrustworthy intensity of love in otherwise trustworthy people. It’s not that I didn’t want to like Wallace, or even that I crassly sought to disagree with those who liked him for no reason other than the contrariness; but many admirable minds laud him as one of the greatest novelists of his “generation”, and I distrust both praise and references to generations. Imagine the delight and the shame I felt when I discovered that Wallace wrote a mockery of the hagiographic use of “generation” too – in his short story “Death Is Not the End” he writes a parodic biography of a dead poet which “two separate American generations have hailed as the voice of their generation”.
By virtue of almost nothing other than my own ignorance, I suppose I’m ripe to fall into the second generation of Wallace admirers (which is exactly what I am – I decided a couple of days ago whilst sitting on the Northern line). The forthcoming, posthumously published novel The Pale King is not a book that I, unlike Wallace’s legion of fans, have been “eagerly awaiting”. It’s not even a book I knew existed until recently – but in reading two early reviews (in Time and GQ), I’ve learnt the odd thing about Wallace that has made me abandon my scepticism. What would Wallace think about the consolidation of my respect growing from the textual peripheries of others, rather than from his own writing? I suppose he’d look sad and shrug, but then, I haven’t even finished Oblivion yet, so I wouldn’t know. In any case, I should qualify myself – my respect has been consolidated not by these reviews, but by the extracts of Wallace’s writing embedded in them.
Still, assertions like Lev Grossman’s (in the Time review) that Wallace’s remaining notebooks are “chewed over and bent and practically charred by the intellectual energy Wallace expended in them” are symptomatic of the kind of mythologising that good dead authors find themselves subject to. That one of these notebooks had a picture of one of the Rugrats on the front is testament of how, to put it tritely, paper was paper to Wallace. I’m not sure he’d want his manuscripts monumentalized – tempting as that might be. “He switched pens practically every paragraph” Grossman breathlessly notes. Well, he probably didn’t. And if he did, that makes him silly, not a genius.
His essay collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again begins quietly with a distancing “supposedly” and escalates into an absolution of a “never again” – which sounds both a threat and a loss, like a child covering disappointment with disobedience. It makes me wonder, of the so many people who have waited for The Pale King, how many would really have the ability to be disappointed with this last slice of Wallace. John Jeremiah Sullivan articulates a feeling that any reader who has fallen in love with an author has felt: “I was surprised to have the wind sucked out of me by the thought … that there would be no more Wallace books”. Perhaps this is the best thing about my slowly dissolving ignorance: I’ve got a lot of Wallace books still left to read.
Jonathan Derbyshire reviews “The Pale King” in this week’s issue of the New Statesman
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