Most Helpful Customer Reviews
71 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Alas, poor Yorick!, March 18, 2010
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
David Lipsky has done a laudable service for both David Foster Wallace and his readership with this jaunty road-trip/interview/memoir. As Infinite Jest was being launched in 1996 and Wallace was nearing the end of his book tour, Lipsky, a rising name in journalism, followed Wallace through the last week of the tour, the Midwest portion, and recorded almost every word spoken. (The piece was supposed to run in Rolling Stone , but never did. Bad timing due to the untimely death of a rock star and other foibles of the industry.) Lipsky interviewed Wallace without ever being obtrusive or intrusive. He allowed their relationship to form organically, gradually, and avoided a forced fellowship. Rather than a stilted outcome of an interview, this cohered with warmth, wit, warts, a wink here and there, and a wily charm. A salty, chatty Wallace emerges as a captivating and unreliable narrator of his own life.
Lipsky precedes the interview with a mighty potent "afterword," a several page editorial that is also filled with specific facts about Wallace's depression and suicide. I sprung a leak; it was like he died all over again and I had to mourn him once more. It was tender, frank, and genuine. This is also the only section where it is revealed that Wallace had been on MAO inhibiters (an old-school anti-depressant) since 1989, a fact that Wallace chose not to reveal in the interviews. On the contrary, Wallace fairly denied being (currently) on any medication for depression. But, throughout the text of the interview, Lipsky tells the reader each time the author's watch beeped an alarm. It took me a while to put it together--it seemed extraneous to tell us that. But, I think that Lipsky was allowing the reader to connect the dots and draw the arguable conclusion without making any personal statements. Wallace was forthcoming about his depression, and even about his ECT treatments (electroconvulsive therapy). But he was opaque about his current medication regimen. He chewed tobacco almost ceaselessly, drank Coca-Cola like water, and enjoyed the occasional draught beer. And he ate like a lumberjack. (He was 6'2" and robust, athletic.)
Throughout the three hundred pages of this protracted interview, I engaged with the momentum of Wallace-speak. Because his verbiage is unedited, it is sometimes necessary to read his sentences more than once. They are often choked with articles, prepositions and conjunctives that, idiomatically, are natural, but difficult on the page initially. However, I got into the zone and flow. Wallace is an enthusiastic interviewee if erratic at times. He vacillates from agile, amiable, and arch to repetitive and awkward. There are also words that hold a lot of charge for him, such as "continuum." In fact, Lipsky relates looking up that word after he went back to his hotel room, because it was so fundamental to Wallace's formal conception of the psyche.
For the most part, I was illuminated by the book-sized interview. Wallace shares in-depth insights on growing up, his scholarly pursuits, tennis, depression, love, and of course, the process of writing. He discusses (not all at once, but at episodic intervals) the themes of Infinite Jest and the fear that we are in a culture of entertainment addiction. Additionally, Lipsky and Wallace deconstruct movies--from Lynch to Tarantino and several stops in-between. I was delighted that he waxed about my my favorite movie scene of all time--the scene in True Romance between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper. They argue and examine literature and gossip a little about other writers and celebrities. Wallace had an almost childlike crush on Alanis Morissette, permeated with a fetching adoration and wonder.
There are about fifty pages in the middle that lost steam. They were repetitive and grinding at intervals and seemed to be placed there in order to add to the "road-trip" ambiance. I got antsy and wanted to move ahead to more luminous discussions.
By the end of the book, I felt closer to understanding Wallace, who yet remains an enigma and a haunting cautionary tale. Unintentionally, I felt a pull toward Lipsky, too. His observations are quick, inconspicuous, and often sublime. I was impressed by his tasteful treatment of Wallace's memory, of his regard for integrity, and his ability to capture the essence of this beautiful and tormented man and phenomenal author.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
38 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The boyish wonder, March 19, 2010
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Probably the biggest question that you, someone who at least must have a passing interest in David Foster Wallace to be visiting this page, would like answered about this book is: does it deliver the goods? The book is billed as a conversation between the late David Foster Wallace and David Lipsky, a Rolling Stone journalist and novelist. Is it worth reading? I would enthusiastically say yes, even if you haven't cracked Infinite Jest, or finished Consider The Lobster. It's pretty true that you can get a good sense of the sort of person Wallace is by reading his work, but the book gets across a lot of new detail and stuff I wasn't aware of. The conversation is frequently engrossing, and it covers incredibly diverse terrain, including Wallace's very complicated relationship with fame, his interesting thoughts about pop culture and the future of entertainment and books (which are actually pretty optimistic, considering the sheer tonnage of writerly sentiment about the end of civilization), as well as a lot of stuff about Infinite Jest, then brand new, and what he thought the main points of the book were, with some argumentation and elaboration with the author about them. There's a lot about Wallace's drug problems and depression in here, which cannot help but be more than a little sad. Wallace sincerely believed that people just can't ever be completely happy, that there's a restless part of us that can never be satisfied, and while that is a debatable notion I do think it turned out to be true in his case. Lipsky tactfully points out some hints of Wallace's future trajectory along the way, but one can kind of sense that despite the zeal that Wallace had for his work and for quite a bit of life, that the guy had a lot of issues and that writing never completely purged them.
Still, the point of the book isn't to pity Wallace. Through the conversation, Wallace comes across as the person one would expect him to: exuberant, highly intelligent, open, introspective, incredibly silly at times, but all in all a good guy and a real iconoclast. Lipsky makes the incredibly accurate observation that he had never lost touch childhood, and that definitely comes across in the book, as he is capable both of wild-eyed wonder and great anxiety. Just a great person to hang out with for a few hours. Lipsky keeps things moving briskly, and the book is a highly addictive read. I would seriously recommend the book if you're interested in DFW, or, you know, good books.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A portrait of the young Lipsky with a great man, August 5, 2010
Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is essentially a transcript, set into 310 pages of text with minimal editorial work. Nothing appears to have been left out, and little has been added aside from the frequent interviewer's notes, which resemble stage directions in a screenplay. Lipsky also adds a short introduction, a preface, and a sensitively written afterword, all placed at the front of the book. A list of cultural references (movies, television shows, songs, and books) appears at the end of the volume.
The conversations are varied, mostly undirected, and sometimes repetitive, with abrupt transitions between topics and as the time and place suddenly change. The young Lipsky (30 at the time of the interviews, to Wallace's 34) quickly becomes a personality to the reader: what he doesn't reveal about himself in his questions, he reveals in the interviewer's notes. His envy of Wallace's success with Infinite Jest is front and center, as is his mistrust of his subject's generosity and openness. (Wallace, in a mixture of Midwestern hospitality, genuine niceness, and strategy, accepted Lipsky as a house guest and driving partner during the last stages of his book tour.) Whenever Wallace says something complimentary to Lipsky, the interviewer makes a note: Flattery. Trying to win me to his side. Cagily implying that we're equals. Flirting. But it's Lipsky who is infatuated with Wallace, astonished by every flash of humor, each revelation of familiarity with cultural ephemera (the movie True Romance; Alanis Morissette). Lipsky, a New Yorker, is particularly fascinated by Wallace's Midwestern way of speaking. Intermittently, he transcribes in dialect, recording Wallace's "something" as "sumpin'" and "doesn't" as "dudn't." There are passages where Lipsky dutifully removes all the g's from the end of the -ing words. This is tiring and distracts from what Wallace is saying. One wonders how Lipsky would react if someone were always to record his pronunciation of his home town as "New Yawk," assuming he speaks that way.
This isn't the best introduction to the mind and thoughts of David Foster Wallace, which express themselves just as honestly and much more forcefully in his essays and in his Kenyon College commencement speech. Reading this book is like listening to a full-length recording of an opera; unless you already know the opera well, you're better off with a highlights disc. As a fan of Wallace, I frequently found myself irritated by the young Lipsky's suspicion and combativeness in the face of his host's generosity. Lipsky was acting as a good journalist, but as Janet Malcolm pointed out in her book about Joe McGinniss, being a journalist means a certain willingness to misrepresent oneself, and possibly to betray. The best part of this book was the afterword, which (for the first time, as far as I know), tells the story of Wallace's struggle against clinical depression and sets it in context with the rest of his life. The older Lipsky is fair, compassionate, and moving, and makes the powerful point that to file David Foster Wallace in the cubbyhole marked "tormented genius" is a mistake. For most of his life, his disease was well-managed. Certainly the Wallace who's revealed in these five days of conversation doesn't seem more troubled than one would expect of a sensitive person suddenly presented with the weirdness that is universal acclaim. That Lipsky remembers Wallace so fondly, and that Wallace, according to his friends, liked Lipsky in return, reflects well on the interviewer.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
