It is no surprise that the estate of David Foster Wallace has brought this collection to market; his cult has only grown since his death, and his essays were published in so diverse a set of publications during his lifetime that it's unlikely that any but the most fanatical readers saw a large fraction of them. The pieces here appeared originally in The New York Times, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spin Magazine, Tennis Magazine, Might Magazine, Waterstone's Magazine, Fiction Writer, Salon.com, Science, Rain Taxi, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, and as portions of the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus and The Best American Essays 2007. The range of topics is not quite so wide, and covers ground familiar to readers of DFW's previous work -- fiction, tennis, Wittgenstein, movies and math.
The collection is clearly the spiritual sibling of
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and
Consider the Lobster, and comparing these seems appropriate. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (hereinafter, "ASFT") is an irregular collection -- the highest points, including the title essay, are superb, but the low points are utterly forgettable. As a result, I typically suggest that newcomers to DFW's essays start with Consider the Lobster; though it contains nothing as wonderful as the Illinois State Fair or Cruise Ship essays in ASFT, it's more consistently impressive.
This collection, Both Flesh and Not, more closely resembles ASFT. It may be that the editors had little control over this; DFW is dead and a finite number of his essays wait to be collected. Here we get two tennis essays (one of which purports to be about the economics of tennis, but it's still a tennis essay), neither of which is as good as the tennis essay in ASFT, which was in turn not one of the stronger pieces in that collection. These might be read as similar in some regards to DFW's wonderful travel writing, where in this case he was traveling to the U.S. Open tennis tournament, but unlike those pieces, we here get a relatively narrow picture of DFW himself, robbed of the neurosis that gives those pieces their soul.
Both Flesh and Not also contains a couple of ruminations on the state of contemporary fiction and book reviews, none of which will alter my reading of such books in the slightest. And even when DFW gives an over-the-top positive review to the book "Wittgenstein's Mistress," his reasoning is so opaque to me (and probably any non-fan of Wittgenstein), that despite my immense respect for DFW, I'm never going to read the book. The essay on Terminator 2 seemed to make only trivial observations about the role of big money in cinema.
So, what here was good? I liked the essay "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama" from Science magazine. It was a funny and smart discussion of the brief trend in "brilliant mathematician" movies and books that were popular at the time. The essay will reward multiple readings. The notes from the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus will please the many readers who also liked DFW's "Snoot" essay (reprinted in Consider the Lobster). I similarly liked his deconstruction of prose poems.
One piece, "Back in the New Fire," has not aged well, and seems more dated than anything else by DFW I can recall reading. The piece argues that the advent of AIDS might cause young Americans to embrace a more conservative sexual morality than had seemed to become the norm in the late 1960s and 1970s, and that they might ultimately view this as a blessing. Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called this essay "thoroughly offensive," which seems too strong a reaction to me. It's an odd piece but one would have to almost deliberately misread it to think that DFW was calling for the death of gays, or whatever Michiko thought was going on.
DFW so consistently proved himself a brilliant writer that I find myself holding him to a high standard. I don't think this is unfair; he held himself to a high standard as well. This collection does not contain his best work and should probably not be anybody's introduction to DFW, but it is totally worth reading.
One point about the form of this collection rather than the content. The date of original publication of each piece appears at that piece's end, and the book or magazine in which each piece appeared is listed in an appendix. This information should all be on the first page of each essay.
