A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments Paperback – February 2, 1998

Most fans of contemporary literature know David Foster Wallace's monumental novel Infinite Jest. Less well known are his efforts during the 1990's and 2000's as an essayist on pop culture and a 'gonzo' journalist intrepidly reporting what he sees, hears, smells, etc. on assignment from Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Premier, Rolling Stone, Gourmet, and other venues. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997) is a great example of his journalistic style. He's more refined that Hunter S. Thompson, but he's every bit as much an alien on an expensive cruise ship vacation in the Caribbean (in the essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again") or at the Illinois State Fair (in the essay "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All") or on set for a few days with David Lynch and crew filming Lynch's movie Lost Highway (2000) in the essay "David Lynch Keeps His Head" (gonzo commentary interspersed with critical reviews of Lynch's Blue Velvet, Dune, Wild at Heart, and of course the TV series Twin Peaks). And see his reporting at the world-famous Maine Lobster Festival held every late July that DFW chronicles in one of the essays published in 2005's Consider the Lobster (check out the scientific lore that DFW includes about these bottom-dwelling sea 'insects,' in the tradition of Melville's scientific interludes about whale anatomy and whale habits in Moby Dick). The book Consider the Lobster also finds our intrepid journalist at the Las Vegas convention for the porn industry one year (the essay is entitled "Big Red Son" following Hollywood slang for it's more profitable offspring), and his conversations with the industry moguls and porn actresses he meets and hangs out with are priceless. No topic is too high or too low for DFW's journalistic eye - similarly his eye for truth in his short stories, see especially the collection titled "Oblivion" in which DFW samples big-time marketing firms ("Mr. Squishy") and small-time rural hustlers ("The Suffering Channel").

It's not all just fun, though. The essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again titled "E Unibus Pluram" tackles the 'predatory instincts' of fiction writers in the television age in a critical review of new fiction, an essay that is read in university Lit departments all over the country. In Consider the Lobster, DFW reviews (and demolishes) Updike's Toward the End of Time (1998) in the essay "Certainly the End of Something or Other" (a sample: "Mailer, Updike, Roth - the Great Male Narcissists ('GMNs') who've dominated postwar American fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and online predictions of the death of the novel as we know it. When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. And no US novelist has mapped the inner terrain of the solipsist better than John Updike . . ."). DFW even pays homage to Kafka in "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness" (a sample: "Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine ['the standard undergrad critical analysis'], the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty").

And DFW also turns his attention to the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary critical literary theory. The essay titled "Greatly Exaggerated" (in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) is an independent-thinking American intellectual's take on the 'fertile miscegenation' of Marxist critical theory and philosophy. A sample: "The deconstructionist ('deconstructionist' and 'poststructuralist' mean the same thing, by the way: 'poststructuralist' is what you call a deconstructionist who doesn't want to be called a deconstructionist), explicitly follows Husserl and Heidegger the same way the New Critics had co-opted Hegel." Another sample: "[T]hese guys - Derrida following Heidegger and Barthes Mallarme and Foucault God knows who - see literary language as not a tool but an environment. A writer does not wield language; he is subsumed in it. Language speaks us; writing writes; etc."

Sample DFW's wide-ranging, wonderful intellectual vistas for yourself!

It has become clear in a very short time, to this reviewer, that the late David Foster Wallace, characterized as one of this generation's most influential novelists, could certainly venture outside that vaunted portraiture and still be erudite and humorous as a journalist, his mind being a captive and gifted cavern of endless curiosity and with his pen still able to transfer those deep and nuanced thoughts and humor to the page.

With "...Fun Thing..." he takes this journalism role and turns it to a new and dissimilar function, describing an amazing array of topics that both challenge the reader and, at times, make him/her laugh out loud. In a book of "essays and arguments," a collection of works that had been previously published in various high-brow magazines, but with some in severely attenuated form and finally compiled into this volume, they were ultimately published soon after his mammoth literary breakthrough "Infinite Jest", in 1997.

Within this work, Wallace, in seven very dissimilar and aesthetic essays, examines topics as diverse and wide ranging as tennis, literary theory, film noir director David Lynch and his magazine commissioned adventures at the Illinois State Fair and on board a cruise ship. All written in the early to mid 1990's, he shows not only a literary maturity, he was only 28 in 1990, but an ability to abound the senses with high octane, sometimes verbose, run-on sentences that, at times, require re-reading. In two narratives, "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" and "Greatly Exaggerated" this approach seems to work against him somewhat as the essays become over long while trying to maintain a tangible point. His intelligence in these stories is evident and in depth but the burden on the reader is vastly beyond enjoyment. So to with "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U. S. Fiction", but in a different way. This essay is an argumentative piece that hammers home the theory that Americans have become over-indulged and over-reliant on non-stop entertainment via the boob-tube. Wallace makes his point very clearly early on, but feels compelled to continue the argument and this work gets, at times, again a heavy burden for the reader to tow.

Those being the criticisms, the other works and the ones which make up the large portion of the book are, conversely, very well told, brimming with a sort of "just below the surface" cynical humor while also showing the superlative thinking and observations skills of DFW. "David Lynch Keeps His Head" and "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry..." are two very enjoyable works that tap into Wallace's almost professorial knowledge of film and tennis. On the set for the filming of Lynch's somewhat inferior "Lost Highway", Wallace observes and offers up an account of what filming a dark and surreal movie in the "Lynchian" mode is like. Conversely, he covers tennis player Joyce, a middle ranked pro in the early 90's, with an admiration and candidness that only slightly overrides what was basically (and self described) an autobiographical work. Both of these were completely different structurally, but both were amazingly readable and abounding in obscure Wallace observations.

The two award-winning essays and the ones that undoubtedly became the selling points for this book is "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All" and the book's title work. In "Getting Away...", Wallace is sent to the 1993 Illinois State Fair to observe and chronicle middle-America for Harper's Magazine. Told in the unique Wallace tone, this work is highlighted by an account of a baton twirling contest that can also be heard, with Wallace reading, on the web at a San Diego reading. "...Fun Thing..." is his colossal account of a 7 day cruise ship trip in which he goes to great pains to describe the overt and excessive pampering that the cruise lines shower their guests with. Monumentally funny, with supremely intelligent and humble insights, this work, alone, would be worth the price of the entire book.

The David Foster Wallace legacy, today, seemingly enjoys a huge cult-like following that resurfaces whenever complex, intelligent fiction is discussed or read. Many of today's "post-modern" writers (Franzen, Rick Moody, Lethem, even Ferris) certainly owe a nod to Wallace who, in turn, honed his skills reading Pynchon, Delillo and Barth. This book, although in many cases somewhat dated, is a prime example of Wallace at his best and gets an overwhelming recommendation from this reader. Enjoy.

I absolutely loved this book of essays by DFW. I had read Consider the Lobster first, and found this one to be a lot better. Like all essay books, some were winners, two were, meh, and there was a bit of filler. However, the ones that were winners absolutely knocked it out of the park on this one. I haven't read all of his work yet, so I can't say that this one is better than that one, but I found these essays to be informative, intelligent, entertaining and engaging. If you like to look at the world with the veneer washed off, this book is for you!

A collection of seven essays about the popular culture written and previously published in the early-to-mid-`90s in HARPERS, ESQUIRE, and scholarly journals.

Some are entertainingly observational, some are densely erudite, all are brilliant. Most include DFW's signature styles of verbosity, footnotes and textual shorthand. There's analysis of rural life via people gathering at a state fair; of pampered life via guests on a luxury cruise ship; of athletic excellence, specifically tennis. And of film, television and literature, for example "Greatly Exaggerated," which turned out to be literary criticism on authorial context, a topic on my to-pursue list. (I read the essay twice, at first nearly laughing at its over-the-top-ness in density and assuming it must be satire. But it's not, and I'm drawn to explore it elsewhere to figure it out.) Though the essays are about pop culture, the setting is clearly DFW's mind. Maybe he manipulates the reader's attention toward it, but honestly, it feels gravitational. I have everything else of his still to read, yet I despair because eventually there will be no more.