I ordered David Foster Wallace's oeuvre as a graduation gift to myself. I'd read Infinite Jest (1996), Consider The Lobster (2005) and his commencement speech at Kenyon already. With those mere 1447 pages under my belt, I was firmly and deeply committed as a passionate acolyte. Sounds silly, but IJ has really shaped my outlook on life.
No matter your interpretation, DFW is really fucking hard to read. He is brilliant, hilarious, and extremely thorough. He manages to pick exactly the right word for the situation (I'm sure there's a word for that). His constant self-awareness and unceasing criticism of the post-modernist school that has dominated literature for the past few decades (while being self-aware of his own allegiance and gratitude to said school) is a weirdly satisfying meta-metafictional experience. (Or non-, as the case may be.)
Anyway, GWCH is a pretty interesting read. It's a collection of short stories (I'd call the last one a novella). You can see the author of Infinite Jest struggling to define his style (and succeeding, I'd say). His criticism of modern-day America is pretty fascinating. Some of the characters involved in GWCH include: Alex Trebek, David Letterman, a barely-concealed John Barthes, and both Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. As only he could say: "These stories are 100 percent fiction. Some of them project the names of "real" public figures onto made-up characters in made-up circumstances. Where the names of corporate, media, or political figures are used here, those names are meant only to denote figures, images, the stuff of collective dreams; they do not denote, or pretend to private information about, actual 3-D persons, living, dead, or otherwise."
(Additional tidbit from the copyright page: "ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF SUPPORT TO: the Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Fund for Aimless Children.")
It's not at all the scathing criticism most of the Europeans and South Americans love to slough onto American culture (while wearing Levis and Nikes). He's not an obnoxious yuppie ex-pat who is sighing on the banks of the Riviera; Foster-Wallace lived in Bloomington, for christ's sake. He loves modern America just as much as he loathes it.
Still, if it's the magnificent transcendental quality of the last 50 pages of IJ you're looking for, look elsewhere. These stories almost all end on a pretty bleak note. I know it's really easy to confused Dave the author with Dave the depressed person, but c'mon. You can tell the man is struggling with issues way beyond anyone's grasp. Further, the whole meta-meta/post-post thing can get pretty tiring after a while.
Still though. Couldn't imagine a bigger nerd-crush.
Miss you terrible, Dave.
