DFW

Fans of David Foster Wallace should not miss his interview with Paul Brownfield for the LA Times. Wallace is the author of Inifinite Jest, which Brownfield fairly accurately (if reductively) summarizes as:

a 1,079-page, obsessively footnoted, high-comic novel -- that made Wallace a literary cause celebre. The book is set in a near future in which years are not numbered but corporate-sponsored ("Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar," etc.), and within its world are a junior tennis academy, a band of Quebecois separatists and addicts of various stripes and substances.

Wallace is something of a recluse so this interview is a rather rare look into his life at the moment. The interview touches on his new life in CA (he's the "Roy Edward Disney Professor of Creative Writing" at Pomona College), and on the whole Franzen/Oprah fiasco, about which this quintessentially DFW excursion:

[Wallace] expressed "admiration mixed with a mild contempt for the increasingly savvy way" Franzen handled the controversy that ensued when he spurned Winfrey's selection of "The Corrections" for her book club. He said the Franzen incident illustrates the trouble with whirlwind book tours, wherein the author moves in a state of surreal fatigue from airport to hotel room.

"There's something very uncomfortable about the whole thing, and yet on the other hand, what kind of prima donna says, 'Thank you, major corporation, for your advance, but now you're not allowed to use your marketing tools to try to recoup your investment'? You know, the head just goes around and around and around."

...

"There's a weird illogic about it, because the less important literary fiction gets to the culture, the harder those corporations who for whatever reason keep wanting to publish it, have to market it. So in order to keep it alive, you have to murder it to save it."

"Shall I say something so obvious that you just won't even put it in the article?" Wallace said. "A book is also a product. At least the books that we're talking about.... Even a book that's about living in a culture that relentlessly turns everything into a product is a product. There are not very complicated ironies built into that situation. But you know that happens maybe four or five times a year. There are these legions of very smart, nice, usually Seven Sisters-educated young publicists for all the different publishing houses whose entire job is networking and lunching and hanging out with the book reviewers and opinion makers again and again ... hoping the cultural and marketing motor will catch, which one out of 200 times it does.

"At a certain point," Wallace said finally, "I just stopped thinking about it."

If you didn't find that both fascinating and funny, don't read Wallace.

Posted 08:11 PM | ai books

Thanks

Thanks to jd2b for the mention w/regard to the comments on this post (the link was posted on April 23). Note to the folks at jd2b if you happen to read this: Can you add permalinks, please? And comments? Your readers will thank you!

Posted 08:37 AM | Comments (1) | law school