Wood reviews Wallace

[jbor]

Review by James Wood of DFW's story collection.

Title: The Digressionist.
Subject(s): OBLIVION: Stories (Book); BOOKS -- Reviews; WALLACE, David
Foster; SHORT stories; FICTION
Source: New Republic, 8/9/2004, Vol. 231 Issue 6, p26, 6p
Abstract: Reviews the book "Oblivion: Stories," by David Foster Wallace.

Excerpt:
[...]
Like all immersion novelists, Wallace is digressive. One might say that
the great problem with digression, as a literary mode, is that the only
way to experience the aura of the digressive is to endure digression
itself. The shaggy-dog story is excruciating precisely because it is
shaggy; and alas, that is also the only way to experience its
excruciating shagginess. For many readers, this is too high a price to
pay. Likewise, the great limitation of immersion is that the only way it
can represent something is by embodying it rather than by gesturing
toward it.

The original digressionist is Laurence Sterne, that master of the
shaggy-dog story, or "Irish bull," and David Foster Wallace owes more
than a little to that writer: the bulbous comic sentences, the manic
listing, the spiralling footnotes (Infinite Jest has more than one
hundred pages of them), the playing around with voices, the
self-referentiality, the insistent and even relentless "comedy," the
cod-scholarly interest in jargon and technical discourses--all this can
be found in Tristram Shandy. Thomas Pynchon is the great American
Sternean, and Wallace has also learned a good deal from him. T.S.
Eliot's advice about the importance of "relevant intensity" in good
prose undergoes almost an inversion in the hands of such writers.
Irrelevant intensity becomes a motor of the prose, a generator of the
comedy and loose abundance.
[...]

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