Martin Schneider writes:
Last night I was lucky to see a unique literary event: New Yorker book critic James Wood speaking for an hour or so about David Foster Wallace’s second short story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, at the 92nd Street Y.
An a Wallace enthusiast, I was a bit worried about where Wood would come down on BIWHM. Wood’s tastes can be a bit arid—at one point during the address, he cited Henry James as a model Wallace might have profited from emulating—and it was all too easy to imagine Wood not cottoning to Wallace’s verbal, stylistic, and formal excesses.
I need not have worried. Wood was generous in his praise of Wallace, albeit (quite properly) not unreservedly so.
I have seen Wood speak once before, at the 2008 New Yorker Festival, but it was on this occasion that he showed what a prudent, insightful, excellent critic he is. While never deviating from the basic stance of fulsome praise, Wood showed that he admired Wallace’s writings and appreciated his concerns and approach, while also pointing out some of the dead-ends that Wallace had constructed for himself.
Wood’s discourse started with an appreciation for Wallace’s “extraordinary ear for speech,” to demonstrate which he quoted several passages. At the very end Wood commented that Wallace, like Henry Green, understood the way in which people “invent” their own words as they speak. To which I’d add, the key to Wallace’s dialogue—as the title suggests, BWIHM has huge chunks of spoken discourse, which also creeps into the omniscient narrator’s patterns as well—is that he understood that even quite ordinary people speak in remarkably pretentious ways, which lead them to mix in (and mangle) hifalutin words like “environs” when they probably shouldn’t.
From there Wood moved to a discussion of a quintessentially Wallacean problem of “the helplessness of the self.” For Wood, Wallace constantly undercuts what ought to be “naive” gestures like a praise of generosity by pointing to the underlying selfishness of the act—and, importantly, each person’s awareness of the contradiction—a condition most thoughtful people suffer from. In his story “The Depressed Person,” we see all too vividly the tendency towards solipsism, a word that informs a great many of Wallace’s characters.
With reference to a brief, Xeroxed passage from Beckett, Wood demonstrated that Wallace has a knack for cannily eliding the meat of a subject, “withholding and repressing what we would actually want to know.” Several of the stories feature “ellipsis and occlusion” about key points.
At the same time, Wood (probably correctly) chided Wallace for an unwillingness to just leave it alone, to let the ambiguity remain. Wallace “tends to overplay his hand,” which tendency leads him to unveil narrative corkers in his stories’ finales that might better have gone merely suggested: “Beckett does not give you the key; Wallace spoils it by giving you the key.”
During the Q&A, there was an excellent question by an older gentleman that went something like, “Can you address the idea of meta-fiction, and meta-meta-fiction, and … how many metas one can tolerate without losing one’s mind?” Wood clearly found this very resonant, stating that one of Wallace’s key themes is indeed precisely that “one can’t escape all of those ‘metas,’ and one also can’t, unfortunately, lose one’s mind.” That is, we lose ourselves in the recursive mental spirals, in which consciousness tends to keep us mired.
I raised my hand too! Riffing off of the earlier questioner, I asked something like, “Wallace resorts to a lot of ‘tricks,’ like footnotes and brackets and so on. Do you ever find yourself wishing that there were an … alternate version of Wallace, who could display his great moral sense and feel for language and precision and character and narrative in a “cleaner” form, without all of the distractions?”
To my great satisfaction, Wood’s answer was terribly expansive and in some ways got to the heart of the conundrum of reading Wallace. He started by saying, “Yes…. I often think that Wallace is ‘performing,’ and sometimes I wish that he would ‘perform’ a bit less.” This was followed by a wonderful impression of a reader encountering a Wallace story, noticing the matchless prose of the opening passages and then flipping ahead to see how far Wallace was going to sustain the performance—and then becoming dismayed at its daunting length and complexity and, perhaps, tricksiness.
Wood then spun out a dichotomy in Wallace’s work, between the “performer” and the more straightforwardly “moral” writer, referring to Zadie Smith’s recent essay on Wallace (which Wood praised) that defended Wallace as precisely an uncomplicated sort of moral writer at root. Wood dismissed this view, citing some of the darker elements in these purportedly clean, positive, and “moral” resolutions, insisting that this tidy, “moral” version of Wallace misses his essence.
Wood felt that what forced Wallace into his great length (and tricks and repetitions and refractions) was his status “also as a great realist—too much of a realist, for my taste.” In other words, the desire to be accurate compelled Wallace to pursue the logic behind the thoughts to their logical conclusion. Wood mentioned a trope of Henry James, that it is the role of the artist to “draw a circle” around the story—in other words, it’s not necessary to replay the inescapability of the dynamic at such length: we could also get the same point in five pages. However, Wood added, even this excessive, mimetic urge within Wallace is an honorable and serious one in an artist.
Afterwards I had the pleasure of meeting well-known literary bloggers Ed Champion and Sarah Weinman for the first time. We gabbed about Wallace and Wood for a while until finally reaching the table behind which Wood had graciously agreed to sign some books. (Most everyone had fled by this time.) When Wood saw me, he eagerly took the opportunity to round out the train of thought my earlier question had sparked. It was a joy to see such a fine critical mind at work—occupied with an object worthy of his contemplation.