Wyatt Mason on Wallace

The current New York Review has Wyatt Mason’s review of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace.

Mason’s review is quite interesting, but not for the actual review of Although of Course, which Mason rightly dismisses as interesting (for what Wallace says) but minor (for what Lipsky does with it):

The overall effect of Lipsky’s constant interruptions of Wallace’s routinely thoughtful replies is not to give the reader useful information but to show how little Lipsky seems to understand Wallace—both the man who preferred to avoid doing journalism of the variety that Lipsky has produced and the artist whose method Lipsky claims he was attempting to ape: “the deluxe internal surveys [Wallace] specialized in—the unedited camera, the feed.”

(You can read my own critique of said book in the LA Times.)

The interesting part is the rest of the piece, wherein Mason articulates a coherent defense of Wallace’s style, a style that has drawn numerous detractors, some as dismissible as Lipsky and some not. Here’s a kernel of Mason’s argument:

The mix of registers here is typical of Wallace: intensifiers and qualifiers that ordinarily suggest sloppy writing and thinking (“unbelievably”; “really” used three times in the space of a dozen words; “something like that”) coexisting with the correct use of the subjunctive mood (“as though the driver were”). The precision of the subjunctive—which literate people bother with less and less, the simple past tense increasingly and diminishingly employed in its place—is never arbitrary, and its presence suggests that if attention is being paid to a matter of higher-order usage, similar intention lurks behind the clutter of qualifiers. For although one could edit them out of the passage above to the end of producing leaner prose—

I felt sorry for him. It was irrational, but I felt as though the driver were me. I wasn’t just sorry for him, I was sorry as him.

—the edit removes more than “flab”: it discards the furniture of real speech, which includes the routine repetitions and qualifications that cushion conversation. Wallace was seeking to write prose that had all the features of common speech.

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