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| Hearsay: |
Backwards City points to The Rake, who has caught Dave Eggers out on some David Foster Wallace flip-flopping. His first review of Infinite Jest was a major pan, but now, years later, he praises him highly in a forward to the same book. Change in taste or, as has been suggested, change in status?
"Infinite Jest" also ends abruptly, leaving as many questions unanswered as does Jim's suicide. Like his alter ego's experimental films, the book seems like an exercise in what one gifted artist can produce without the hindrance of an editor. Subsequently, it's also an exercise in whether or not such a work can sustain a reader's interest for more than 1,000 pages and thus find an audience outside academia. Wallace's take on that can be found in the book's apt title. It's an endless joke on somebody.
(We will leave aside the hilarity of Mr. E—– making an oblique dig at someone for operating without the "hindrance of an editor," as much as it pains me.)
Anyway, let's take a look at that brand spankin' new forward again, as Mr. E—– (ca. 2006) returns ten years later to praise Infinite Jest to the high heavens.
Hmm:
David Foster Wallace has long straddled the worlds of difficult and not-as-difficult, with most readers agreeing that his essays are easier to read than his fiction, and his journalism most accessible of all. But while much of his work is challenging, his tone, in whatever form he’s exploring, is rigorously unpretentious.
Well, "rigorously unpretentious" (2006) isn't exactly the same thing as being full of "superfluous and wildly tangential flights of lexical diarrhea" (1996), now is it? But let's keep going:
The book is 1,067 pages long and there is not one lazy sentence. The book is drum-tight and relentlessly smart and, though it does not wear its heart on its sleeve, it’s deeply felt and incredibly moving.
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November 28th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
10 years is a long time. I’ve thought the insistance on never changing one’s mind in modern discourse for fear of being seen as a flip-flopper is kind of silly.
Quite possible Eggers is just doing his friend a favor and writing a glowing review even though he doesn’t liek the book, but it is just as possible he has changed his mind in the last decade.
November 28th, 2006 at 5:27 pm
I mean, I think it would be weird if Eggers was some public figure back then, but 96 was four years before he even wrote his first book.
If I wrote a random book review today and a decade later was really famous I probably wouldn’t even think of referring to it.
November 28th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
My guess is that Eggers is simply full of shit and probably has been for at least 10 years. His about-face on this “endless joke” is the hallmark of his hypocrisy. His criterion for this sort of praise is not the literary merit of Wallace’s aptly named book, but hipster caché the book has garnered with the diposable income of the post-ironic Von Dutch Trucker Cap community.
November 28th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
I’m with Paul. Changing one’s mind over ten years is one thing, completely contradicting your earlier take on a book is more like sucking up.
I quit Infinite Jest on the first page, the moment I read the chapter heading: “The Year of the Depend Undergarment.”
November 28th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
Always enjoy your blog… but may I suggest that the first paragraph read “foreword to the same book” rather than “forward”?
November 28th, 2006 at 8:37 pm
Doh.
November 29th, 2006 at 2:24 am
‘Quite possible Eggers is just doing his friend a favor and writing a glowing review even though he doesn’t liek the book,’
Um, am I the only person who considers this the lowest act of literary scum? A writer (in a review most of all) should live through his words. Writing a glowing review purely because Wallace is a friend, is pathetic, detrimental and wrong. It shows that Eggers has no real credibility, though perhaps that wasn’t up for debate.
November 29th, 2006 at 7:13 am
“Um, am I the only person who considers this the lowest act of literary scum?”
No.
November 29th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Well it is a forward, not a review, which isn’t quite the same thing. Negative forward’s don’t exist. A forward is really only a place to tlak about a book’s stregnths.
November 29th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
And if you think the book has few strengths, you’re probably not the person to be writing the forward. Maybe Eggers had a Saul on the Road to Damascus moment at some point in the intervening decade, but it seems as tho, if that’s the case, he’s withheld it from the forward. Which probably means that he didn’t have one, since that would’ve been great copy, and he’s just being a hypocrite. Another possibility is that he was trying cynically to make a name for himself in 1996 and trying cynically to add to his fame in 2006, in which case there’s no real contradiction at work. Either way, hard to respect without a willful suspension of disbelief.
November 29th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
Maybe Eggers had a Saul on the Road to Damascus moment at some point in the intervening decade, but it seems as tho, if that’s the case, he’s withheld it from the forward. Which probably means that he didn’t have one, since that would’ve been great copy,
Well my feeling is that, like I said above, this was written a long time before Eggers was any kind of figure in the literary world. This isn’t some famous review. Hell, I tried to google it and couldn’t find any corroberation that it even exists. Not saying it is fake, just saying it is something he wrote half a decade before he was famous and a decade ago. I know i’ve changed my minds on books I read a decade ago on a few occasions and if I wrote a random review today, but in 10 years from now was really famous and changed my opinion, I doubt it would even cross my mind to correct my previous unread and unimportant review.
This isn’t to say Eggers isn’t just cynically making a name for himself, but I think that it is hardly proved beyond a reasonable doubt, so I”ll just assume it is kosher until there is more proof otehrwise. Innocent till proven guilty, and all that.
November 29th, 2006 at 10:48 pm
C’mon, ChimCham, the guy has been an arrogant, self-agrandizing ass for years, and now he’s been caught out in a flagrant act of full-of-shitness. It actually looks kind of good on him. A little humility would suit him. And still you want to be his apologist?
How many manuscrpits do you have the in the McSweeney’s slush pile right now anyway?
November 29th, 2006 at 11:02 pm
How praisey is the foreword really? “Rigorously unpretentious” sounds like he’s saying the tone would be thoroughly pretentious except the author never lets up the fight against pretentiousness and never lets you forget it. “Relentlessly smart” suggests an annoying child. Annoying on a mission. “Deeply felt and incredibly moving” convey nothing so much as “I can’t think of anything to say so I’ll just toss in some sweet love talk I heard on The Bachelor.”
November 30th, 2006 at 8:51 pm
Paul: You caught me, i’m actually Dave Eggers’s wife! I was just trying to nip this silly thing in the bud before it got out of hand!
No, really I’ve got nothing in the McSweeney’s slush pile (I submitted once and it took them 9 months to get back to me, so I figure anything good enough for them to publish will be snatched up by someone else before they’d even see it) and frankly i’ve never read anything Eggers has written except two stories, one I thought was great and one that was bad. So, i’m fairly neutral on him as a writer. I do love McSweeney’s though.
It just seems silly how much people hate him. I mean look at how violent your post reads. Did this guy murder your sister or something? He is just a moderately popular author who spends most of his time promoting artists and authors he likes and working on interesting projects.
Yeah, he seems kinda like a hipster doofus, but there are a hell of a lot more shitty types of people than that.