What's not to love about a posthumous collection of Wallace's essays — and why we love it anyway

Both Flesh and Not rounds up a mélange of David Foster Wallace’s essays — sports reportage, surveys of contemporary authors, movie and book reviews, grammar pointers, and cultural criticism — never published in book form during his lifetime. Wallace committed suicide in 2008, and who can say what he would have chosen to include in this collection had he been alive to edit it. But what we have been given is by turns hypersmart and hypertender, infuriating and inspiring, allowing Wallace’s energizing, rigorous, and formally wide-open perspective to remain in the conversation about the future of American literature.

The book opens with the gorgeous title essay, about tennis phenomenon Roger Federer. “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” originally published in 2006 in The New York Times’ sports magazine and by now almost canonical, showcases Wallace’s most agile and compelling moves as a prose stylist, philosopher and innovator of the essay form (those infectious footnotes!), along with his novelist’s eye (and ear) for human vulnerability and pleasingly down-to-earth colloquialisms.

In the penultimate essay, “Deciderization 2007 — a Special Report,” Wallace presents a visionary piece of literary criticism under the guise of an introduction for The Best American Essays 2007. Ever the meta-critic, Wallace uses this intro as an opportunity to reflect on the editing process, take the temperature of his cultural moment, and pose difficult questions. Here and in other essays (“Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. Novels >1960,” for example), Wallace argues passionately for new writing that displays intellectual breadth, emotional vitality, and formal risk. He is especially preoccupied with “the connections between literary aesthetics and moral values.” In other words, he asks how and why we consider certain types of writing good or beautiful or literary, and what this says about our shared ethics.

These questions become useful when navigating some of the collection’s problematic moments. After the title essay, the collection moves through the remaining pieces in chronological order, starting in 1988, and the backward jump proffers some jarring claims. There is, for example, the deeply vexing “Back in New Fire,” from 1996, in which Wallace argues that since the AIDS epidemic arose from nature, it is therefore neither good nor bad. Instead, he argues, “the specter of heterosexual AIDS” might be seen as a cautious opportunity to reinvest sex with its proper gravitas by erecting new and exciting “erotic impediments” (aka safe sex practices). His framework leaves out the political dimensions of the travesty, the inadequate federal and public response to the marginalized communities most affected by the crisis — it’s akin to calling Hurricane Katrina a natural disaster that ought to be cautiously celebrated for its potential to reawaken people in, say, Rhode Island to the awesome power of weather.

Other prickly ethical/aesthetic moments occur more quietly. In “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” from 1988, tucked away in his roll call of promising new talent Wallace mentions only three female authors, and their brief, collective cameo occurs under the banner of “bitchy humor.” It’s a fairly reductive and belittling lens, though in context (it seems) the phrase is meant to be a compliment. Overall, the piece parses well the problems of a TV-saturated culture, yet here and throughout, moments like this grate.

Perhaps these criticisms are, after all, of a piece with Wallace’s own provocation to think. As he writes: “But of course you’ll see how hard the reader is required to think about all this.” And this is where the collection’s central pleasures reside. In “Twenty-Four Word Notes” (a total pleasure read for grammar and usage geeks), Wallace tries on multiple positions in the great post-modern language debates, limning words as “both symbols for real things and real things themselves.” Another way to pose this dilemma is as follows: Does language reflect the world, or does language (at least in part) make it? Wallace plays the spectrum, proposing an ambitious, expansive role for prose in general, and fiction in particular, as innovative, evolving art forms. This constant evolution is bound to be dotted with missteps alongside the revelations, and as Wallace’s work is full of revelation, so, too, is it our job as readers to engage with his mistakes. “We are heirs to a gorgeous chaos,” he writes, listing a rowdy proliferation of literary forms and conveying his broad vision of fiction’s potential energy. In the end, it’s this expansiveness of vision that makes the tour through Wallace’s own gorgeous chaos well worth it.

So the question is – in brief – what gives? Why have these novels begun popping up like Whack-A-Moles? It’s not as though their authors have built identical worlds. Open one book and you find yourself stuck in an ever-changing stone maze filled with hideous monsters; open another and you’ve been sent to a shadowy fort miles from anywhere to undergo psychological treatment for your fears. Or – to take one of the most prominent and popular of the New Dystopias – open Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, and suddenly you’re in a post-apocalyptic America where, as ongoing punishment for a long-ago rebellion, conquered districts are forced, every year, to send 24 children to battle to the death on reality television. Whatever nerve these books are hitting, it’s a general and deeply enough rooted one to transcend the particulars of setting.

If we’re to believe the critics who like to pontificate on such matters, there are two possible explanations for the insane popularity of these books. (I do mean “insane popularity”: Though its original print run was just 50,000 copies, there are now more than 7.2 million copies of The Hunger Games in circulation in the United States alone, and the movie version has made almost $700 million worldwide since its release.) To wit:

1. Dystopias appeal because they are morally simpler than the real world, and therefore we wish we could escape to them.

2. Dystopias appeal because they are absolutely terrible compared to the real world, and therefore we are super pumped that we never, ever have to go there.

Alas, like Mama and Papa Bear’s respective too-hot and too-cold porridges, these explanations constitute a false dichotomy worthy of storybook history. In other words, they’re both wrong.

Arguing for Team Moral Simplicity, Maggie Stiefvater, bestselling author of The Scorpio Races, thinks that kids relish the lack of ethical ambiguity presented in dystopian novels. It’s pure escapism: The clean, obvious divide between Good and Evil in these worlds offers relief from the murkier realities of our own.

Stiefvater’s point isn’t totally empty, but neither is her explanation comprehensive. Take, again, The Hunger Games and its later installments: Sure, the books have certain unambiguously evil elements – most obviously, the repressive and authoritarian government of Panem, headed by the sadistic, poison-drinking President Snow. But the trilogy’s driving concern is how to determine the best and most righteous response to evil – and this question, it rapidly becomes clear, is anything but straightforward. How much death and destruction does it take for a revolution to become worse than the society is meant to replace? What’s moral and what’s practical don’t always dovetail, and throughout the series, Collins’ characters wrestle with anguished, unflinching questions about when, whether, and to what extent ends justify means.

Meanwhile, over in Team Schadenfreude’s corner, Karen Springen, a journalist at Publisher’s Weekly, proposes that dystopias appeal precisely because they’re worse than reality. Kids love “what-ifs,” she argues, and the dismal conditions of dystopian societies remind readers to appreciate how lucky they are.

But this theory, too, for whatever germ of truth it contains, is overly simplistic. We’re always sensitive to, and on guard against, some impending doom. A generation ago, it was the threat of nuclear war. Today it’s – among other things – the threat of terrorism, the specter of climate change, and the reality of global economic instability. However lucky we may know ourselves to be, most of us aren’t complacent about it.

No, dystopias aren’t appealing because they offer a shining example of moral clarity, nor because their horrors are utterly, fascinatingly alien to us. They’re appealing because they offer a dark mirror of our own present reality. The images may be distorted, but they’re recognizable, and in being recognizable, they are validating. As Ursula LeGuin said, famously: Science fiction doesn’t describe the future; it describes the present.

As for the fact that it’s YA dystopias in particular that have exploded in popularity of late, rather than all dystopias in general? Adolescents are inherently more likely than readers of any other age to find such stories resonant. When else but adolescence do we become newly, brutally aware of all that is already broken in the world around us – the way the stories on which we have grown up are broken? When else do we chafe so strongly against powerlessness, and vow so strongly to right the wrongs inflicted upon us by the generations that have come before us? What The Hunger Games and its ilk lose in pure escapism, they gain in honesty.

The final, key piece of the puzzle is that if adolescence is ripe for outrage, it is also ripe for hope, and YA dystopias first tell the truth about what merits outrage, and then insist on the possibility of change. The protagonists of these books share a fierce determination to uncover hidden truths. To read about them is to watch them, against all odds, succeed. Following Katniss Everdeen through The Hunger Games as she fights to save first her skin and then her society gives readers hope, and it’s a hope that’s curative.

It happens, also, to be a hope that’s well-written. Collins’ prose is skilled, and her exaggeration of present social ills is both gripping and credible. And so it’s a contagious hope, too, appealing ultimately to adult readers as well as YA audiences. Which is all to the good. We can, all of us, use a little courage. We can, all of us, use a little cure.

We at eMusic were fascinated by the character of Nik, so we thought we’d take his obsessions one step further: We commissioned five of our favorite artists to design album covers for five of Nik’s biggest albums. The results are as creative and brilliant and eccentric as Nik himself. You’ll find them below, along with commentary from the author. — Maris Kreizman, Audiobooks Editor

Usually, I am reluctant to attach images or music to my novels. I want it to be words only. I want to give some description, but I want room for the reader’s imagination. I realize that sounds a bit precious.

And it is fascinating to see how other people respond to your ideas, particularly other artists. So I came to the idea of seeing depictions of Nik’s covers with excitement and trepidation.

I think these are excellent interpretations. They are not what I imagined, but they show the imaginations of others in a kind of dialogue with my imagination. (And since my description of Nik’s music and art is inspired by so many other artists, this idea feels like a continuation of Nik’s MO.) — Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia

The Fakes, Take Me Home and Make Me Fake It
— Alex Eben Meyer

Alex Eben Meyer’s cover is wonderful. There is something perfect about the sneer of the title and the rudeness of the frog. The title is self-deprecating and aggressive, and somehow the frog in bunny ears hits it exactly right. It has an appropriate F-You feel, and I think I would listen to this record. I also like the puke-but-look-at-me colors. The Fakes title Take Me Home and Make Me Fake It was a version of the Alex Chilton song “Take Me Home and Make Me Like It.” I took his title and added a propensity for inserting the band name into different phrases, which I got from all those Miles Davis records (Miles in the Sky, Milestones, Miles Ahead). —D.S.

Nik Worth, Meet Me At The Movies
— Drew Dernavich

Drew Dernavich’s cover illustrates the mystique of Nik’s project very well. In the book, Nik has a self-reflexive narcissism that veers from irony to earnestness. I think that is captured in the “Downcast Idol” look of this cover. The colors and lines and computer pixilation look early ’80s to me — which is right. “Meet Me at the Movies” is a song title I borrowed from my songwriter husband, Clem Coleman. I like the longing and nostalgia in it. (The other song title of Clem’s I used in the book is “Breakfast at Kingdom Come.” I like how he mixes the quotidian and the cosmic in that title.) —D.S.

The Fakes, Here Come Your Fakes
— Justin David Cox

Justin David Cox’s cover also reminds me of the ’80s, but more punk. It looks like a Replacements or Husker Du EP. I love the duct tape letters. I also like that you can’t see the person — just his feet, as if he were escaping. It seems very Do-It-Yourself, and it also looks like someone is climbing into a garage or basement. Since this is a book about secret garage art, I think it works really well. The title of “Here Are Your Fakes” was inspired by some ’60s albums like Meet the Beatles mixed with an Eno title, Here Come the Warm Jets.—D.S.

The Demonics, Sound Fantastique
— Michael Fusco

Michael Fusco’s cover is for the Demonics, and the Demonics are Nik’s serious band. They are more challenging, less interested in pop. The title Sound Fantastique is a variation on Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Nik, a very hard-working autodidact, brings a wide and disparate set of influences to the table. Although he can get things wrong, he is also acutely aware of himself, and he applies great verve to his mish-mash of ideas. I really like how intense this cover feels. I think the whirls of red look great with the yellow letters, and I like the collage of newspapers behind the vortex. Nik makes all his album art himself (he is a self-described “glitter and glue” guy and a bit of a Luddite), so he frequently makes collages.—D.S.

The Fakes, Breakfast at Kingdom Come
— Mingering Mike

Mingering Mike’s cover is radiant and beautiful. I love the Magic Marker and how you can see someone hunched over and working on this cover. Mingering Mike was actually one of my inspirations for Nik. Mike has made a lifelong project of fake record covers, liner notes and LP labels. I think he is a wonderful artist, and I love the rays coming out of the hand. I love how every white space has been covered. It makes me remember how a page entirely filled in by Magic Marker gets almost heavy and starts to curl at the edges. This style reminds me of my stepfather Richard Frasca’s album covers. He was the main inspiration for the character of Nik. He also has a lifelong collection of self-made fake records. (One of Frasca’s record labels is called Fake Records, and Nik’s band name “The Fakes” is an homage to his label name.)—D.S.

“We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed,” Smith writes of their early time together. The power of their connection is inspiring.

The book, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, operates also as historical document, as Smith introduces us to a fascinating tract of cultural history: New York City in the 1970s. Here’s the legendary Chelsea Hotel, where Smith and Mapplethorpe lived together for years, bursting with artists and musicians, and there’s the wildly decadent Max’s Kansas City, where Smith and Mapplethorpe made the scene, decked in their finest hipster fare. Smith also reveals her interactions with important artistic personalities, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepherd and Janis Joplin, all of whom she encountered with wide-eyed innocence.

Finally, Just Kids is simply a gorgeously written book. Smith’s eye for object and place is mesmerizing; the language impeccable. She writes of her first trip to New York: “At 20 years old, I boarded the bus. I wore my dungarees, black turtleneck, and the old gray raincoat I had bought in Camden. My small suitcase, yellow-and-red plaid, held some drawing pencils, a notebook, Illuminations, a few pieces of clothing, and pictures of my sibling. I was superstitious. Today was a Monday; I was born on Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”

It’s also a real treasure to have Smith narrate the audiobook — a ridiculously addictive, highly listenable experience, as the older, wiser version of Patti Smith reflects on her younger self. Her youthful optimism still hangs so well, as she reflects on seeing Picasso as a teenager: “I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings to create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.”

Before he did, he wrote a note and left it somewhere it would be found. On his writing desk in the garage, neatly stacked, were 250 pages of The Pale King, the novel he’d been working on for 10 years.

As a writer, Wallace was similarly deliberate. He was a famous perfectionist, known to argue vigorously over unwanted edits. In interviews, he attributed his style (and success) to sweat equity rather than pure talent, choosing to revise his own words almost without end. He wasn’t the type to rush his work to print, or to release something he hadn’t first obsessively chiseled and sanded into shape.

And yet, there was The Pale King, incomplete but inviting, sitting on the desk. We couldn’t read it the way we would if it were whole. But we could still read it. “An unfinished novel is what we have,” Wallace’s longtime editor Michael Pietsch writes in the forward to The Pale King, finally published in April. “How can we not look?”

To look or not to look? Pietsch’s dilemma was not uncommon. When authors die, executors summon editors to handle the literary estate. In some cases — for example, Mark Twain — they follow explicit instructions: His autobiography — a massive collection of haphazardly arranged stories and fragments — was to be published, by direct order of its author, on the 100th anniversary of his death. Although pieces of The Autobiography of Mark Twain did surface before then, an unabridged version didn’t see the light of day until 2010, once the century mark had been reached.

While Twain’s wish was fulfilled, and readers ate it up — Autobiography was a surprise bestseller — some critics dismissed it as the untamed ramblings of an old, vain man. Author Garrison Keillor, writing for the New York Times Book Review, was particularly harsh, dismissing the book as “a ragbag of scraps” he wished he’d never read.

Keillor — himself a pale heir to Twain’s pop-folksy crown in print and on the radio — lobbed some of the blame at loathsome “academics” who chose quantity over quality. True, a sure-handed editor could’ve trimmed away some of the sprawl, but wouldn’t the author’s vision be compromised with each snip?

Sometimes, the editor’s dilemma is how soon he or she can safely disobey the wishes of the deceased. In his will, Vladimir Nabokov instructed his wife Vera and son Dmitri to burn the 138 index cards that comprised his unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. Instead, the cards sat in a safe deposit box in Switzerland for 30 years until Dmitri finally caved and the novel was published. To resounding disappointment.

As a literary cryptid, Laura was a thing of mystery and romance, the final work of a master writer, imprisoned and unread. Once the words were made flesh, however, the book Dimitri praised as an “embryonic masterpiece” was dismissed by the kinder critics as a “glorious mess.” When Nabokov’s off his game, as Martin Amis wrote in his review of Laura for the London Guardian, it was a disaster “on the scale of a nuclear accident.”

Compared to Franz Kafka’s pal Max Brod, however, Dmitri looks like the model of divine patience. Asked by his dying friend to burn all files and papers, Brod instead edited and published Kafka’s three major novels (The Trial, The Castle and Amerika) at a rate of one per year in the three years that followed his passing. Although the unburned manuscripts were later re-edited by busybody scholars, Brod is kind of a hero. Were it not for his sublime disloyalty, we’d have been robbed of a literary giant’s finest works.

Of course, for every writer who wills his or her unpublished works be deleted in a blaze of unrealized glory, there are untold thousands who make no provisions whatsoever. Take Kurt Vonnegut. It makes sense that the devout humanist wouldn’t presume a literary afterlife, and so the several posthumous volumes of Vonnegutiae stand no chance of insulting the author. However, the man had 84 years on this planet in which to publish the 14 stories in 2009′s Look at the Birdie, for instance, and the fact that he chose not to could be interpreted as a vote of no-confidence.

Like Wallace, Vonnegut was his own taskmaster. “He rewrote and rewrote,” his friend and colleague Sidney Offit recalls in the foreword to Birdie. “Although Kurt’s style may seem casual and spontaneous, he was a master craftsman demanding of himself perfection of the story, the sentence, the word.”

And that’s the thing we’re most likely to find missing when we tuck into the latest works of late authors: their version of perfection.

The Pale King as it currently exists started as a stack on Wallace’s writing desk, but Pietsch mined all available material: folders containing hundreds more pages — some typed, some handwritten — and computer files buried on hard drives and floppy disks.

The thing would have to be Frankensteined together, a task made more daunting by Wallace’s wily, counterintuitive storytelling style. The Pale King, it turned out, was intended to employ the same “tornadic,” multi-braided approach that made his masterwork, Infinite Jest, such an intimidating and acclaimed literary landmark. If anybody could tame this tornado of text it was Wallace’s longtime editor, but it was just as possible that nobody could.

To guide him, Pietsch had about a decade’s worth of notes and outlines, and his own sweat equity. Contradictions were identified and reconciled. Repetitions were excised judiciously. A final chapter “Notes and Asides” was added to compile clues as to where things might’ve been headed — little bits of prose, skeletal fragments of bigger ideas and plans, hints at the novel’s greater potential.

In short: Turning an incomplete work into something not merely publishable but also worthy of the author’s legacy is a tricky business.

So, too, is reading it.

That The Pale King — which concerns itself, partly, with the denizens of a painfully dull IRS office in Peoria, Illinois, in 1985 (including a new hire named David Wallace, an unexpected moment of Vonnegutian whimsy) — doesn’t have a satisfying conclusion is likely no big letdown to readers familiar with the author. Neither Infinite Jest nor Wallace’s only other novel, The Broom of the System, came close to tying up the many plot threads it had unspooled. The joy in reading Wallace is in the journey, losing oneself in the word-to-word moments, letting the serpentine sentences pull you out of this world and into another.

The Pale King succeeds on that point.

Still, this isn’t the book the author intended to write, and The Pale King will always have that pall hanging over it. Its shortfalls, while few, gain momentary prominence in the reader’s mind. Some characters could use more flesh on their bones. Some of the dialogue-heavy chapters might do with some tightening. Once in awhile a reverse oasis appears, a dry patch of dullness that springs up unnaturally in Wallace’s otherwise lush and liquid prose. (Granted: This is a book with some complicated things to say about boredom and bureaucracy.)

And then there’s the author, alive on the pages but gone nonetheless. The past-tense bio on the sleeve. No readings. No signings. No interviews. No more books forthcoming. Whether Pietsch had waited 30 years, or a hundred, Wallace’s absence is a tangible and sometimes inescapable part of the reading experience.

But, like Pietsch said: This is what we have. With Wallace and The Pale King — with Twain, with Nabokov, with Kafka, with all of them, it could be argued — the risk is worth the reward.

The secret to evaluating The Pale King, to enjoying it, is context. Before we can even contemplate cracking it open, we know what this book is not. We know that an author whose prose usually moved with painstaking deliberateness did not consider it complete, whole, or ready.

This is the rough and raw copy, the stuff the perfectionist hadn’t gotten around to perfecting. To find out what that means, like Pietsch, we have to look.

How can we not?

Originally published in 1977, Scanner takes place in a 1994 near-future version of Southern California where widespread use of a destructive, highly addictive drug has devastated the region. Its residents are divided into “straights,” the average upstanding citizens who live in protected enclaves, and “dopers,” who are constantly and aggressively monitored by the police. And then there are people like Bob Arctor who straddle both segments of society…

I’ll leave the rest of the plot summary to a description from the Vintage Books website: “Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D — which Arctor takes in massive doses — gradually splits the user’s brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn’t realize he is narcing on himself.”

Did you follow that? Sounds confusing, but Paul Giamatti’s dynamic narration, along with Philip K. Dick’s prose — remarkably lucid even when his characters are not — make the split personality conceit seem disturbingly plausible. Speaking of Giamatti’s performance, I’m kind of bummed that the audiobook jacket for A Scanner Darkly is a tie-in to Richard Linklater’s 2006 film adaptation. Especially given how cool the original jacket art was. I think that listening to this book is an entirely different way to experience Scanner, and it’s got very little to do with Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder. Do you agree?

Now that we’ve got a basic grasp on the plot, I want to start by laying out some general themes and questions to contemplate while we’re listening. Nine hours of audiobook is a lot to take in, I know, so we’ll ease into this slowly and get into more chapter-by-chapter specifics on the message boards.

Delusion vs. Reality

Bob Arctor/Fred may be one of the most unreliable narrators ever. It’s hard to tell which aspects of his world are real and which are your run-o-the-mill, drug-induced paranoid delusions. Bob can’t tell who’s screwing with him, and in turn, we can’t tell if he’s screwing with us. It’s as if our paranoia has to increase right along with Bob’s. Where do we draw the line? What are we, as readers (or listeners!), supposed to take in from this messed up world? Should we even bother trying to make a distinction between what’s real and what’s not?

Identity

At a critical moment, Bob wonders, “How many Bob Arctors are there?… Is Fred actually the same as Bob?…Who am I? Which of them is me?” Are drugs solely to blame for Bob’s identity crisis? If he ultimately has two personalities, which is more authentic? What aspects of the way he lives his life define who he is?

The Medium

For this and for future eMusic Book Clubs, I’ll be curious to know how the experience of listening, as opposed to reading, has affected your understanding of the book. I found myself missing a hard copy when it came to the more practical considerations of moderating a book club. I often wished I was able to dog-ear pages or highlight key phrases, and I had to keep going to my computer to look up spellings and the like (the word “cephalochromoscope” isn’t exactly one I could pull out of the ether). On the positive side, Dick’s whacked-out druggie dialogue seems absolutely made to be spoken aloud, not read in silence. I also appreciated how not being able to focus 100% on plot minutiae freed me up to focus on bigger-picture issues.

I’ll leave you to ruminate on these topics, and I’ll post a few more thoughts on the message boards towards the end of the week. I hope to see you all there!