DFW And The DWM
I love David Foster Wallace’s literary criticism, his attention to the symbiosis of diction and ideas, how each determines the other. In English departments ‘craft’ analysis—”how a poem [or story] means,” as pithily put by I wish I remembered who—is the domain of creative writing types, and distinct from critical studies. Conversely, creative writing classes are oddly shy about discussing themes. Wallace romps through everything, and is as acute about how we read as about what we read.
Natashav points to Wallace’s precision-guided review of Toward The End Of Time:
[The protagonist] persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair. And so, it appears, does Mr. Updike.
I think that, and this
[The narrator’s obsession] ends up being embarrassing the way something pretentious is embarrassing when it’s also wrong.
sum up why Updike’s work, for all its often gorgeous prose, will not age well. His concerns are not our concerns. He is able to devote hundreds of pages with a complete absence of irony to nuances that now seem adolescent, distasteful, and more than a little sad.
It shows the gaps in my reading that for a long time I thought of Updike and Cheever as two sides of the same misogynist coin. Not so! Misogynist, yes, but Cheever is far, far weirder, with an Ancient Mariner forcefulness to his storytelling that’s conspicuously absent in much of contemporary fiction, with our aversion to the kind of conviction he depends on for his life. Give yourself a treat; read Cheever’s Stories cover to cover. You’ll probably despise him by the end, but when he puts needle to vinyl you have no idea what’s going to play. Just that it’s likely to be a #1 hit song.
