David Foster Wallace

 

I keep coming back to David Foster Wallace’s work.  This is an old story, and one that I may have shared on this blog before, but here it is again because this is something that has been important for me.

I picked up Oblivion, the book that turned out to be Wallace’s last short story collection on the recommendation of a friend.  This guy had been pushing Wallace on me for a long time.  Infinite Jest seemed too long ( I didn’t have the same tolerance for long books then that I do now) and too much of an investment.  I opted for the short story collection, which probably delayed my actual appreciation of Wallace for a while.  

Anyway, I struggled through parts of this book and wrote off this writer.  After further insistence from my friend, I picked up Infinite Jest a couple of years later.  I struggled through it and finished it.  I thought it was dumb and pretentious.  I didn’t care about the characters and I think that my reading of it suffered because it was such a struggle and it took me nearly a year to get through it.

The problem that I had is that I kept thinking about it.  When I was in the middle of reading it, I had just started in my doctoral program at the University of Tennessee and I was trying to figure out the direction I wanted to take my studies.  I kept returning to this novel, kept thinking about it.  There was something to it that I couldn’t figure out and it got to me in a way that novels that I just don’t like cannot do.  I went through my courses and decided that I would focus on contemporary postmodern fiction (this wasn’t much of a choice, it is and was all I read).  

I won’t go into too much detail here, but I ended up rereading the book a couple of years later and the whole thing clicked with me.  The book is big and difficult to read, but it is worth the read.  I have made attempts to read through the rest of Wallace’s catalogue and have ended up putting a good dent into it.  I can say that I sort of liked The Broom of the System and will probably read that again soon.  I really like his non-fiction and essays, but I have never liked his short fiction.  Infinite Jest stands out to me as an absolutely stellar novel that is the more stellar because it stands alone among his fictional offerings as a truly, truly quality work.  

This is what brought me to Wallace.  What I am here to write about is D.T. Max’s biography of Wallace, titled Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.  I read this book years ago while I was writing my dissertation (of which Infinite Jest was the focus of a chapter).  It had just been released and it seemed like a source for good supplemental material.  I read it quickly at the time and got a couple of good quotes out of it.

Well, I just finished reading this and my take is a little different.  I still like the book.  I think that Max did a good job with the subject material.  He focuses the narrative of Wallace’s life around his writing and attempts to present a sympathetic version of Wallace for the reader.  Overall, he succeeds in doing this.  This time that I read it, however, I was more struck by Wallace’s idiosyncrasies and the unlikeable aspects of his personality.  After Wallace’s suicide, many sources went out of their way to portray the writer as an earnest, kind person.  I think that he was this.  But I think there was more to him.  I won’t get into my evaluation of him as a person here because all I would be basing it on is my reading of his work and a few interviews.  That doesn’t matter here.

Here’s the thing: I still love Infinite Jest.  I hope that it stands the test of time and continues to be a good book.  The aspects of Wallace’s personality that I don’t like don’t really matter because I never knew him.  I don’t think that he was terrible, so I don’t need to bend myself to make excuses to like him.  By all accounts he really was a nice person and cared a lot about his students.  That is good.  I like that.  

I have mixed feelings about this biography, but that is not specific to this biography.  I think that there is a problem that all biographers face, and that is how to present the narrative of another person’s life.  Max made a decision about how to write about Wallace.  He cast Wallace’s life in a particular light to achieve a particular end.  All biographers do this.  I take a page from Hayden White in this.  White wrote about history and his belief that historians cast events in a particular narrative arc: comedy, tragedy, irony, or farce (I think.  I may be wrong on that last one, I am doing this from memory).  This cuts against the so-called “objectivity” of history because it necessitates the historian’s perspective and affects the way that it is, then, written.

The same must be true of biographies.  This shouldn’t be earth-shattering.  An author must feel a certain attachment -- positive or negative -- to their subject.  And this will come through in the writing.  Wallace’s life was not a narrative, but it was narrativized.  And from a particular perspective.  

So, I reread this book after I had gotten some distance from Wallace’s work.  I still like it.  I think the author did a good job and related some key aspects of Wallace’s life, especially as they connect to his writing.  

Down Among the Sticks and Bones

I always hate saying that I am "surprised" that I like a book or a movie because it implies that I went into it expecting to dislike it.  Sometimes it is true that I pick something up to give it a shot, knowing that the odds are that I will not like it or not finish it -- this has been the basis of my reading too many Palahniuk books.  Generally, what I mean instead is that, having finished a book or movie, I liked it more than I would have guessed going into it.  It is a fine distinction and a weird nonironic double-positioning of knowing and unknowing.
All of this is to say that I read Seanan McGuire's Down among the Sticks and Bones recently and I am surprised by how much I liked it.  This post will be about McGuire's book, but I also want to unpack what I mean by being surprised to like this.  I want to analyze what readerly expectations are when picking up a book and how this may influence the reading process.

Each month tor.com gives away free ebooks of their releases if you subscribe to the site.  It is cool and I recommend that you do it.  The free books are split between sci-fi and fantasy.  I normally opt to skip the fantasy, but I decided to give Down among the Sticks and Bones a try based on the description.  I don't remember what that was now, but I will provide one of my own in a bit.
Where I got this book is the first part of my readerly expectation.  I tend to like Tor's publications because they travel a lot of the same roads that I do.  Much of their output is sci-fi and what falls outside of this is often dark, gothic, and weird in varying degrees.  They do publish some high fantasy that goes a bit beyond my tastes, but I understand the overlap.  Given the publisher's history, I figured that this was close enough to something that I might like.  I picked up the book knowing that it was a sort of fantasy --again, not a genre I tend to like much.  But I was not primed to dislike the novel because of this; rather, I was looking to this to defy my expectations in a way.

The novel is something of a postmodern-parable-reimagining of the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme.  In this telling, Jack and Jill are twin girls (Jaqueline and Jillian) born to selfish, status-hungry parents who mold them into tomboy and girlie-girl stereotypes.  The parents refuse to see the as autonomous humans and only care about how the girls fit into their idealized version of family.  The girls are props used by their parents and are largely ignored beyond that.
The first third of the book establishes the girls' early lives and the trajectory that their parents force on them. The girls' grandmother lives with them for the first five years of their lives but is turned away by the parents because of the way that she encourages the girls to seek their own personalities and shun their parents' expectations. 
After their grandmother is sent away, the girls develop a codependent/competitive relationship that ends up leaving each feeling alienated, as they don't even have one another to rely upon.  The parents, real pieces of shit, even go so far as to tell the girls that their grandmother left because she didn't love them anymore.
The novel takes a fantastic turn when the girls, now 12 years old, discover a hidden stairwell in the bottom of a trunk that was left behind in what had been their grandmother's room.  The two find a door marked "Be sure" at the bottom of a very long staircase and push through to arrive at a place called the Moors. Without going too far into this part of the story, the Moors is home to a small village presided over by the Master.  Monsters prowl the Moors and it exists in a state of suspended technology and witchcraft.
The twins, now free of their parents, match themselves to competing protector figures, adopt the nicknames Jack and Jill, and follow new directions according to their own personalities.  Jack, the sister forced into a strict traditional femininity, instead chooses to apprentice herself and adopts functional, masculine clothing.  Jill, the erstwhile tomboy, takes to a softer life with the Master, living in a fine castle and dressing in opulent gowns.  As the two settle into their respective roles, they drift ever further apart.
I am going to skip to some highlights now that I have gotten the characters to the heart of the story.  They learn more about the world they live in and themselves.  The fantastic world of the Moors is something like a medieval recreation.  The economy is subsistent and feudalistic.  The Master is revealed to be a vampire and Jack's master is a Dr. Frankenstein sort.  Werewolves and sea creatures roam the wilderness outside of the village.  Both girls learn that the Moor is home to many "foundlings" such as themselves, lost children who come from a different existence.  Some of these children find their way home and some live out their lives in the Moors.  Independently, the girls decide to stay on the Moors, each cleaving to her respective master.  Jack wishes to replace the doctor after she learns his trade, and Jill wishes to become a vampire and join the Master in ruling the village.
Something happens to close off the possibility of the girls staying in the world and they must escape back to their own world, having spent five years on the Moors.  The final scene of the novel finds the girls standing in front of their parents and new younger brother, no one sure what to do next.

So, this book does some surprising things.  Throughout the reading, I found myself wondering what the relationship was between the world that the girls came from and the one they have adopted.  This is never answered, which ends up being a point in its favor.  The girls live in a mysterious world that they learn little about.  The reader is placed in the same position of not knowing.  This helps to heighten the tension of the novel.  We know already that the girls don't have much to go back to, but this new world still does not seem satisfactory, but they both choose it.
Part of wondering about the relationship between the worlds is wondering how time functions.  A part of me expected the girls to eventually find their way back and to revert to the 12-year olds they were when they left.  This would fulfill some nursery rhyme type allegory about growing up or self-actualization.  The author doesn't do this.  The problems the girls face are compounded by the fact that they have left their own world to learn new rules in a new place.  Their parents and old world have moved on for five years without them and have, ostensibly, accepted the loss of them.  This actually deepens the allegory because growing up and finding oneself is not a simple quest with a clear goal.  This ending more accurately reflects the confusion of "coming of age" in that one is just as likely to feel the same confusion and misgivings as a new "adult" that one had as a child.  Becoming oneself and reaching adulthood don't solve any problems, they just shift to new sets of problems.  Where the novel leaves off, the girls will need to deal with their ew places, the new brother and the family dynamic that this creates, and struggle to keep reclaiming the personalities that they have fought for.  This is one of the moments that struck me most in reading this book.  The author left me with more to think about after the story ended.  To me, this is a welcome surprise and is one of the reasons that I liked this book so much.
Most of the book adopts the simple language and shallow characterizations of nursery rhymes, so when this last image leaves so much room for nuance, is comes as a surprise itself.  It makes a quick reversal in direction and opens the way for a new interpretation of the preceding story.

Earlier in this post I mentioned a nonironic double-positioning of knowing and unknowing.  What I mean by this is that, when considering a novel or story, the reader projects what kind of story they think it will be, they pretend to know more about the book than they do know.  This helps to set up expectations for what is to come.  This, I think, is actually a really useful heuristic when it comes to apprehending narrative.  This amounts to looking for patterns and building meaning from the way that a particular narrative either conforms to or deviates from familiar patterns.  When narratives surprise us, they deviate from expectations, or perhaps they conform to them in new or unexpected ways.  What this means for the reader is that they are in a state of expectation/anticipation and confirmation or deviation.

In this novel, much of it builds on familiar narrative tropes.  The naming of the girls, the reversal of their positions, their desire to stay in an unfamiliar new home rather than return to an unfulfilling old one all build a momentum for the narrative.  There are several places in the narrative that also disrupt this momentum, but it is the ending that is most jarring.  The surprise at having to re-evaluate earlier expectations of what the novel will convey is what is the more rewarding for it arriving in such an unexpected way. 
This is all back of the envelope narratology and I have not spent too much time fleshing it out, so if it sounds a little out there, I'm not taking responsibility for it.