Stephen Covey

But the food for thought that characterizes all of Wallaces work. A consistently deep and satisfying author, this is a book best consumed over time so that one may consider all he offers on a wide range of topics. The final essay, "Just Asking", may well be the finest bit of prose written about 9/11 and the "War on Terror" in the 11 years since that day.

So, a writer you like dies. Lets say that they die young. Once you get over the tragedy, you can be mad. It makes sense. You wanted this person to continue to entertain you until the end of your days.

Now that theyre dead, they cant do that, and you get angry.

So of course the question to ask is: does this person have anything sitting around that can be issued?
David Foster Wallace was nice enough to leave some droppings. First there was an incomplete novel, "The Pale King". It was about a Midwestern IRS employee in the 80s. It was about as fun as splitting together the footnotes to Infinite Jest with the tax code. I couldnt tell you much more. I only got 30 pages in.
For the truth though, I didnt like IJ. I spent a whole summer struggling through it wondering what was so great about all of this - finding flashes of brilliance while working on my carpal tunnel problem. In fact, I have liked DFW more for his essays than his fiction. His two collections that came out while he was alive popped with verve and straight-up awesomeness. He was a more literate version of Chuck Klosterman.

So it is my luck that "Both Flesh and Not" is a collection of his nonfiction.
It is good.
In places.
With caveats.
It is not an organic whole. Some of the pieces are well-thought and developed criticism or insightful sports criticism, while there is a couple of paragraphs that were put up on the internet in the late nineties. This is more of an assemblage or a collage, but it does show the breadth and depth of DFWs mind and concerns.
Im not going to go piece-by-piece, but one of the last works in the collection I think contains a valediction and a summation of his life (Though utterly impossible): "In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help." (Deciderization 2007 - A Special Report, 316)
We miss you, Dave.

Outside of a couple of essays that involved Men’s tennis that are dated to the era but still worth reading,these have gotten better with age.The next to last essay on Decridization 2007 is excellent,and though it was a poke at 2007 cultural figures,it holds up well in what is now the information overload age.Another essay on male sexuality in the post-Aids era is excellent,it fuels the Gen X narrative that we are living in a World that was destroyed by boomers but we got the blame.DFW is a voice that is sadly lost at this time of Chaos.

I had read some of the essays in this collection in other places. My first ever introduction to DFW was in his introduction to the Best American Essays that talked about how one goes about deciding what essay is a best essay. Ive read a lot of Wallaces work but I think I finally figured out his Shtick, Wallace will find a very complex subject and then painstakingly make it simple and explain it to you. He will then point out what is absurd or foolish about said subject and leave you feeling like you are the smartest person in the room because you "get" what is so funny about something that you never knew existed a few paragraphs before. His talent for this is on display here in his essays on tennis, language and an outstanding essay about Terminator 2 which turns into an indictment on feminism in films, James Cameron as a sellout etc. Wallace is also at his best as a sensitive human being in essays about our post 9/11 reaction and how we have turned sex into a commodity. Im proudly going to keep this next to my almost complete library of DFW stuff and Im glad I took the time to read it.

Any Wallace publication is an event especially since his unique voice has been prematurely silenced. Unfortunately, Both Flesh and Not is a not altogether successful effort sweeping together previously uncollected pieces. The fifteen essays, some as thin as a few pages in length, are supplemented by many pages of word lists that Wallace apparently kept updating on his computer.

More than half of the essays are devoted to literary subjects including an NYT Book Review of a Borges biography, the introduction to the 2007 edition of Best American Essays and a lengthy, and somewhat challenging, discussion of David Marksons Wittgensteins Mistress. In another entry, Wallace presents the young novelists of the eighties as products of university training and television ubiquity before predicting that, despite these challenges, his peers "are going to make art, maybe great art, maybe even great art change."

The most accessible works in this book, however, include a tennis piece originally titled "Federer as Religious Experience." On full display here are Wallaces deep knowledge of and love for the game of tennis. In his paean to the skill of Federer, Wallace tells of the evolution of the power baseline game made possible by improved racket technology while giving some idea of what it looks like to stare down the barrel of a 90 mph volley in real life as opposed to the foreshortened view of a television screen.

Wallace improbably makes a readable entry out of Terminator 2. This movie has seminal impact, he argues, because it is the first great example of special effects porn (6 scenes of action between vast stretches of banality.) Wallace posits the Inverse Cost and Quality Law: "The more lavish and spectacular a movies special effects, the shittier the movie is going to be in all non-F/X aspects."

His genius is most conspicuously on display in his Wittgenstein analysis and as he brings his own unique perspective to often discussed public issues like the HIV virus and 9/11. Wallace poses unasked questions from unusual angles. In Back in New Fire, the author wonders if the danger of heterosexual AIDS will increase sexual passion by adding risk. "Nobodyd claim that a lethal epidemic is a good thing," says Wallace, but "an erotically charged human existence requires impediments to passion, prices for choices." A short entry about 9/11 asks whether we should consider a minimum baseline vulnerability to terrorist attack as part of the price of the American idea much as highway deaths are an assumed cost of the mobility and autonomy conferred by the automobile.

"We need narrative like we need space-time. Its a built in thing," submits Wallace. His fiction and non fiction support this vision. Both Flesh and Not is not his finest effort but it is Wallace, and that makes it readable at worst and, in its finest moments, compelling.

Smarter people than I can describe DFWs incandescent prose. But did they notice the geeky little pun in the last two words of the title, like I just did after like ten years? (Its a Boolean operator, "AND NOT").

Like Elvis, DFW will never die. (He haunts libraries rather than Wal-Mart parking lots.) Rock on, DFW.

This is one of three narrative nonfiction / essay collections published by the brilliant, sui generis David Foster Wallace. A Supposedly Fun Thing and Consider the Lobster are both better than this one, but Both Flesh and Not is still a fabulous read that--like all his books--somehow manages [usually with incredible success] to be entertaining and deeply thought-provoking at the same time. There are a few pieces Id consider duds, and it seems like this one is quite a bit less suffused with verve and significance and pure joie de vivre than those prior two. Given that this was published after his death, if Im not mistaken, you dont have Wallaces rabid perfectionism to sift out the duds. There are a few self-indulgent pieces that dont offer a whole lot--at least compared with the typical dizzyingly spectacular standards set by this wordslinger-god. Still very enjoyable though, and worth reading [after his first two essay collections, that is].

The essays in this book range from light fare to an in depth analysis of a novel based on Wittgensteins atomic philosophy. The title refers to a lovely piece about Roger Federer and the US Open, an amazing synthesis of a genius writing about a genius. Every piece is thoughtful, slightly sarcastic, and just plain beautiful.

And so it was that after a long wait, David Foster Wallaces final novel hit the world with a crash! Then, perhaps knocked from the trees by the Pale Kings vibrations, came this. If this were another author Id have given this collection 1 star, but even when Wallace was more interested in showing off how smart he was than in actually saying something with that rocket ship of a brain, he is still an incredibly thought-provoking read. I read this hot on the heels of D.T. Maxs biography of Wallace, and the early essays especially feel like ideas that Wallace himself later retreated from and thinking he tried to rectify in his later work. The best piece in here is probably the Federer article from the NY Times Play magazine which is available for free. Check it out; Googles a thing. While this isnt as transparent a cynical cash grab as "This is Water," it doesnt feel like it could be of too much interest to anyone outside Wallace historians, of which there must be at least, what, 30? If youre interested in seeing what all the fuss is about, I highly recommend picking up "Consider the Lobster" instead and moving on to "Oblivion" to see if his fiction writing is for you. If you read Wallaces entire oeuvre and miss this one, youre not missing anything much.

DFW is my favorite author. This was a nice addition to my bookshelf. The essays cover a huge range of time in DFWs career and most I had not read before.

My biggest complaint is the layout of the word lists that precede each essay. They are interesting and fun to look at, but I do not think the cross-page layout is not the most effective choice.

If you are a fan of DFWs nonfiction, you must read this book.