David Foster Wallace (photo: Marion Ettlinger)
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In the hands of David Foster Wallace, fiction sometimes feels like a physics experiment. His writing atomizes and analyzes the world, as most of us think we know it, and leaves his characters to spin at odd angles. Whatever expectations a reader might have for coherence and chronology quickly are overtaken by a kind of verbal Brownian motion, the wild zig and zag that marks a Wallace narrative.
Ultimately what brings his stories together and occasionally splits them apart, is the language, the sheer rollercoaster ride of words. Character and plot are present but only as afterthoughts to the verbal gymnastics of his prose. In his new book, he comes down from the vast airy altitudes of meta-fiction and delivers the world in slightly more bite-sized morsels.
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