So after ditching the Peace I reverted to unpatriotic type. The very few people who read this blog regularly will know that DFW is one of my very few favourite writers, so it might seem weird I hadn't already read this. I think I worried it wouldn't be very good, as he wrote it so young and amidst his academic studies. I imagined it as a sort of over-learned, derivative-without-knowing-it kind of thing. Very stupid and odd to have thought that, really, especially as I remember being really keen to read Pynchon's 'Slow Learner,' for example.
Anyway, I'm glad I hadn't already read it, because it's brilliant and I feel both thrilled and comforted to be back in safe hands. Does that mean I'm on the 'comfort the disturbed' side of Wallace's fiction teacher's equation about good fiction? Anyway, like Pynchon and Perec, he's such a nice writer to be living with. It does feel like the work of a young man, but it's also reminding me just what a great writer he was, just in the traditional sense of ideas, character, plot, dialogue and prose.
I know from reading interviews with him years back that he only rated about a quarter of Pynchon's work, but the influence here seems really strong - no bad thing for me. There's the potentially signifying names; Biff Diggerence, Stonecipher, Rick Vigorous, and even at the early stage I've reached, there's the slightly shadowy Stonecipheco organisation.
It's long too. Nice and long.
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