New York Magazine's Vulture blog is running a discussion panel about a recently published long-form interview of David Foster Wallace. The interview was conducted in 1996 or thereabouts, around the time Infinite Jest came out. It will probably be quite some time before I get around to reading it, for the following reason, which was offered by Garth Risk Hallberg:
The urge to turn our dead artists into motivational speakers is perhaps a symptom of the peculiarly American disease Wallace is concerned to treat in his fiction. It works well enough for pop music, which after all is an art already made out of sound bites; I'm as heartened as the next guy when I pass that ride on Coney Island with an airbrushed Tupac and Biggie presiding over the kiddie cars, friends in death, as they couldn't be in life. But as someone who was imaginary friends with David Foster Wallace, there's something unsettling about the compelling simulacrum this book offers.
It's maybe unfair to pit an interview against a novel this way, or to judge a book by its cover. But if you're really interested in Wallace's "astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world," and are new to it, Vulture readers, don't start with this book, and don't listen to the revisionists who tell you DFW's journalism is his great achievement. Get thee to a bookstore, and go read Infinite Jest.
I don't have enough global experience to know if this is an exclusively American danger, but a book-length interview seems like a way to try to get around wrestling with the books and stories and essays.
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