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Stephen J. Burn, Ed.: Conversations with David Foster Wallace

2013; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

2374-6629

Steven Moore,

Short Stories in Global Literature

Stephen J. Burn, ed. Conversations with David Foster Wallace. UP of Mississippi, 2012.186 pp. Paperback, $25.00. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou, eds. The Legacy of David Foster Wallace. U of Iowa P, 2012. 270 pp. Paperback, $19.95. The only upside to the tragically premature death of David Foster Wallace in September 2008 is an acceleration of books on his work, a rush to judgment to commemorate his spectacular achievement and to locate his place in contemporary American literature. First came David Lipsky's book-length interview tape-recorded in 1996, Although of Course You End up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (2010), which might not otherwise have ever seen print. On its heels came Consider David Foster Wallace (also 2010), a collection of conference papers edited by David Hering, and then in the spring of 2012 there appeared the two books under review, along with a revised edition of Stephen Burn's 2003 book David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide. D. T. Max published Every Love Story Is a Ghost Store: A Life of David Foster Wallace in August 2012, and by the time this review appears, another critical study or two will probably be forthcoming. I was surprised to learn in Stephen Burn's introduction to Conversations with David Foster Wallace that the novelist gave over seventy interviews during his relatively short career, especially since Wallace didn't enjoy them or think he was a particularly good at them (though he was). Burn has selected twenty-one of the best, ranging from one conducted in 1987 shortly after the publication of his first novel, The Broom of the System, to a brief talk with the Wall Street Journal four months before he died. Most were done in conjunction with publication of new books; they are arranged chronologically here, resulting in a book-by-book commentary by Wallace on his work, and a register of his growing fame, especially after Infinite Jest came out (1996) and he became regarded as a kind of voice of his generation. (He didn't think so, though, again, he was sort of was). For the most often-quoted interview Wallace ever gave, the one with Larry McCaffery published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, Burn went back to the original transcripts and added around 2,000 words, making it even more invaluable. The book ends not with Wallace's last interview but with the obituary-essay David Lipsky published in Rolling Stone a few weeks after Wallace's suicide, which quotes from the then-unpublished interview he did in spring of 1996. It goes without saying that Conversation with David Foster Wallace is an essential book for Wallace critics, but it will be of great interest to anyone interested in late 20th-century American fiction, of which he was both a stellar practitioner and a perceptive theorist. As the title suggests, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace is largely concerned with what Wallace bequeathed to fiction. It is a creatively curated collection, mixing academic essays with memorials, tributes, and interviews, with contributions from novelists as well as critics (and one librarian). Around two-thirds of the contents have been published before, most within the last four years since Wallace's death: there are remarks from the memorial services that were held in New York and Illinois, a few Web publications, two brief interviews (not in Burn's book), and the foreword Dave Eggars wrote for the tenth anniversary edition of Infinite Jest--all interleaved under three main subjects (History, Aesthetics, Community). …