I was late to the David Foster Wallace party. I unfortunately only began to read his work after his untimely death. In his wake, I read so many glowing paeans to his writing in various publications that I wanted to see what the hoopla was all about.
So about two years ago, Shipping Out was the first piece of his that I read. And as I’ve now re-read it, it’s interesting to note that my reactions are similar. This may sound silly or glowing, but there’s a kind of amazement that I feel to be able to find myself invested in something as simple-minded and trite as a Caribbean cruise.
Reading Wallace’s work is more of an interactive and entertaining experience than a feat of intellectual absorption (although it is that too). Reading Wallace is different than a typical reading experience in that it requires a little extra work on my behalf. Wallace’s sentences have this way of making me feel intellectually deficient yet privileged to have access to his mind. Or to put it more plainly, reading Shipping Out, and every other Wallace piece I’ve read, is a weird dichotomy of constantly reaching for my dictionary and flipping through endless footnotes but also laughing out loud at the absurdity of everyday happenstances – things that take no dictionary to interpret.
Here’s an example what I mean. This sentence is from toward the end of the section titled, “Pampered to Death, Part II,” when he’s become increasingly paranoid about being monitored by the cruise staff and how it is that they know when he leaves his room and how it is that the maid, Petra, keeps his room sparkling clean despite all of his attempts to leave it soiled:
Then I leave the cabin with exactly the same expression and appurtenances as before and this time stay hidden for thirty-one minutes and then haul ass back – again no sight of Petra, but now 1009 is sterilized and gleaming, and there’s a mint on the pillow’s new case.
So, this may not be a quintessential Wallace sentence, because it doesn’t employ a colon to and jump into an unexpected deeper level. But I wanted to look at this sentence to make a point. I have a decent-sized vocabulary but when I read Wallace’s work I find myself learning a new word every couple of pages. In the sentence above I had to look up ‘appurtenance,’ which means an accessory. (Maybe I’m dumb, but I just plain didn’t know that word. Other words I learned from this article include: glabrous, simulacrum, sommelier, sybaritic, and lapidary – among others.) But the sentence above illustrates this dual role that Wallace inhabits so gracefully, the role of brainiac in one sense and a funny , everday type of guy in another sense. The point being, that not too many writers will employ a word like ‘appurtenance’ and a phrase like ‘haul ass’ in the same sentence.
That’s just a single example of a pattern that repeats itself throughout Shipping Out. Wallace’s language inhabits that duality when he makes his first major move in the essay. When he describes the former cruise attendee who committed suicide, Wallace says the young man, “did a half gainer from the top deck,” which is the sort of phrase someone might use to casually to describe a suicide while nursing a beer on a barstool. Then in the same paragraph – Wallace is pushing the intellect of the piece making the deeper connection that a cruise ship is a place of despair.
There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir I felt despair. (First paragraph, Pampered to Death, Part I)
Other Notes on Reading:
- In the hands of another author (or pseudo-journalist) this piece could have been overwhelmingly snarky or suffered from forced irony, but that was not the case. Even as Wallace takes his shots at the Cruising subculture – there’s an underlying type of respect and dignity that remains. Like, no doubt, Wallace saw over 20 makes of rubber thongs, was forced into a conga line, and found himself eating nightly dinners with South Floridian elderly folks endlessly discussing the quality of food, but his humor is just that – it’s humor. In my opinion, he’s not making fun of the culture. It’s almost like he caricaturizes it a la Hunter S. Thompson, except there’s a genuine realness to the portrayal of his characters. (My favorite description may have been when he describes the couples walking with the grain of the rolling and pitching waves supporting each other like “high school steadies.”) And it’s not a caricaturization, it’s just an incredibly vivid portrayal. In the end if he’s over-embellishing anything – it’s his own forlornness; however, that seems to be genuine as well. It’s odd that with his endless details and listing of the characteristics of the ship, the cruisers and the staff – it almost seems hyperbolic. But it’s not. I think it’s just a reflection of the hyper-activity of Wallace’s mind.
- Before I began to read David Foster Wallace, my literary intake was heavy on guys like Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway and Charles Bukowski, masters of the short, economic sentence. Writing short sentences, in turn, was a practice I emulated. But, when I read Wallace – he made me think about it differently. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why. I do think some of his paragraph-length sentences are overboard (no pun intended.) Though, in the same sense, it’s a crucial part of his voice and it suits him perfectly. One thing, I’ve learned (I think) from Wallace is that he uses the colon to extend a thought or an idea – and pushes what would be an otherwise simple subject into the next level of thought: it’s something I may one day try to emulate as well.
- And finally, I’m sad that David Foster Wallace is no longer with us. He was a great one.
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