Wallace was sent to the adult film industry awards for a magazine, to a Maine lobster festival for a food magazine, and on the road with John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign for another. In each case he filed something considerably stranger and longer than the assignment implied. This collection gathers ten such pieces, spanning literary criticism, political reporting, a dictionary review that turns into an essay on class, and a short account of watching the September 11 attacks on television in small-town Illinois. The footnotes are famous and, on the page, unavoidable.
What it’s about
There is no single thesis, but there is an unmistakable method. Wallace’s habit is to accept an assignment at face value, follow it honestly, and then refuse to stop at the point where a professional writer would normally stop. He keeps asking the next question — usually an ethical or epistemological one — that the genre conventions are designed to prevent anyone asking.
The title essay is the clearest demonstration. Dispatched to cover a festival, he ends up asking whether it is defensible to boil an animal alive for pleasure, works through what is actually known about nociception in crustaceans, notes the ways the question is usually deflected, and then declines to hand the reader a verdict. He does not moralise. He makes it very difficult to go back to not thinking about it.
The same move recurs across the collection. Reviewing a usage dictionary, he turns prescriptive grammar into a question about who gets to speak with authority and what dialects cost their speakers socially. Reviewing a tennis autobiography, he asks why athletes who perform genius are so rarely able to describe it. Covering McCain, he takes the campaign’s central question — is this candidate sincere, and would we recognise sincerity if we saw it — seriously enough to admit he cannot resolve it. The unifying preoccupation is the gap between what people say they are doing and what is really going on, including in the writer himself.
Key ideas
- The assignment as pretext. Wallace uses journalistic commissions as doors into subjects the commissioning editor did not have in mind, which is why a food-festival piece becomes moral philosophy.
- Discomfort as the point. He deliberately withholds resolution. The essays are constructed so the reader has to carry the unresolved question out of the piece rather than dispose of it inside it.
- Self-implication. He consistently includes himself among the people whose motives he is examining, which pre-empts the reader’s obvious objection and gives the moral inquiry its credibility.
- Language as a marker of power. The usage essay reframes correctness as membership: which dialect you were raised in shapes which rooms will take you seriously, a cost borne unevenly.
- The inarticulate expert. His tennis piece argues that the capacity to do something extraordinary and the capacity to explain it draw on unrelated faculties, which is why sports memoirs are so hollow.
- Footnotes as structure. The digressions are not decoration. They let him hold qualifications, second thoughts and counterarguments in view without pretending the main text is tidier than the subject.
Who it’s for
This is for readers who enjoy watching a very fast mind refuse the easy version of a question, and it is probably the best entry point into Wallace’s non-fiction — several essays stand entirely alone. The style is the barrier: the sentences are long, the footnotes are relentless, and the self-awareness can tip into a performance of scruple that some readers find exhausting rather than honest. The pieces are also uneven in reward; the literary reviews assume more interest in their subjects than a general reader may have. But at his best — the title essay, the September 11 piece, the McCain reporting — he does something few essayists manage, which is to make an argument you cannot quite put back down.