The Review of Contemporary Fiction

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments by David Foster Wallace
Trey Strecker

David Foster Wallace. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Little, Brown, 1997. 353pp. $23.95.

Anyone not enamored by last year’s spectacular Infinite Jest might suspect that a lame self-referential joke lies buried in the title of this collection, but the essays themselves prove that David Foster Wallace is a comic genius who need not resort to such pandering. Previously published between 1992-1996, these seven essays address an array of topics, including Wallace’s misadventures “In Quest of Managed Fun” aboard a mass-market luxury Caribbean cruise, a piece which could effectively be retitled “Fear and Loathing on the Love Boat.” During his visit to the Illinois State Fair in “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All,” Wallace navigates his way among pungent livestock and nauseating rides as competitors for the Blue Ribbon dessert mistake the Harper’s on his press credentials for Harper’s Bazaar (the one with recipes)—a confusion Wallace encourages until he can ingest his fill of prize-winning desserts. In addition to this kind of “pith-helmeted anthropological reporting,” Wallace recounts how growing up in the geometric grid of the Midwest’s Tornado Alley helped him develop a talent for calculating wicked angles and playing unpredictable winds to his advantage on the competitive junior tennis circuit. All of the essays evoke themes Wallace explores in his fiction, such as mass culture, spectacle, desire, expertise, control, and conditioning. Two profiles, about filmmaker David Lynch on the set of Lost Highway and tennis player Michael Joyce on the pro tour, provide dazzling philosophical investigations into the nature of artistry and excellence. The book only contains two literary forays: a review of the death of the author question and “E Unibus Plurum: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Wallace’s critique of a postmodern legacy of thirty-plus years of self-conscious irony. Originally published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, the latter stands out as the highlight of the collection, an absolutely indispensible text for students of twentieth-century American literature and culture. While these invigorating excursions into lit crit are outrageously entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny, his journalistic observations are fresh and thoughtful; both display the boundless energy of Wallace’s hyperkinetic prose and erudite attention. One fervently hopes Wallace will reconsider the “never” in his title, because the essays here are genuinely fun. [Trey Strecker]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments by David Foster Wallace Trey Strecker David Foster Wallace. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Little, Brown, 1997. 353pp. $23.95. Anyone not enamored by last year’s spectacular Infinite Jest might suspect that a lame self-referential joke lies buried in the title of this collection, but the essays themselves prove that David Foster Wallace is a comic genius who need not resort to such pandering. Previously published between 1992-1996, these seven essays address an array of topics, including Wallace’s misadventures “In Quest of Managed Fun” aboard a mass-market luxury Caribbean cruise, a piece which could effectively be retitled “Fear and Loathing on the Love Boat.” During his visit to the Illinois State Fair in “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All,” Wallace navigates his way among pungent livestock and nauseating rides as competitors for the Blue Ribbon dessert mistake the Harper’s on his press credentials for Harper’s Bazaar (the one with recipes)—a confusion Wallace encourages until he can ingest his fill of prize-winning desserts. In addition to this kind of “pith-helmeted anthropological reporting,” Wallace recounts how growing up in the geometric grid of the Midwest’s Tornado Alley helped him develop a talent for calculating wicked angles and playing unpredictable winds to his advantage on the competitive junior tennis circuit. All of the essays evoke themes Wallace explores in his fiction, such as mass culture, spectacle, desire, expertise, control, and conditioning. Two profiles, about filmmaker David Lynch on the set of Lost Highway and tennis player Michael Joyce on the pro tour, provide dazzling philosophical investigations into the nature of artistry and excellence. The book only contains two literary forays: a review of the death of the author question and “E Unibus Plurum: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Wallace’s critique of a postmodern legacy of thirty-plus years of self-conscious irony. Originally published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, the latter stands out as the highlight of the collection, an absolutely indispensible text for students of twentieth-century American literature and culture. While these invigorating excursions into lit crit are outrageously entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny, his journalistic observations are fresh and thoughtful; both display the boundless energy of Wallace’s hyperkinetic prose and erudite attention. One fervently hopes Wallace will reconsider the “never” in his title, because the essays here are genuinely fun. [Trey Strecker]

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