Luxagraf

I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace’s new book¹ Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity for a few days now and I’m happy to report that it’s everything you would expect from the author of Infinite Jest. And I mean that in the best way possible.

Wallace tends to provoke strong sentiments among readers. As my friend Mike put it when I mentioned to him I was reading the new Wallace book:

I think it’s funny that these new authors (also Eggers) can be pretentious and patronizing, and yet come off as sincere and knowledgeable. It’s all about convoluting the prose to the point where you’ll either laugh or decide that these fools don’t know what they are talking about.

Generally speaking I agree with Mike. I never finished Infinite Jest and I actually love really long books. I never finished it because it felt too arrogant in ways that’s difficult to put my finger on. Yes there’s the footnotes thing, but I didn’t mind that so much as the less obvious things like tone and semi-elitist humor.

On the other hand I think Wallace is an amazing essayist. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again is a great collection of writing, so I was a bit more excited about this new work than say a new novel. Still essays are one thing, pop science another. Pop-science is treacherous ground for any writer, but doubly treacherous of non-qualified writer. Steven Hawking writing pop-science runs the same risk of oversimplifying important complexities that Wallace does, but Hawking inspires trust because we recognize that, if he weren’t trying to render things in our language, he could, and has, explained them rather well to his colleagues in highly specialized languages. Wallace may have had some background in math and philosophy, but we know him as a writer of fiction and essays, not as a mathematician. At the same time I am also not a mathematician so I can’t read it like one. For me it comes off more as a very extended essay, as much about the vague notion of infinity as the pure math correllaries.

Naturally I keep thinking of software analogies, so here comes my biggest one: If Cantor wrote the binaries for infinity, Wallace is releasing the package installer. What Wallace has done is create a strange middle ground between the blissfully wrong consumer science of the evening news and the hard proofs of the source. The hallmark of consumer science is that it brings it down to analogies you’re familiar with or can at least grasp. Pure math has no analogies by definition; it’s total abstraction from what we might call everyday objects. While actually doing the math requires years of intensive study, pop-science allows us to grasp the conceptual ideas involved even if we don’t understand it beyond the metaphor. The danger of course is that we mistake the metaphor for an understanding of the abstraction. But in Everything, Wallace has done something more than just distill the work into digestible form, he might have actually gone and invented a form.

But first let’s address the detractors. Of course Wallace isn’t qualified and anyone who’s run across his occassional Harper’s or McSweeneys’ pieces knows he isn’t afraid of coming off as overly pretentious in both his style (do we really need to have the w/r/t abbreviation of with regard to—is it that much shorter?) and subject matter. Perhaps the book is not perfect. Perhaps it contains technical errors, so do plenty of ‘non-fiction’ works, perhaps what we’re missing is that Wallace had the balls to do it at all.

After about a hundred pages I’ve realized that what Wallace is trying to do is put the art back in science, not with the sort of hyper-intellectualized soul searching of Fritj Capra, but with the actual form of delivery. Wallace comes to the reader without the background of years of pure math research, but with years of complex thinking and writing. And yes it is worth pointing out that at times Wallace can get carried away with something perhaps best defined by my castagraf co-editor as ‘boyish enthusiasm.’ And mark the boyish, not childish enthusiasms. And she’s right, Wallace and Dave Eggers et al (you pick ‘em) are very much concerned with the dilemmas, pains, paranoias, fears, and joys of a certain upper-middle-class white male position in American culture. Of course it makes sense that they are such experts at and so in love with these ideas because they themselves are of the same social intellectual position and we all know what Hemingway said. I bring this up not to pigeon hole them or critique them for the subjects they have chosen, but to point out that the stance Wallace often takes is very postmodern, often (though not as much in this book) hyperself-aware and yes, male.

But part of what makes Wallace interesting to read is that his enthusiasm, however boyish it may be, is contagious and engaging. Wallace believes in what he writes and desperately wants to connect with his audience in a way that transcends the medium he is working with. At the same time he’s hyperaware of the expectations of his readers. In this latest work he has gone to great lengths to try and establish some procedure for reading without having to confront the actual math. And yet he can’t let himself skip the math because he’s too concerned with being thorough, and avoiding the traps of commercial science’s manipulative ‘black box’ qualities. Even Hawking at times presents the ‘black box’ approach to theory where rather complex ideas are asserted as defacto true. Wallace wants to open the black box without losing the less dedicated reader, and if you ignore his overly complex scheme of organizing the book, he largely succeeds.

In Everything Wallace tackles one of the most complex abstractions that exists and he manages to write a history and explanation of infinity that is both readable and interesting, which is no easy feat. Everything that makes him a great essayist is here as well. And it’s a difficult thing to put your finger on, but I would sum it up by saying that he can write critically about extremely complex ideas without dumbing them down and more importantly without coming across in what I like to call a grad studentish way. That is, the depth of his knowledge/understanding conveys a familiarity that can’t be had simply by reading math texts, but is only acquired by actually turning things over in one’s head for a while. It’s only after seeing things from several, possibly infinite, angles that you can convey the kind of intimacy and understanding that Wallace pulls off in Everything. In this sense he does build, or perhaps pull you into, a kind of trust that, while maybe not as compelling as Hawkings’ might be, moves beyond the rout memorization of facts that a lesser writer might throw out. And it’s in this sense that I feel like he’s trying in small ways to pull science back into the realm of art, if only to simply show that non-technically trained people can have a deep, if not complete, understanding of science, just as one can see a sunset both as a beautiful phenomenon to behold and as a complex display of the laws governing wavelengths, curvature of the earth and atmospheric distortion.

What is so great about some of Wallace’s shorter essays is his willingness to undercut the reader expectations and his own, sometimes patronizing, editorial slants. For instance, the remarkable title piece from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again involves Wallace being sent on a cruise ship by the editors of a prominent magazine. I can already hear the condescension dripping off his white teeth onto the suntan lotion slick foredecks. And yet Wallace avoids that easy tactic by undercutting his own observational slant. Rather than, as a lesser writer might have done, simply regarding cruise ship denizens with the sort of New York superiority that his editors no doubt expected of him, he ends up ridiculing himself and the reader for thinking that such an elitist stance is any better than that of the self-entitled tourist basking fat in the sun.

Wallace pulls off something similar in this latest work. He is both well researched and intimately familiar with his subject in a way that comes off as both informed and casual. I can’t even do that half the time in these columns. He has some unique ability to talk about complexities without coming off as rout memorization or regurgitations that one might expect. At the same time, if you have no background in math at all, the book will very likely be over your head, or perhaps even better it may send you to library with a copy of Wallace’s bibliography in hand.

A few years ago Wallace gave a fantastic interview in which he said: “in dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.”

Which just about perfectly describes the other book I’ve been reading, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. Rather than offer a review on top of another review I’ll simply say that the book does, on several levels, apply “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow.”

And like Wallace, with three names he’s either bound for even greater things or he’s going to kill a president. Probably the former.

1. 2. no review of a David Foster Wallace book would be complete without a footnote.↩