Book Review: Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

The author describes his own work well: in the beginning of Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (a sort of indieish title that is never explained or used within the book UPDATE: see the comments: I'm an idiot. Buy the book anyway.), he says of its subject that “this is like the DVD extras” and he’d recommend you tackle the main stuff, that is Infinite Jest and David Foster Wallace. And most people reading the book undoubtedly also enjoy Wallace’s books and essays, so it’s a bit of a futile advisory to someone who’s already reading the words on the printed page. But since you’re reading it here digitally, the words explain the book perfectly: the transcripts of the long, days-long road trip that the author David Lipsky took with David Foster Wallace are fascinating if you’re a Wallacologist as I am.

The book displays the Wallace that I’ve loved to read—as Lipsky notes in the preface, Wallace has an extraordinary ability to speak in well-turned prose—and displays his remarkable humanizing ability. It’s a bit odd to read at the time, but makes sense in retrospect, that Lipsky considered Wallace utterly charming and incredibly socially skilled. The impression you’d get, reading him, is perhaps that he was a nerd—and some of his essays explicitly confirm that—but apparently he was quite charismatic. But the effect Wallace has on his fans is to convince you that he is thinking with you (and already, on some level, thought it out) as you are thinking with him: it’s what you might call his voice, smart, erudite and yet informal all at once. So perhaps it’s not surprising for Wallace to go on a long discussion about how fans in autograph lines believe that Wallace is somehow their friend through reading his books and they understand him intimately…Wallace chalks this up to a fate shared by all famous authors, but think of the other famous literary authors: who thinks Roth speaks for them? who thinks Zadie Smith speaks for them? Very few, I’d wager, though I haven’t taken a scientific poll. No, that quality was rare even among rare people, and Wallace had it.

The other quality Wallace has always been known for is his encyclopedic knowledge: Wallace could write well about tennis, and did; he could write well about language, and did; he could write well about politics, and did…and the same for movies, books, morality, lobsters…So it’s surprising to see Wallace surprised by his lack of knowledge: Lipsky seems to be an expert in literary history and is able to cite famous quotations from Nabokov and Shakespeare and what have you off the top of his head, and Wallace wonders at that ability of his, odd given Wallace always seemed like the kind of guy who could rattle off facts off of the top of his head until kingdom come.

Wallace’s extraordinary ability, when he was writing, was that he had an imagination that seemed to encompass everything. The emotional range of Infinite Jest from halfway house to tennis court is reminiscent of the old realists writing about a whole world; an imagined one that’s part satire and part emotional testimony of what we might become, but a whole world nonetheless…Wallace was certain, to hear him tell it in the book, that he could do better, and perhaps the elements of his great novel don’t cohere as well as they should, but they still fit together well. There’s a section of the book where Wallace worries about his next novel, about taking money for it, about beginning it in general, and it’s clear the topic weighed on him even then, in a moment that he perhaps should’ve felt most satisfied. In a too-neat version of the romantic artist tale he would’ve deplored, as he makes clear, he never finished the novel. Which is why these transcripts were released. It’s a poor substitute: read the man first.