Product Description

A collection of insightful and uproariously funny non-fiction by the bestselling author of INFINITE JEST - one of the most acclaimed and adventurous writers of our time. A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING...brings together Wallace's musings on a wide range of topics, from his early days as a nationally ranked tennis player to his trip on a commercial cruiseliner. In each of these essays, Wallace's observations are as keen as they are funny. Filled with hilarious details and invigorating analyses, these essays brilliantly expose the fault line in American culture - and once again reveal David Foster Wallace's extraordinary talent and gargantuan intellect.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23944 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Review
'It's the kind of book you can't even put down while brushing your teeth. He's damn good. I take my hat off to him.' GUARDIAN 'Enviably good.' SUNDAY TIMES 'Like sea air, David Foster Wallace is so bracing.' GLASGOW HERALD 'Brilliant.' MAXIM 'There is an astounding amount of freshness, wit and insight here.' GQ 'An exploding star of a novel' SPECTATOR

Spectator
'An exploding star of a novel'

Independent
'Ambitious, accomplished, deeply humorous, brilliant and witty and moving. A literary sensation'

Customer Reviews

Erratic but wonderful
By its very nature (a hodge-podge of random musings, semi-academic essays and travelogues commissioned by glossy magazines), this collection is erratic in tone and occasionally in execution. Yet even at his least engaging and most wilfully opaque, DFW is still incredibly readable, pulling your intellect along as he spins off on any number of tagents. When he's at his MOST engaging, however, he's among the most appealing writers of either fiction or non-fiction at work today. I defy even the biggest DFW cynic to read the title essay, for example, and claim not be alternately amused and weirdly moved throughout its (countless!) diversions and narrative scenic routes.

the best writer around today
Anyone who is reading this having just finished Infinite Jest, I can heartily recommend this book. This was the first Wallace book I read, and it got me hooked. Having read a lot of essays by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Martin Amis, I can honestly say that this is as good as anything by those esteemed writers. Wallace has a knack of making the truly bizarre somehow understandable. The essays are deeply funny, but never sneery or mocking. Wallace is just geniunely baffled by the wierder aspects of American culture (pro sport, Hollywood, agricultural fairs etc), and succeeds in poking good-natured but cutting fun at various excesses in American life. He combines the laugh-out-loud element of PJ O'Rourke with the intelligence and insight of Tom Wolfe. A must read for anyone interested in modern American culture, or who justs want to read a different and original collection of journalism

Disappointing outing from a brilliant writer
After being shelled into submission by "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" I was completely hyped at the prospect of reading this book. Particularly as I'd just read that it left Jonathan Franzen's book of essays "How to be alone" for dead (not that I've read it). Well, past the first couple of pieces I was seriously disappointed. This is not the reinvention-of-the-essay-as-we-know-it that I'd been told to expect. What we have is a mixed bag consisting of one autobiographical fragment, a couple of pieces of journalism-on-assignment, a couple of straight essays, and two hybrid journal-profile-essays.

"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley", which is the opener, comes the closest to achieving the remarkable combination of intellectual intensity with emotional directness I saw in DFW's short stories. It's an honest childhood reminiscence, the only place in this book where we seem to be in the company of a living breathing human being. The second piece "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" is an essay, pure and simple, and rather sober despite the DFW tics (footnoting; self-consciously neurotic patter). DFW's gloss on highbrow American fiction of the last half century or so is both straightforward and insightful, though I really wanted him to show off a little more. His focus is on the way irony has come to imbue almost every aspect of American intellectualism, an awareness that he uses to remarkable effect in his fiction, sometimes by deliberately foreclosing the ironic stance, sometimes by merely bending it to the realm of the what-if-I'm-not-being-ironic. The irony of ironies is that these insights into the blinders of contemporary writing manage to shed an unflattering light on the remainder of the book.

DFW is not a journalist, and not much of a hired gun. By the time he's made it to his second piece on assignment (the title track) he's loosened up a bit and started to hit his straps, but the pattern established in his first journalistic outing, a piece on the Illinois State Fair, establishes some major limitations. For a writer with a feel for persona that operates like a two inch puncture wound, it's inexplicable that the authorial voice is stillborn in the form of a 90's Woody Allen goes grad school. The lack of ingenuity and credibility is breathtaking. It's all the more frustrating as he resorts to the same kind of lazy mickey-taking(albeit filtered through a transparently feigned innocence) he so easily dismisses when talking about the ills of U.S. literature.

DFW the fictionist is a far more effective cultural critic than DFW the essayist. There are some well-argued points, witty moments, subtle insights, nicely painted absurdities, but nothing like the sustained bravura of BIWHM.