David Foster Wallace: not an AC/DC fan. One more reason to like him.

When I first came across it I had the assumption that I would have a significant amount to say about this Hairpin post about The Marriage Plot. As it turns out I don't. I have two much smaller things to say:

1. It's remarkable to me the correlation between negative-ish reviews of the book and reviewers who are convinced Leonard is nothing more than a DFW stand-in. In physical description, perhaps. But unless one thinks that "intelligent man who is attractive to women" must stand in for someone in the author's own life and could not possibly be an original or semi-original* creation (paired with, naturally, "intelligent man who has trouble with women"). I don't think Leonard's being an aspiring scientist was accidental, nor do I think the book's ambivalence about whether Leonard was a good scientist was accidental.

2. The thrust of the post, which is that Madeleine is rendered as nothing more than a somewhat vacuous female object to be possessed and/or fought over by men (except for the inconvenient fact that Leonard and Mitchell don't fight over her, ever**), mistakes the novel's bigger themes for failures of characterization. All three of the main characters go through different phases and identities over the course of the book, in search of something to which they can attach themselves--e.g. Madeleine from literature to critical theory to Leonard; Leonard from being a slacker to high achievement to hospitalization to science; Mitchell from Madeleine to academia to world travel to mystical religious enlightenment. Most importantly, all of these attempts to attach oneself to some cause or person fail. This failure, this ruling out of possibilities, is not itself taken in a particularly judgmental way: Eugenides treats it as the process of leaving the world of college and becoming an adult. Madeleine's being rich and beautiful confers on her no more or less advantage than Leonard's being brilliant.

I will leave aside questions about whether it's a faithful recreation of the female experience (about which I would be hopeless to comment anyway) and opt instead to reiterate as conclusion that I think all of the main characters are treated in approximately the same way and given something like the same general character arcs. There may be (and are) flaws in the novel, but I'm not sure that's the one to be looking for.



*Look: Leonard is probably a stand-in for DFW on some level. This does not make "the character of Leonard is obviously a working out of Jeffrey Eugenides' massive jealousy towards and fixation on DFW" a good argument, unless one happens to think Eugenides is not a very good author or unable to use that 'imagination' thing some people have. Javier Cercas in Soldiers of Salamis has a conversation with a Chilean author by the name of Roberto Bolaño who happens to live in Blanes, Spain, where the real Bolaño lived at the time. Even so, I am confident that the character is primarily a fictional creation, whatever real-world facts may be borrowed in the narrative. I am equally confident about Leonard.

**And, in fact, the one conversation the book ever mentions between the two of them is not about Madeleine at all which a. is not what Madeleine thinks and b. is a sort of delicious reverse Bechdel Test.

I quite liked the DFW syllabi and class notes linked here, and I agree with the general spirit of his variations on the standard course syllabus, but I think they're ultimately not very useful as general examples.

Every time I begin to think that maybe this Jonathan Franzen guy might be worth reading,* he goes and does something that makes him seem like a bit of a jerk. The unfortunate thing about his statements about his now-dead friend DFW is that it's very hard to sort out his motivation. I can conceptualize that he's hurt and bewildered by what happened. I can get that he wants to counteract some of the egregious praise that's gone DFW's way, since Dave Wallace is not/should not be a role model. But some of it does feel awfully manufactured, and all seems to be directed at taking his friend down a peg or two--ie there's not a lot of positive reflection on his friendship, there haven't been instances where Franzen admits to having taken a position where DFW was, on later reflection, correct.

Someone should really write a book about those two.


*Even if only because of my maddening need to read everything.

This NY Mag article, ostensibly about Jeffrey Eugenides' new novel (the bad review in the New York Times Review of Books convinced me to get it), talks at length about the writers in the DFW circle. It sounds terrible and yet fascinating at the same time:

Wallace did end up in Syracuse, in a small apartment very near Karr’s place. Karr had split with her husband, and Wallace came for her. Before they even kissed, Karr writes, he had her name tattooed on his arm. He proposed marriage and wrote her ardent letters from blocks away that barely fit in the envelopes. They rented videos like RoboCop from Blockbuster because they both “loved movies where shit blew up,” Karr says. “We laughed our asses off.”

But Wallace was volatile, Karr says, and she was sharp-tongued; their fights became frequent and virulent. Karr is a charismatic raconteur, and the portrait of Wallace that she painted in speaking with me was striking. In one fight, he threw her coffee table at her; in another, he stopped the car in a bad neighborhood and pushed her out, leaving her to walk home. Then he would try to win her back. He once climbed up on her balcony, she says, to “beat on the door like in the fucking Graduate.” This is not the familiar Wallace, wounded and ever sweet. Years later he wrote Karr a letter of apology, she says, for “being such a dick.”

While they were seeing each other, he also credited her for transforming him as he worked on Infinite Jest. He once wrote to her about the “long thing I want to do” and said that when he looked at material he’d written earlier, it wasn’t as “awful” as he feared, but it was “way too concerned with presenting itself as witty arty writing instead of effecting any kind of emotional communication with people. I feel like I have changed, learned so much about what good writing ought to be. Much of what I’ve learned I’ve learned from you, more from the example of your work and your feelings about your work than from any direct advice. You’re good about not giving advice; you just live, and let me watch.”

And sort of funny for how novelistic it all sounds. At least until I realized that this is probably what you'll find if you scratch the surface of any group of intellectual and upwardly-mobile friends. It also makes the comparative success of the figures involved less surprising to me.