[JadeNB]

Because I find the title gives no indication what to expect, the author is David Foster Wallace, and here's the first paragraph:

> Because I am a long-time rabid fan of tennis in general and Tracy Austin in particular, I've rarely looked forward to reading a sports memoir the way I looked forward to Ms. Austin's Beyond Center Court: My Story, ghosted by Christine Brennan and published by Morrow. This is a type of mass-market book—the sports-star-"with"-somebody autobiography—that I seem to have bought and read an awful lot of, with all sorts of ups and downs and ambivalence and embarrassment, usually putting these books under something more highbrow when I get to the register. I think Austin's memoir has maybe finally broken my jones for the genre, though.

On further reading, wow, that's pretty savage. Sure seems disproportionate to me. For example, I wonder if you can be as outraged as DFW that:

> The author's primary allegiance seems to be to her family and friends.

as opposed to that allegiance being to the reader, whom she owes because, it seems, of the reader's interest in her:

> Obviously, a good commercial memoir's first loyalty has got to be to the reader, the person who's spending money and time to access the consciousness of someone he wishes to know and will never meet.

In fact, as someone who has at times enjoyed DFW immensely, it's hard to imagine a writer who writes more for himself than DFW, so the complaint comes across as a bit off-base to me.

[aasasd]

The essay in fact makes one salient point: if athletes' life stories and interviews are often unbelievably vapid, perhaps it's because athletes don't have much of a mind for anything beyond perfecting one thing that they do well. Specifically they don't do much self-reflection in poetic and witty terms.

I was reminded of this essay when listening to Lewis Hamilton's interview for the ‘Beyond the Grid’ podcast. I vaguely dreaded this very prospect in advance, but Hamilton really shamelessly overshot my expectations, it's almost a Hollywood-esque story of perseverance by the whole family. Guess I'll stick with watching the man's pole laps, they're way more satisfying.

[GavinMcG]

But DFW writes for himself by doing what he's demanding: exposing his consciousness, his self-commentary, his inner life.

Also, that line ("The author's primary allegiance seems to be to her family and friends") is unequivocally ironic. "Seems to be"? As though it's a surprise? DFW knew what he was doing. If anything the line is an indictment of his (and our) indignation at not getting access to Austin's consciousness and lived experience for the cost of a paperback.

[JadeNB]

> Also, that line ("The author's primary allegiance seems to be to her family and friends") is unequivocally ironic. "Seems to be"? As though it's a surprise? DFW knew what he was doing. If anything the line is an indictment of his (and our) indignation at not getting access to Austin's consciousness and lived experience for the cost of a paperback.

I'm sure that there is some of the subtext you mention in it—this being DFW, I'm sure there's every kind of subtext imaginable in it—but I'd be more inclined to buy that it wasn't also a fully meant indictment of the author if it weren't part of a pages-long attack that, though it could surely be profitably directed at the genre, is also, to my mind excessively, personal. You can be ironic all you want, but "there's little sign in this narrator of the frontal-lobe activity required for outright deception" is just mean.

[GavinMcG]

It sounds as though "just mean" is an obvious impeachment in your view, and if your position is that we shouldn't write and publish mean things, then...well, that's fair.

I'll agree it's mean. But in many ways I think the piece teaches worthwhile lessons by being very specific, which may also be excessively personal. For example, the novel idea of the author occupying a reality that "is not just un- but anti-real" doesn't land without the preceding litany of cliches. That sets up the next couple pages, which asks how we should read this sort of unreliable narrator, and proposes the explanation that maybe she's just that stupid. You objected to this—the "frontal lobe activity" bit—but so did DFW, rejecting that explanation and calling it "literally incredible" then proving it with examples.

I don't think that arc makes much sense in the abstract. And the specificity is even more necessary in the next move, from page 148 to 151, making the larger point about the depth and potential that existed in her specific story. And that, of course, gives us a grounding to consider the broader questions: DFW acknowledges that "neither Austin nor her book is unique" and turns to the central question: why the fact that athletes are "stunningly inarticulate" is "always so bitterly disappointing," which is about the genre.

The conclusion—the last four paragraphs of the piece—isn't just dusting over the meanness. The possibilities discussed on the last page are real ones and also deeply troubling to intelligent people, DFW included, who derive a lot of self-worth from their "interior struggle."

[JadeNB]

> It sounds as though "just mean" is an obvious impeachment in your view, and if your position is that we shouldn't write and publish mean things, then...well, that's fair.

I was advancing it as a rebuttal to what I took to be the claim that "The author's primary allegiance seems to be to her family and friends" is entirely ironic, which you did not explicitly advance. If you were claiming only that the line was ironic in part (while also being a criticism of the author), then I suppose I can agree with that, but then this:

> Also, that line ("The author's primary allegiance seems to be to her family and friends") is unequivocally ironic. "Seems to be"? As though it's a surprise? DFW knew what he was doing. If anything the line is an indictment of his (and our) indignation at not getting access to Austin's consciousness and lived experience for the cost of a paperback.

doesn't seem like a rebuttal of my claim of savagery (on which I'm not sure we disagree, so that I'm not sure on what we are disagreeing—I didn't say it's not OK to be savage (though I personally find it unappealing here), just that this piece is savage).

[handrous]

Maybe it's wrong, but highly-regarded authors writing really mean reviews of work they consider embarrassingly (for the author of the work under review, had they any shame and the good sense not to subject the public to this, which clearly they do not, is the usual implication or outright statement of the review) terrible or highly over-rated is practically a literary genre of its own. This hardly stands alone, and is a continuation of a time-honored (if, again, maybe wrong, or bad, or what have you) tradition.

... in fact, much of the tone of writing on the early and mid-period Web was pretty similar, including some that was among the most well-known, and strong backlash against that in favor of gentler writing has only come in the last decade or so. Simply common and normal, hardly meriting comment, then. Perhaps humanity has recently experienced a great moral leap forward.

[tyre]

> it's hard to imagine a writer who writes more for himself than DFW

I don't think this is entirely true. He understands his job, as he'll admit in the middle of some essays.

Consider one of his more famous essays, "Consider the Lobster":

At one point:

> I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of Gourmet wish to think about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.

And later on:

> For those Gourmet readers who enjoy well-prepared and -presented meals involving beef, veal, lamb, pork,chicken, lobster, etc.: Do you think much about the (possible)moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved?

He's very specifically targeting the reader.

I think the common charge against Wallace is that he is very smart, which is fine, but he is so _obviously_ intelligent; so neurotically intelligent that he couldn't leave any stones unturned or examined. And that's inexcusable, since obviously anyone who writes as such must be fully up their own ass. His struggles with mental health and self-worth push back on that analysis.

Most importantly, I think, is that his job is to be those things. Anyone hiring Wallace _is_ paying for that work. He is entirely himself and delivers on that product. His disappointment in this autobiography is that it fails to deliver.

[JadeNB]

> Most importantly, I think, is that his job is to be those things. Anyone hiring Wallace _is_ paying for that work. He is entirely himself and delivers on that product. His disappointment in this autobiography is that it fails to deliver.

This, I think, is the point. I could not dream of accusing Wallace of not understanding his job. However, what he wrote was still for him; it was his vision of himself and the world around him, and if someone were to complain that it did not live up to their vision of him, then he—while doubtlessly adding that criticism to his inner monologue—would surely not have thought he should adjust his writing one whit because of it.

Here, though, he seems to be complaining that Austin isn't who Wallace expected her to be, not that she's not authentically herself. He seems to be complaining that she's shallow, while fully acknowledging that he's partaking of a genre that he knows does not demand or reward deep soul searching.

[telesilla]

>He is entirely himself and delivers on that product

As on a simple thing such as a luxury cruise in "A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again":

"They’ll make certain of it. They’ll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation. You will be able – finally, for once – to relax, the ads promise, because you will have no choice."

http://archive.harpers.org/1996/01/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1996-...