[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.