Endnotes: A David Foster Wallace BBC Documentary

Taking a master class in artistic bravery, or how to honor the work of a literary lion.

When the writer David Foster Wallace ended his own life in 2008, the engines of culture immediately began producing analyses of his work with suicide as the subtext. How had depression informed his 1,000-page-plus masterpiece Infinite Jest, or his collections of short stories? Besides pronouncing Wallace’s martyrdom, the other tendency was to fix a specific place for him in the literary pantheon, so that his genre-bending oeuvre could be classified for posterity.

Now an excellent new BBC Radio piece aims to rescue him from these dual dangers of early hagiography. First aired on February 6th, the audio documentary is called Endnotes — both a melancholic acknowledgment of his early death, and an allusion to the author’s fondness for footnotes. (As the BBC reminds us, Infinite Jest contained 388 of them.) We were thrilled to hear the author reading portions of his own work and commenting on the challenges of writing fiction in late-millennial America.

Featuring interviews from Wallace’s sister Amy, his literary hero Don DeLillo, and novelist friend and contemporary Rick Moody, the BBC feature contextualizes his writing in terms of Wallace’s Midwestern upbringing, early love of math, and yes, his depression. But it does so without sentimentality and is explicit about rejecting any reductive interpretations of his legacy.

In the words of his editor, Michael Pietsch:

David loved to set himself enormous challenges… [He] was thinking about the fact that most of our lives are made up of boringness. Most of our lives are what he calls ‘irrelevant complexity,’ things that you just do again and again and your brain learns to go elsewhere while you’re doing them. And most novelists just avoid them; they just compress around the exciting bits.” ~ Michael Pietsch

Wallace, by contrast, managed to make the mundane profound. Listening to the piece we felt that heart-pounding feeling we had upon first reading his writing, of ideas pumping through the brain and blood at a rate faster than they could be absorbed. It was exhilirating, and reminded us how much we’re anticipating his final unfinished work, The Pale King, forthcoming in April.

In the meantime, load up the BBC’s endnotes and enjoy a 45-minute tour through the ideas of an unfailingly ambitious, quintessentially American author.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA but still stubbornly identifies as a Brooklynite.

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Victorian Women in Crime

Long before there was Superwoman, Lara Croft or even Mata Hari, there was a dangerous and suspicous character known as the New Woman — a Victorian rebel who rode bikes, spoke with cutting wit, and took orders from no one. In The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime: Forgotten Cops and Private Eyes from the Time of Sherlock Holmes, Penguin editor Michael Sims orchestrates a meet-and-greet with the most notorious crime-fighting females of Victorian literature, from Loveday Brooke to Dorcas Dene to Lady Molly of Scotland Yard. Though rooted in fiction, the book bespeaks the era’s restlessness for the empowerment of women, embodying culture’s tendency to first imagine social shifts, then enact them.

The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime is out this week and highly recommended. It’s the sequel to 2009′s equally excellent The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime: Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes.

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How to Write a Sentence: A Manual for the Art of Language

This week has been a mecca of publishing gems: From J. D. Salinger’s highly anticipated biography to a priceless collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s unpublished fiction to an innovative modernization of Gogol’s Dead Souls for the Facebook age to TED’s bold entry into publishing with the freshly launched TEDBooks imprint. But perhaps most notable among them is Stanley Fish‘s humbly titled yet incredibly ambitious How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One — an insightful, rigorous manual on the art of language that may just be the best such tool since Strunk and White’s legendary 1918 classic, The Elements of Style.

In fact, in many ways, Fish offers an intelligent rebuttal to some of the cultish mandates of Strunk and White’s bible, most notably the blind insistence on brevity and sentence minimalism. As Adam Haslett eloquently points out in his excellent FT review:

[Pared-down prose] is a real loss, not because we necessarily need more Jamesian novels but because too often the instruction to ‘omit needless words’ (Rule 17) leads young writers to be cautious and dull; minimalist style becomes minimalist thought, and that is a problem.”

To argue his case, Fish picks apart some of history’s most powerful sentences, from Shakespeare to Dickens to Lewis Carroll, using a kind of literary forensics to excavate the essence of beautiful language.

How to Write a Sentence isn’t merely a prescriptive guide to the craft of writing but a rich and layered exploration of language as an evolving cultural organism. It belongs not on the shelf of your home library but in your brain’s most deep-seated amphibian sensemaking underbelly.

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