In every way but financially, it may have been a break for Wallace that 1996’s big fiction awards went to more modest, mainstream talents. It didn’t dent the critical reputation of the outrageously ambitious, 1,079-page novel “Infinite Jest,” and he got to keep his outsider cachet. “A Supposedly Fun Thing” is a comparable outrage to mainstream journalism. “I’m fresh in from the East Coast to go to the Illinois State Fair for a swanky East-Coast magazine. [Harper’s, FYI.] I suspect that every so often editors … slap their foreheads and remember that about 90% of the United States lies between the Coasts and figure they’ll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological reporting …” Sure, metajournalism has been done to death. But so has journalism, with its dubious pretense of reportorial invisibility; at least this is living death.
Wallace’s fast eye-brain-lexicon-hand coordination lets him crank out small wonders at a fearsome rate: a tennis player whose narrow face has a “rodentially patrician” look, a field of “hammer-shaped” off derricks “bobbing fellatially.” But readers of “Infinite Jest” will recognize the big themes and lurking moral seriousness as well. The fair, with its foods “quick-fried and served on cardboard,” mirrors the cruise ship with its “pampered” passengers sipping such drinks as the Slippery Nipple; wretched excess makes both places antechambers of hell, teeming with repulsive allure. And Wallace’s essay on television and fiction ends up regarding TV as a sinister cultural force. Hey, just like me-only difference is, he knows something about TV. I’ll tell him what: as long as he’s willing to get down and rassle with this stuff, I’m glad to sit here and read all about it.
