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Title: Girl With Curious Hair (Norton Paperback Fiction) by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 0-393-31396-4 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: March, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (24 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Foster: a craftsman of the human language
Comment: Unfortunately, there is a very real difference between those with a gift for manipulating the human language and good 'writers'. Continents of difference.
Wallace will often spend pages of deft and cynical description, and it takes the heaviness of the reader's eyelids to alert him to the fact that *nothing is happening*. Now, thinking something needs to be happening in fiction may be out of style among the Midwest creative writing programs this year, but all Foster seems to be communicating is "Look at me! I'm clever as you please!" Some of these stories almost feel like they began as one of his overly-written essays (once he spent twenty pages describing a tennis court, apparently in the belief all of his readers were Haitian refugees who only knew sugarcane fields) and then he added a few lines of dialogue.
The language is very pretty, but I have hand-carved pretty crystal things which aren't even decent paperweights. If only his fiction were about something besides poking fun at the writing of fiction!
It's something like literary self-gratification. It takes skill and effort, and it probably felt very good while he was doing it, but in the end he's left all alone, the only person who really knows the 'what' and 'why' of any of it.
Rating: 4
Summary: An Entertaining Mixed Bag
Comment: I read Girl With Curious Hair after Infinite Jest, so I thought I had some idea of what to expect. The stories in this book are so different from one another, and from Jest, that I shall now review them separately.
Little Expressionless Animals-This story blended the absurd business of game shows perfectly with the absurd story of a savant lesbian and her autistic brother. This was probably my favorite story.
Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR- This story was the very crisp. It is short, and it is still detailed, but it is not an extravaganza like the others. It is a good story, though, and very clever.
Girl With Curious Hair- This story is hilarious and very perverse. My brother says it is pro-Republicanism, but I do not believe him. It may be too perverted for many people.
Lyndon- This is a good example of DFW's ability to recreate actual famous people. It is also a comment on the different kinds of love people have. I don't think that I understood it.
John Billy- John Billy is an excellent example of DFW's style. It is a simple story about the hometown hero Chuck Nunn Jr, told in a complicatedly Kansan dialect and with a bizzarre twist at the end.
Here and There- This is a story that I enjoyed very much. It is a dialectic account of the failure of a genius to love. It has an anti-ending similar to Infinite Jest, though, which many find troublesome.
My Appearance- This may be the best story in the collection. It explores the conflicting themes of sincerity/naivite and irony/cynicism. It also stars David Letterman.
Say Never- This story was about a man who cheats on his wife and then with his brother's girlfriend, and then confesses. It is told from his p.o.v., the brother's, and their mother's friend Labov. I didn't like this one that much, but the style is, as usual, amazing.
Everything is Green- This one is only two pages long and doesnt make any sense as far as I can tell. If it were more than two pages long, I might advise skipping it. But then, if it were more than two pages long, it might be good.
Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way- This novella made me think alot, about stories and postmodernism and commercialism. I liked it alot. However, like Barth's Lost in the Funhouse that inspired it, at the end I did not understand it.
On the whole, this is an excellent collection and there is something to like about each piece, except maybe Everything is Green. I recommend it and Infinte Jest to pretty much anybody.
Rating: 3
Summary: Worth My Appearance alone...
Comment: Why do so many reviews warn readers of the complexity of Infinte Jest? I found Infinite Jest to be a hundred times more readable than most of the stories in Girl with Curious Hair. The last story is ridicliously difficult to read and the ending makes no sense at all. Why would an author who deftly satirizes meta-fiction even in his first book (which some reviewers compared to the great metafictionists) purposefully try to be so difficult? Like the main character in Broom of the System tells Rick Vigorous: why don't you tell a real story instead of a story about a story? As a huge David Foster Wallace fan, I have to admit that I positively abhor Broom of the System and most of Girl With Curious Hair. They seem to be like cold, heartless exercises in how-avant-garde-can-I-be? and not at all pieces of writing that seemed like they were written by the author of Infinite Jest. But as my title eludes to, I am postively enamored with My Appearance. As an indictment of postmodern irony and its inability to truly accomplish anything, the story is flawless (well maybe the didactic dialogue can be a little off putting). More than any other living author, David Foster Wallace tackles the most important issues of the day to his generation and mine: drug abuse, depression, loneliness, irony, sex, and television. And, unlike other authors, he doesn't do it in a cute or ironic way. In an anthology of literary criticism from the 1950s, I read an article in which a critic expressed her feeling that writers of her decade had lost the ability to write about their culture and instead chose to focus on subjective explorations of individuals outside the bounds of society. I find current writers to be having the same difficulties, though instead of decadent novels about sex, drugs, and depression, todays writers write novels about mysterious byzantine paintings or soulless "satires" of the media in which the same sort of heartless humor and everyone's-a-whore philosophy found on late night TV is used to supposedly "skewer" that very phemenona. Those who are unafraid to face real, scary human realities like Wallace are the real heroes.
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Title: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again : Essays and Arguments Tag: Author of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 0316925284 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 02 February, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Infinite Jest: A Novel by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 0316921173 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 1997 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Brief Interviews With Hideous Men : Stories by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 0316925195 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries) by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 0393003388 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: White Noise (Contemporary American Fiction) by Don DeLillo ISBN: 0140077022 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: April, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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