Ican list a hundred things David Foster Wallace should have written before he wrote a book about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels like he doesn’t belong, and eventually Michael Flatley’s head, which has been seeming to grow on a parallel track with his sinister influence, gets microwaved successfully against all known laws of physics, and we have a moment where we hear all his thoughts as Death clogs his failing body through space and time. There. Done. The Pale King never needed to happen, nor all the rest of it.
Though there is one thing we wouldn’t want to lose: a character named Mr Bussy.
That’s how I felt before I read it, anyway. Criticism of the book at the time, less uneasy in its knowledge of Wallace (in fact performed at the peak of his sainthood), mostly centred on one question: Why did he choose to do it? As in, why would you choose to swim the Channel? Why would you lie on a bed of narrative nails? Why would you slip into the bodies of the men in grey flannel, the opaque fathers, the personified footnotes, the data mystics, the codes and by-laws among men? (We’ll get to the women later. If the male IRS worker’s backstory is that he carried a briefcase as an eight-year-old and had hyperhidrosis, the female IRS worker’s backstory is that she was diddled.)
At the time, The New York Times credited Lewis with “advancing a new genre of journalism that shows how market forces and economic reasoning shape the evolution of sports.” In three years, he released arguably the two biggest sports books of the 21st century. He hasn’t written another one since.
Why not? The simple answer is that Lewis hasn’t discovered a sports story worthy of another book. The more complicated answer is that sports media has changed drastically in the last two decades, draining such books of their significance.
In re-classing the Bennets, Chau both uncovers new layers in the original and reveals some of what Austen left out. “Where we come from is as important as where we want to go,” a chastened Darcy admits to LB. That isn’t really the message of “Pride and Prejudice.” But it’s Chau’s good fortune, and ours, to see in this adaptation not just Jade’s foolishness, but also her courage and love.
Who gets to be a monster? Is the term reserved for enemies or can it be applied to heroes too? Lauren Elkin’s work of radical feminist criticism asks us to meet her art monsters, who are all women, and to see their monstrosity as central to their being and their art.
Beneath all this he has a powerful question, more so because, while he has strong suspicions, he is not completely sure of the answer. He wonders if knowledge is becoming a thing of the past. His concern is based on the observation that nobody needs to know anything anymore. If you visit a doctor, they are likely to check your symptoms on their computer. The same applies to any kind of professional.
So, what happens to us as a species if all our knowing is outsourced to machines. Is it possible to be wise, without personal knowledge. Winchester doubts it. But it is possible to be foolish or even nasty.
In her new book, Jennifer Ackerman, bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, takes us on a journey of discovery into the world of owls, exploring both their mystery and the new science that is revealing their complexity. Along the way, she introduces us to numerous species, from the tiny northern saw-whet owl, which lives in forests across North America and is as small as a robin, to the giant Blakiston’s fish owl, native to Japan and Russia.
A worldwide push is currently underway to have the seas’ cold dark depths fully mapped, with the work to be completed by the end of this decade, no less. Laura Trethewey, a Canadian writer long captivated by matters maritime, has written “The Deepest Map,” a gripping and all-too-timely account of what in more ways than one is turning out to be a very costly and questionably necessary race to the bottom.