""You're seriously asking for my view on The English Patient?!" the late author David Foster Wallace squirms, midway through a lengthy 1997 PBS interview with Charlie Rose. The host had been grilling Wallace, ostensibly invited on to discuss his own literary and journalistic output, on range of topics: tennis, teaching, why women don't like Westerns, depression, and, yes, Anthony Minghella's Academy Award-winning epic war drama, which had by the time the interview aired already become a Seinfeld punch line."
"Watching the interview, it's clear Wallace, who died by suicide in 2008, bristles at being pressed to purvey rank punditry on the popular culture at large like some kind of dancing monkey. But the exercise revealed how Rose, and large swaths of American intellectual culture circa the late-1990s, thought of Wallace. He was an all-purpose Big Brain who could alight on anything, from politics, to avant-garde authors, to the ethics of shellfish eating, to warmed-over Oscar bait."
Back Bay Books is issuing a new paperback edition of Infinite Jest for its 30th anniversary. The novel spans 1,079 pages including 96 pages of Notes and Errata. The narrative centers on Hal Incandenza, a marijuana-using teenage tennis prodigy, and a cast of characters in a near-futuristic Organization of North American Nations where corporate interests control the marking of time. David Foster Wallace resisted facile punditry in a 1997 PBS interview and became known as an intensely erudite public figure. The book remains notoriously challenging, deeply influential, and a strong candidate for the definitive American novel of the 1990s.
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