Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace - D.T. Max

D.T. Max has written a level-headed biography of DFW. The navel-gazing into the theory and meaning of DFW's works vis-à-vis his mental state strikes me as pretentious. However, I admit to being something of a simpleton when it comes to literary theory. It's probably just over my head.

Taken as a whole, Max's writing is compelling and highlights include snippets of DFW's correspondence with Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen.

Max's neutral approach and mostly straightforward writing failed him at probably the most crucial part - the end. In fact, the last paragraph and last sentence specifically, pisses me off:

"The story of 'David Wallace' was now first. In his final hours, he had tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages— drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel over the past decade. This was his effort to show the world what it was to be 'a fucking human being.' He had never completed it to his satisfaction. This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the one he had chosen."

For fuck's sake, man. You couldn't pass on that last sentence when it popped in your head? The sentiment is fine, but you couldn't pass on that little trick of a phrase after spending a significant amount of time discussing Wallace's wish for genuine, "single-entendre" writing?

Read this, anyhow.

I Married a Communist - Phlip Roth

This is the first book I've read penned by Philip Roth, and my expectations were off-kilter. I see his genius with the pen, but man, oh, man this book was a slog to get through. In my eyes, this book is summed up well in a couple of brilliant paragraphs:

"There was one song she (ed. Lorraine, Murray's daughter) especially loved. It was beautiful, too, a stirring, mournful, hymnlike folksong called 'Dubinushka,' a simple song sung with a balalaika in the background. The words to 'Dubinushka' were printed in English on the inside of the album cover, and she learned them by heart and went around the house singing them for months.

Many songs I have heard in my native land - Songs of joy and sorrow But one of them was deeply engraved in my memory: It's the song of the common worker.

That was the solo part. But what she liked best to sing was the choral refrain. Because it had 'heave-ho' in it.

Ekh, lift up the cudgel, Heave-ho! Pull harder together, Heave-ho!"

… In the dark we listened, though now neither I to him nor her to me but both of us to "Dubinushka." It was just as Murray had described it: beautiful, a stirring, mournful, hymnlike folksong. Except for the crackle off the worn surface of the old record - a cyclical sound not unlike some familiar, nocturnal night noise of the summer countryside - the song seemed to be traveling to us from a remote historical past. It wasn't at all like lying on my deck listening to the radio to the Saturday night concerts live from Tanglewood. "Heave-ho! Heave-ho!" was out of a distant place and time, a spectral residue of those rapturous revolutionary days when everyone craving for change programmatically, naively - madly, unforgivably - underestimates how mankind mangles its noblest ideas and turns them into tragic farce. Heave-ho! Heave-ho! As though human wiliness, weakness, stupidity, and corruption didn't stand a chance against the collective, against the might of the people pulling together to renew their lives and abolish injustice. Heave-ho.

I didn't appreciate 320 pages of two characters talking about a third character. Mamet once wrote in a memo to screenwriters that "ANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT." To be fair, Mamet was referring to TV drama, and not a novel, but this ENTIRE NOVEL IS TWO CHARACTERS TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, and it caused the same boredom in me that Mamet warns about.