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Oddly enough, David Foster Wallace is a complicated author to love. It's easy to say you love him, to claim that he's your favourite author, but being the real thing to him ,as a reader, is difficult. Wallace is a rock star of the literary world, an author so charming and charismatic it's easy to love him for reasons unrelated to his work and there's been a lot more of that since his passing in 2008. ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF is only partially aware of the aura surrounding the author, since the events of the book happened during the INFINITE JEST book tour, the novel that propelled him to literary superstardom. So it would be unfair to judge it according to events that didn't happen yet, but ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF is a testament to the impossibility of having a relationship to David Foster Wallace that transcends intellectual challenge.
ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF is not a bad book. It's quite good at times, but it's also quite frustrating. David Lipsky spent a couple of day with David Foster Wallace for a Rolling Stone piece in the midst of INFINITE JEST's release. I have never read the original article, but following Wallace's death, Lipsky decided to publish the entirety of his conversation with the now legendary author. He follows him during the last stops of his book tour, take long car rides with him and even sleeps over in Wallace's house in Illinois. Does the-book-with-the-never-ending-title shines a new light on the last, great tortured poet of our times? Once again, it would be unfair to tell you a categorical ''no'', but the answer is along the lines of ''not really''.
I can't begrudge David Lipsky for not surprising me using material that was produced in the freakin' 20th century, but the irrational, childish, typical David Foster Wallace fan who lives inside me can't help but being jealous and frustrated Lipsky barely ever shed his journalistic stance after all this time spent with the author. There is a lot of material dedicated to formal questions Wallace answered in every interview for the following decade and to small talk. You've probably read about DFW's issues with paralyzing, toxic self-awareness before, yet due to the sheer length of his interview in ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF, he goes into greater details about his consuming fear of becoming his own worst enemy than in any other interviews he gave that I have read. There is a lot of material like this, that touches subjects Wallace tackled ad nauseam, but it is tackled in discussions not constrained by time, so it cuts much deeper into them.
Some readers attempt a second of match-wits-with-David at the signing point. dropping an insight, trying to compress something of who they personally are and what they feel about him and the book into a few seconds. It's strange, and it's why writing celebrities are different from tennis and movie celebrities. Writing is communication, which people do on and off all day; writing os the professionalized version of what they're up to all the time. Fans at tennis matches sometimes show up in the stands wearing wristbands and tennis shirts - and for these few seconds at the signing, they're stepping onto the court with David.
The desire, in those burning seconds, to mark a mark, to be as attractive a mental human package as the evening's attraction.
My main problem with ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF is that David Lipsky can never really shed his own self-awareness and spend half his time observating his subject from afar and the other half pushing David Foster Wallace's buttons to try and get an interesting reaction out of him. That leads to Wallace asking him mercifully to shut up in the middle of a car ride. There is very little time spent discussing about what DFW loved and what made him tick as a human being. There is a discussion about movies where you can feel Wallace's level of enthusiasm gradually rising throughout that was the highlight of the book for me. In general, ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF failed to grasp David Foster Wallace's relationship to culture that fascinates all of his readers and concentrates on humanizing the most humanized author of our era
I think I understand why David Foster Wallace took his own life. He was a sick man, he had always been sick and he crumbled under the weight of expectations. His own and those of his readership. He was a brilliant mind, one of the best we had, but his irreverent approach to academic form and his democratic view of pop culture issues created a mythological aura he didn't feel he was worthy of, I think. I wanted ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF to have more answers than it actually had. It's an interesting read, but it's not as transcendant as a David Foster Wallace novel, per se. If you're looking for that conversational spark that was so fun about DFW, it has surprisingly little of it as it's David Lipsky's book first and foremost. Once more, I can't begrudge him for being human around of the sacred monsters of literature. I would probably not have done better. If you're looking for a lengthy, fun interview with David Foster Wallace, this is as good as it gets.