Book Review : David Foster Wallace - Something to Do with Paying Attention (2022)
In 2023, it will be fifteen years since David Foster Wallace took his own life. When it happened, he immediately received the Kurt Cobain treatment from the literary community. Infinite Jest became the greatest novel of all-time again. His interview clips boomed on YouTube and whatnot. Don't get me wrong: all this love was warranted. But what is left of Wallace's legacy now that his memory is receding from popular culture? Was the love and intellectual kinship of strangers he desperately longed for any sincere?
If anything, posthumous release Something to Do With Paying Attention is a reminded that he was really fucking great and unique.
Something to Do With Paying Attention is originally a part of David Foster Wallace's last novel The Pale King, but like editor Sarah McNally explains in the preface, it's is also technically the last piece of fiction Wallace ever finished and intended to publish on its own. In this novella, the narrator is breaking down in painstaking details the psychological, existential and philosophical process that lead him to join the IRS and, if you know anything about Wallace's work, you already know this process is extremely convoluted.
In hindsight, it seems obvious that I actually liked despising the Christian because I could pretend that the evangelical’s smugness and self-righteousness were the only real antithesis or alternative to the cynical, nihilistically wastoid attitude I was starting to cultivate in myself. (p. 80)
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve read The Pale King or not in order to enjoy Something to Do With Paying Attention. David Foster Wallace is one of these authors you can enjoy out of cultural or narrative context because the writing itself is just ridiculously compelling. This novella is the first person narration of a young man’s path to a high education (an American ideal), which lead him to work for the Internal Revenue Service (a very American death of the soul). It is both gripping with sincerity and dripping with irony.
How is that even possible? Glad you asked: the narrator of Something to Do With Paying Attention has been struggling to form a meaningful connection to his parents all his life. His mother, a radical feminist, is devoted to her journey of self-discovery to a point where her very attempts to connect to her son are imbued with political ideology. For example: they smoke pot together even if neither of them seem to enjoy the exercise because it was an act of rebellion against the patriarchy in the seventies.
The narrator's relationship to his dad is even more complicated because his father was a traditional old school, distant father. But his reappreciation of his now defunct old man is where Something to Do With Paying Attention really shines. What the narrator initially interpreted as snobism and rejection, he reinterpreted as humility and discipline. His father didn't see his wisdom and advice to be of particular interest to his son, so he tried to preach by example and live a life he deemed virtuous.
A self-imposed second reading on your own education is a product one's own growing maturity. The psychological and emotional intensity of the narrator's evaluation of his upbringing is particularly moving because it contrasts with its spontaneity. He talks like he's just earnestly trying to answer a question. This knowledge about his complicated relationship to his parents and the subsequent drug-fueled college years it gave birth to seems internalized, intuitively understood and accepted.
David Foster Wallace's gift lied in expressing complex and often spoken feeling in the simplest, most relatable way possible.
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This sound beautiful and life-affirming, doesn’t it? Where is the irony supposed to be exactly? Chill out, I'm getting to it. Literary irony is not necessarily comedic. In this case, you have this beautiful, thoughtful person who ended up working for the IRS because she needed to find a sense of purpose and control in her life. Something she could have an effect on in the world, because her parents' amicably enough divorce and the tragic death of her father fucked with her sense of self-worth.
The irony is Something to Do With Paying Attention is indeed tragic and it is highlighted in the hilariously over-the-top speech from the accounting teacher (a self-parody of This is Water?) near the end of the novella. The DePaul accounting professor is trying his darnedest to make his students proud of themselves by calling them heroes and comparing them to cowboys even if the rest of his speech is utterly depressing. He talks of sacrifice, isolation, lack of validation and misunderstanding of their role in society.
Well, that part is objectively hilarious.
But in the greater scheme of things, it is still tragic that our narrator is lead down this path of invisible self-sacrifice. He tells us that complex and relatable and moving story of missing out on making a true connection with his parents and the fact that he found solace and respite in the certainty of math in what might be the most boring job in the world is heartbreaking. It is the modern, secular equivalent to taking religious vows. If that isn't literary irony at its finest, I don't know what to call it.
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Ironically enough (hah), Something to Do With Paying Attention is in itself a work of reappreciation of David Foster Wallce's talent and legacy. It is undoubtedly NOT what he intended, but taking out the intimidating bulk factor of Wallace's novels and cutting his work into starter-size meals is really an interesting exercise for the increasingly fragmented minds of my generation. It helps focusing on every word. David Foster Wallace ain't the rockstar he used to be, but his creativity and compassion are still second to none.
