David Foster Wallace discussion

In the spirit of DFW, I have found this quantitative-&-qualitative relationship of his literary output to be true:

The quality of his fiction is inversely proportional to its length.

I feel the bulk of his short stories, especially from _Brief Interviews..._ to _Oblivion_, are some of the most dazzling and perceptive in contemporary fiction. His more experimental vignettes/tableaux/stories were at least interesting and showed a love of language and writing.

However, his novels impress me less and less in retrospect. _Infinite Jest_ has aged terribly. God help me for using this comparison, but the overload of drug-related discursions has a James Frey-esque vibe. Apparently, _Infinite Jest's_ future includes lots of drugs that went out of favor in the early 1980s in our reality (e.g. Quaaludes). This could be nitpicking, but those details are important when the subject is addiction.

Remember all of the talk about how the novel had a narrative arc and structure like some kind of Moebius strip? That's the very definition of "too clever by half"; it's also the perfect epithet for the whole dang book. The endnote shtick is just plain annoying. There's a good book in there somewhere, but it's a shame that nobody actually edited it. DFW needs to impress us with exotic digressions about calculus, geometry, and chemistry, yet he doesn't know the difference between an "isomer" and an "analog"?

I slogged through_The Broom of the System_ back in 1999, and the only thing that stands out now is how mind-stultifying boring it was compared to stories such as "John Billy" and "The Girl With Curious Hair".

I have only read excerpts from _The Pale King_, but saw nothing that would change my mind.

Overall: 1st-rate essays, a wide variety of good to great short stories, but disappointing novels.

His most illuminating text was "Good Old Neon", a perfectly haunting meta-monologue that reveals the good & bad extremes of his personality. That and "The Depressed Person" entertain and inform us more than all of his novels put together. They also show the depths of cynicism, self-destructive navel-gazing, and flat-out nasty solipsism that plagued him.

Just seeing if I'm all alone on this...

I must say that I agree with you to some extent, but I do not know how much sense my picture od his lengthier stories are a bit blurred in my memory.
The thing I struggled with when it came to appreciate his fiction was exactly that; his inability to correctly descripe chemistry. I don't know what he had in mind when he wrote the book but high school level science is just dull and not perticulary clever.
About your other arguments; it will take some time for me to confirm them. But it is not far fetched...

I feel like I need to re-read Infinite Jest at some point as it was the first thing of his that I read. I do think it has some huge flaws, but then other parts of it are extraordinary. One of its biggest problems is that he seems to give every character some kind of extreme or comical deformity - everyone is 'so x they're y', or has some weird condition where they can only do something in an extremely odd way, and that gets a bit tiresome and one-dimensional for a novel.

But at the same time, the idea that 'there's a great novel in there somewhere' seems to me to be intentional. I always felt like Infinite Jest was meant to be like what would happen if someone took all the scenes out of a novel and wrote the gaps between instead. Everything significant seems to have happened before or after the novel itself takes place, or it happens 'off-screen', as it were.

And yet I actually feel like Infinite Jest is more accessible than a lot of his short fiction. I found Girl with Curious Hair much harder to read on the whole, though I'd like to revisit it.

Wallace himself I think admitted that Broom of the System wasn't all that great, and I also found it boring after about the halfway mark, but I'm sort of inclined to separate it a little from the rest of his work, given it was his first novel and was written I think as part of his thesis or something.