Christopher Antimie’s Reviews > Girl With Curious Hair > Status Update

I've mostly enjoyed my time with this collection but I wouldn't recommend it as a place to start with Wallace. I have read a few pages of the final story/novella and I am optimistic regarding its quality but it is clearly doing some serious, referential metafiction for which I am unprepared. I will get back to it once I've read Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse". For now I rate this at 3 stars on the goodreads scale

I've mostly enjoyed my time with this collection but I wouldn't recommend it as a place to start with Wallace. I have read a few pages of the final story/novella and I am optimistic regarding its quality but it is clearly doing some serious, referential metafiction for which I am unprepared. I will get back to it once I've read Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse". For now I rate this at 3-4 stars on the goodreads scale.

This isn't where I'd recommend starting with DFW. Many of these stories would benefit from more polish or editing or focus, yet the writing is unmistakably DFW's, and much of what would come to define his later work is on prototypic display here in character, setting, and theme. Loneliness, disfunction and grotesquerie, trauma, corporate dystopia, love and responsibility,etc.. All very American and essentially DFW