It was nice to know, at last, that there was a certifiable genius at work, and one could feel the anticipation mounting for the next Wallace effort, which would not only claim the awards denied Infinite Jest, but also galvanize public discussion in a rare way, like Catch-22 or the first final episode of Friends. Would the new novel be even bigger? (It seemed both logical and unlikely.) Or would Wallace pare out what many considered extraneous, leaving us with the leanest, meanest, 500-page novel in recent memory? When asked about his work-in-progress, Wallace responded by inquiring whether his interlocutor had ever read the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, and, if so, whether he had done so under the influence of hallucinogens. There were rumors that the new novel had to do with porn.

Eight years, of course, is not so long to wait. Moby-Dick may have been written in six months, but a gestation period measured long modernist novel since Joyce. Our writers have longer life spans and fewer children than their forerunners, and Pynchon, Gaddis, Henry Roth, and Franzen all asserted their right to greater leisure. What distinguishes Wallace is his diverse and rather prolific interim output: a demonically descriptive collection of quasijournalistic essays; a brilliant if uneven book of stories; a biography of the concept of infinity, which reads miserably if you don’t know much about higher math, and, according to expert reviewers, more miserably if you do; and now another book of stories, Oblivion. Has a novelist ever written such a thrilling, remarkable novel and then swapped himself, even temporarily, out of the genre?

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 5:41 PM  |