The frustrations of reading

I recently read a pair of books back-to-back: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. And in reading both of them, I found myself occasionally frustrated, but in different ways. This is a really fine line. A good book – a really good one, a great book – should be challenging. It should provoke emotion and maybe have parts that aren’t immediately understandable. But there is a contract any author makes with a reader. You agree to believe and accept certain things. (In one of Wallace’s stories, he actually makes this contract completely explicit, but of course, he would.) I felt that David Foster Wallace was faithful to this contract, while Zadie Smith wasn’t, and I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Before I read On Beauty, I was reading a review of literary critic Gordon Wood’s book How Fiction Works, in which Zadie Smith is included in a list of “antirealists” (the others are DeLillo and Rushdie). At that point, I’d only read her other book White Teeth, and I thought, really? The book seemed pretty much situated in reality. Then when I was reading On Beauty, I started noticing all the coincidences and inaccuracies within the novel’s universe. Some of these were related to British traditions and phrases occurring in an American college. These range from the very small (college classes generally don’t last all year; Americans don’t call McDonald’s “Macca;” there is no train that goes from Boston to Amherst) to the more widespread – the undergraduate students in the book are so into university politics and academia and scholarly communication. Maybe that’s how it is at a place like Harvard, but not any college I’ve ever worked at or attended. I think the problem here is that Zadie Smith is really good at making realistic characters. It threw me off when these very real-seeming people engaged in behavior or said things that seemed unreal.

David Foster Wallace, on the other hand, dealt in this incredibly acute realism. The stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (many of which, but not all, are framed as interviews) include an excruciating amount of detail. He writes about the physical and mental processes that underlie everything we do, but that we rarely think about. There’s a thoroughness and granularity of thought that must have been exhausting to experience and write. One story in particular, “The Depressed Person,” spelled out the hopelessness of depression in devastating detail. It made me presumptuously wonder if that’s what it was like to live inside David Foster Wallace’s head…and if so, I don’t blame him for wanting to get out. Maybe I wasn’t so much frustrated during the book as exhausted. I read it, like everything, mostly in half-hour increments on the bus, and sometimes even that amount of time wasn’t enough to digest what I was reading – either the content or the form. One of the blurbs on the back of the book calls it a “full-scale harassment of the short story form,” which is dead on.

I’ll conclude with a link to a 1999 interview of David Foster Wallace (conducted by mail) for Amherst magazine by Stacey Schmeidel, who falls into the category of people I hardly know but really like. It’s really good.