Sarah Green reviewed Both flesh and not by David Foster Wallace
Review of 'Both flesh and not' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I was lucky enough to win this book in a GoodReads giveaway, a pleasant surprise.
I enjoyed reading most of the essays overall, but I can see why some of them had yet to be included in any anthologies. I had trouble getting through both of the tennis essays, "Federer Both Flesh and Not" and "Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open," which not even Wallace could make all that interesting to me. I have been having the same issue with the tennis sections in Infinite Jest. While I think the essay on the U.S. Open meandered particularly badly, I may just not be the target audience here. That is most likely a problem with grouping essays together that have nothing in common save the fact that they've never before been included in any anthologies.
My favorites among these were "The Empty Plenum: David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress," "The (As it …
I was lucky enough to win this book in a GoodReads giveaway, a pleasant surprise.
I enjoyed reading most of the essays overall, but I can see why some of them had yet to be included in any anthologies. I had trouble getting through both of the tennis essays, "Federer Both Flesh and Not" and "Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open," which not even Wallace could make all that interesting to me. I have been having the same issue with the tennis sections in Infinite Jest. While I think the essay on the U.S. Open meandered particularly badly, I may just not be the target audience here. That is most likely a problem with grouping essays together that have nothing in common save the fact that they've never before been included in any anthologies.
My favorites among these were "The Empty Plenum: David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress," "The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2," "The Best of the Prose Poem" (despite my wanting to hate it), "Borges on the Couch," and "Deciderization 2007---A Special Report." I didn't want to like "The Best of the Prose Poem" because it comes off as mean-spirited to a lot of beginning writers. Still, he makes many good points, and many interesting points, and proves once again that his brain is an awesome force.
I did really like the vocabulary lists included before each essay, which were compiled and written by Wallace. Some of these entries are quite funny, e.g. "spathic--having good cleavage (used of minerals)," which may or may not have been intentional. Probably intentional.
There were a few in the collection that I forgot as soon as I read, and one that struck me as extremely dated, or insensitive, or both ("Back in New Fire"). It would probably have been better for them to stay buried in the past rather than dug up and re-published in their pasty, wormy glory. Even as I say that, though, they are still better than a lot of the magazine articles I've come across recently.