by David Foster Wallace
2011 Little, Brown, & Co.

First sentence: Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the AM heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butterprint, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.
Words in that sentence that are also names of bluegrass bands: cutgrass, foxtail, wild oat
Words in that sentence that are also names of shitty rock bands: shattercane, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, muscadine, goldenrod, creeping charlie, ragweed, vetch, blacktop, downriver,
Words that are shitty metal bands: nightshade, rust 
No. of children in Africa who died of malnourishment while David Foster Wallace was writing that sentence: One zillion.

The reason David Foster Wallace hung himself in 2008 was that he had written most of this book and finally realized that it was shitty. That first sentence takes up half of the entire first chapter. The first three pages are mostly white space and I was forced to read a whole extra page just to get a sense of where DFW went wrong. I can reasonably say he went wrong by exiting his mother’s womb.

The first character we meet is named Sylvanshine, which I believe is Elven, or if not, then very very gay. From what I can tell, this is a story about an accountant. Wow. DFW is a genius.

I have never understood the cult surrounding this man. The guy wore bandanas and his books are shitty and I say that having read not just one, but zero of them. It is amazing that a man can write so much and have so little to say. This book would be better shredded into packing material — more entertaining, too. The publishers should have left this unfinished novel unfinished and not besmirched DFW’s name further.

I feel a little bad trashing a dead guy, but last I checked, corpses couldn’t defend themselves, and suicide is cheating.

Other reviews: Literary Sluts, Writerly Life, 26 Books, Of Books And Reading

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