David Foster Wallace

author of:

The Broom of the System The Girl With Curious Hair Infinite Jest A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (see Octet in particular)

His stories are pretty hyperlinked, although the medium forces him to flatten the structure down to sequential text and long footnotes.

This quote from Octet about writing captures a feeling that many a software developer has probably felt. (See Also: RefactoringHell)

"So you do an eight-part cycle of these little mortise-and-tenon pieces. And it ends up a total fiasco. Five of the eight pieces don't work at all - meaning they don't interrogate or palpate what you want them to, plus are too contrived or too cartoonish or too annoying or all three - and you have to toss them out. The 6th piece works only after it's totally redone in a way that's forbiddingly long and digression-fraught and, you fear, maybe so dense and inbent that nobody'll even get to the interrogatory parts at the end; plus then in the dreaded Final Revision Phase you realize that the rewrite of the 6th piece depends so heavily on 6's first version that you have to stick that first version back into the octocycle too, even though it (i.e. the first version of the 6th piece) totally falls apart 75% of the way through. You decide to try to salvage the aesthetic disaster of having to stick in the first version of the 6th piece by having that first version be utterly up front about the fact that it falls apart and doesn't work as a 'Pop Quiz' and by having the rewrite of the 6th piece start with some terse unapologetic acknowledgement that it's another 'try' at whatever you were trying to palpate into interrogability in the first version...."

I liked 'Broom of the System', especially the mini short stories woven in. I picked up 'Infinite Jest' for 5 bucks but couldn't get into it. I don't think anyone has really read it but it's so fat to be useful for my baby daughter to stand on so she can look out the windows. -- AndrewQueisser

People have really read Infinte Jest, me for one. It's perfectly competent. A completely OK read. It does go on a bit, but then it's also somewhat entertaining. It's shorter that the Mahabharata and has more jokes than War and Peace.

Sign me up for the backlash. I loved DavidFosterWallace when he was starting to appear in HarpersMagazine, but since the publication of InfiniteJest, and DFW's receiving the McArthurGeniusGrant?, his non-fiction writing has been increasingly self-indulgent, wandering and meandering with nary a point in sight. Personally, I think it is a virtue when a writer respects the impatience of eir audience. -- FrancisHwang

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