The primary points of Zadie Smith’s amazing essay on David Foster Wallace are here presented in no self-aware order.
- Wallace is an unAmerican writer in that he supports the Weil-ian ideas of truth and virtue rather than individual rights.
- The self is the primary product of postmodernism and it needs to be stamped out.
- Self reference and involution were cool and then they weren’t cool and now we think they’re cool but they’re really pernicious.
- Really, stop bitching about things and try to relate to someone.
- Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is a great, flawed piece of literature.
- Oh my god Wittgenstein. Seriously.
- It’s not that stupid people are better in the naively Rousseau-ian way. It’s that they’re less involute and self-absorbed.
- There is no self but thought. There is no thought but language.
- The story about the church not made with hands sounds on the face of things very Carverian, but it’s pretty deep.
- Zadie Smith is sharper than a tack.
