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A review by andriawrites
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max
3.0
First and foremost, DT Max's writing is completely horendous... Which I find quite strange for a staff writer at the New Yorker.
I picked up this book because I wanted to "crack' the puzzle and mystery that is David Foster Wallace and his mythical legacy. Having read some of Wallace's essays before, I felt like Max was trying to (unsuccesfully) mimick his complex and intricate writing style, which just made reading the book so much more of a challenge, because it just felt like a stylistic rip-off.
More often than not, passages were tedious and Max dragged on for three pages on things that could have been described in a simple paragraph.
Max had all the necessary elements for the story and biography of Wallace's life, it's just that the biography lacked a story telling component that I find necessary in biographies in order to avoid a list/hospital record/court document style of writing. The writing was bland, unemotional, and totally devoid of character.
Wallace was a really interesting person; he changed the landscape of contemporary American fiction and I don't feel like Max fairly portrays this in his biography.
I think I will wait on a volume of his collected letters and diary entries to get the "true" essence of DFW, or maybe I'll need to challenge myself to read Infinte Jest?
I picked up this book because I wanted to "crack' the puzzle and mystery that is David Foster Wallace and his mythical legacy. Having read some of Wallace's essays before, I felt like Max was trying to (unsuccesfully) mimick his complex and intricate writing style, which just made reading the book so much more of a challenge, because it just felt like a stylistic rip-off.
More often than not, passages were tedious and Max dragged on for three pages on things that could have been described in a simple paragraph.
Max had all the necessary elements for the story and biography of Wallace's life, it's just that the biography lacked a story telling component that I find necessary in biographies in order to avoid a list/hospital record/court document style of writing. The writing was bland, unemotional, and totally devoid of character.
Wallace was a really interesting person; he changed the landscape of contemporary American fiction and I don't feel like Max fairly portrays this in his biography.
I think I will wait on a volume of his collected letters and diary entries to get the "true" essence of DFW, or maybe I'll need to challenge myself to read Infinte Jest?