A review by markeefe
Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallace

3.5

As might be expected from a posthumous essay collection, this is a bit uneven. The title piece on Roger Federer is amazing, and several other pieces are quite good. But a couple of long pieces from the '80s and '90s were passed over for inclusion in prior collections, and it's apparent why. The one on Conspicuously Young writers rambles, is a kind of stiff, and its discussion of TV's influence on his generation is better fleshed out in "E Unibus Plurum." And his Tennis Magazine piece on commerce at the U.S. Open, while it features some great writing (especially on the sport itself, the experience of watching, and on his experience of watching the fans), it gets bogged down in both hyper-observational specificity and in amassing support for its thesis. There are some fun and/or thoughtful, shorter pieces, especially in the book's latter half, like his round-up of five great post-1960 novels, his 24 thoughts on word usage, his philosophies around Terminator 2 (which is a middle distance essay, really), etc. This collection is worth reading, but selectively. If you haven't read A Supposedly Fun Thing and Consider the Lobster yet, hit those first.