This was basically a transcript of an interview for a never-published Rolling Stone profile of DFW during the time Infinite Jest was hitting it big. There is some new material about the period around his suicide (and Lipsky handles it quite well) that fans will appreciate. It's just great to hear his voice in my head. ( )

Four stars on a reader enjoyment level, but there wasn’t really much here to critique or anything. Just some transcriptions of conversations. Recommended for a DFW fan but not otherwise.

AB ( )

Objectivity is something that rarely rears its head when I’m dealing with much of anything concerning David Foster Wallace, as I’m a literary DFW groupie through-and-through. Many would see this book as something redundant, as I’ve already seen (several times) the film on the same events, The End of the Tour, starring Jesse Eisenberg as the interviewing author David Lipsky, and Jason Segel playing Wallace. Lipsky was on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine to try and capture the excitement of the author who seemed to own the publishing scene, and his fans who were walking on air as they met him during the last five days of the book tour for his monumental book, Infinite Jest. Lipsky was another adoring fan as well, seeing Wallace’s fame as something he lusted for himself, while it was something that DFW was not that comfortable with at all.

Wallace was also quite nervous that in the interviews he would come across as too much of … frankly, so many things. On the page, Wallace was used to constantly rewriting, editing, and perfecting his words, but he worried that a casual, off-the-cuff remark could make him look like an ass, a fool, ignorant, or countless other things. As a reader, I found myself fascinated by how this raw, first draft of a conversation allowed me to see just how his mind works on the fly. Sure, I heard him say the same things in the movie, but the printed word is my thing. Makes me think of how many years it took me to become comfortable reading fiction off a monitor, and not needing to print it out on paper to enjoy it.

No one should think that these interviews/conservations are going to always be deep and meaningful, with everything being so profound. Lipsky ends up sleeping in an extra bedroom at Wallace’s house when they’re in town, so he catalogs the books and the décor of the house, down to his Alanis Morissette poster and the Barney the Dinosaur towel covering a window. They do it all together: drive, eat, play with his two big dogs, and talk constantly about writing, fame, women, insanity, and what the two men want in their lives.

This is not a road trip/buddy movie, but there’s a lot of common ground, even if the two men are coming at things from very distinctively different positions. There are times when Lipsky asks a probing question about Wallace’s mental state, drug use (especially rumors about his heroin addiction), being institutionalized, ego, his friendships (Jonathan Franzen and more) and his opinions of other writers—and Wallace will show his discomfort, but most times he will put a response together in his head, and print out, give an answer. The way the two men relate is fascinating.

A quote from Lev Grossman in Time magazine was spot-on to me. “Lipsky’s transcript of their brilliant conversation reads like a two-man Tom Stoppard play or a four-handed duet scored for typewriter.”

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, even with (or maybe because of) all of its familiarity. These two authors speaking intelligently about writing and their lives is golden to readers like me. The book is also a treat to just pick up and read random sections of. It’s a book that works for some, and not at all for others [I’m thinking of Vicky here], but those that appreciate it are as happy as David Foster Wallace’s dogs were to get outside to play. ( )

I have complicated feelings towards David Foster Wallace's writings. Wallace is the kind of writer that you have to work at to appreciate, and not everyone will get there, myself included in that statement. I first picked up "The Pale King" at a library not long after its' release, and was confusedly entranced as I waded through the pages upon pages about tax law and the sheer boredom of corporate life, yet fell in love with the gems of prose that I stumbled into along the way. "This is Water" is one of the best things I have ever read; I flailed through "Infinite Jest" and was confounded by "The Broom of the System." In this book, the very format (a transcript of a five day trip with a Rolling Stone reporter) makes for a rather rough, broken reading, but just as you start to wonder if it's worth continuing, a ridiculously profound paragraph will wander into the book, forcing you to go back and reread a few pages to see what exactly led up to it. As you read this one though, keep in mind what Wallace himself said, regarding the format of dialogue and transcription and quotes, "Writing down something that somebody says out loud is not a matter of transcribing. Because written stuff said out loud on the page doesn't look said out loud. It just looks crazy" (164).
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This is not an easy read. Even for a die-hard David Foster Wallace fan like myself, it was frustrating. Lipsky has basically transcribed, word for word, "um" for "um," the conversations that he had with Wallace over the course of a few days that the journalist spent profiling Wallace toward the end of the Infinite Jest promotional book tour. Perhaps this is an homage to Wallace's instantly recognizable conversational style, but it's quite hard to follow at times. Especially since Lipsky has decided to condense his own questions down to key words, and not to label his versus Wallace's remarks. He may have done this to minimize his own verbiage and shine the light on Wallace's, but it just makes the exchanges that much harder to comb through. Yet comb through I did, for the pearls of Wallace wisdom contained therein. If you are new to Wallace, this really won't make sense until you've read Infinite Jest. Good luck. ( )