The Paris Review

As readers of the Daily know, we don’t publish criticism. But over at his day job, our Southern Editor has written a deep review of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King—a review that is really an essay on Wallace and his peculiar place in American fiction (and nonfiction).

Of The Pale King, Sullivan writes:

You’d be forgiven for suspecting that a book about random people who work for the government sounds insufferably tedious. The reason it’s not has to do with the word about—it’s the wrong word, the wrong preposition. Wallace doesn’t write about his characters; he hadn’t in a long time. He writes into them. That thing he could do on a tennis court or a cruise ship, or at a porn convention, that made him both an inspiration and a maddening, envy-making presence for the scores like me who learned to do “magazine writing” in his shadow (he was one of those writers who, even when you weren’t sounding like him, made you think about how you weren’t sounding like him)—Wallace liked to do that, in his fiction, with his characters’ interior lives.

Imagine walking into a place, say a mega-chain copy shop in a strip mall. It’s early morning, and you’re the first customer. You stop under the bright fluorescents and let the doors glide closed behind you, look at the employees in their corporate-blue shirts, mouths open, shuffling around sleepily. You take them in as a unified image, with an impenetrable surface of vague boredom and dissatisfaction that you’re content to be on the outside of, and you set to your task, to your copying or whatever. That’s precisely the moment when Wallace hits pause, that first little turn into inattention, into self-absorption. He reverses back through it, presses play again. Now it’s different. You’re in a room with a bunch of human beings. Each of them, like you, is broken and has healed in some funny way. Each of them, even the shallowest, has a novel inside. Each is loved by God or deserves to be. They all have something to do with you: When you let the membrane of your consciousness become porous, permit osmosis, you know it to be true, we have something to do with one another, are part of a narrative—but what? Wallace needed very badly to know. And he sensed that the modern world was bombarding us with scenarios, like the inside of the copy shop, where it was easy to forget the question altogether. We “feel lonely in a crowd,” he writes in one of his stories, but we “stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being,” with the result that “we are, always, faces in a crowd.”

That’s what I love in Wallace, noticed details like that, microdescriptions of feeling states that seem suggestive of whole branching social super-systems, sentences that make me feel like, Anyone who doesn’t get that is living in a different world. He was the closest thing we had to a recording angel.

For a long time now, we’ve been thinking that our friends over at The Awl should start a culture diary of their own—and now they have! And with no less an eminence than David Orr, poetry critic of The New York Times Book Review. Hot, hot, hot!

Johnathan Wilhelmi of Everyman Espresso on 13th Street between Third and Fourth Avenues.

Wasn’t this a nice morning surprise! Everyman Espresso, in Manhattan’s East Village, is giving away free coffee with every purchase of our winter issue.

If you want your local café to stock the Review, tell them to get in touch. We’ll be happy to set them up with an account.

Jonathan Franzen has just given the deepest, most searching and revealing interview of his career. And we don’t mean on Oprah. You won’t find this interview on TV, on YouTube, or anywhere else on the Web.

You can only find it in the winter issue of The Paris Review, alongside a startling portfolio, curated by David Salle, of paintings by Amy Sillman and Tom McGrath; a selection of portraits and landscapes by legendary draughtsman Saul Steinberg; and a troubling, sexually charged novella by Hungarian master Péter Nádas.

Issue 195, which will hit newsstands December 15, also includes a Writers at Work interview with novelist Louise Erdrich, poems by Brian Blanchfield and Jim Moore, debut fiction by Alexandra Kleeman and Claire Vaye Watkins, and much, much more.

Order your copy today—or click here for our holiday gift offer and consider Christmas solved. Happy holidays!

First The Paris Magazine, now this! We like to think of The Paris Review as the little magazine that launched a thousand little magazines. And yes, in our book, imaginary magazines count extra. We wish “The Oakland Review” a long and happy life ... or at least a superfun night. Just give back the bird once you’ve finished?

We just came up with a brilliant idea¹, if we do say so ourselves.

For the first time ever, you can give our winter issue—plus a year’s subscription and a sexy new Paris Review T-shirt—in time for Christmas. Just order before December 20th and we’ll take care of the rest.

How are we pulling off this Amazon-like feat of speedy delivery? By filling all orders here on White Street. That’s also why each gift package comes with a note signed by yours truly. And why our office is full of tissue paper.

We are our own elves. Click here to buy it now.