A supposedly fun book but actually not very enjoyable. DFW is a very good writer, and he's very clever, and he can be very funny...but somehow this collection of essays (many of which are really quite old now) is less than the sum of its parts. There's a really interesting one about his brief career as a competition-level junior tennis player, which also includes lots about growing up in the Mid-West (a part of the USA that is especially foreign to me), and then there's another less interesting one about how tennis competitions are organised and conducted. I started out thinking 'all this detail is really interesting, who knew?', and then the feeling passed and instead I thought 'why would I ever want to know this much detail since I neither play nor watch tennis?'.
There are two essays about 'ordinary folk' - one about the State Fair, and one about cruise ships, and both of them are very well observed but have a nasty trace of sneer about them. There's one about David Lynch, whose films I quite like, but this went on and on, and had so many footnotes, that I lost the will to read to the end. Another one is about post-structualist literary theory, but written in sort of popular, muscular language so as to make it faux-accessible, and again I couldn't face reading all the way to the end.
And of course it's all from a bygone age, before the internet and when the idea that lots of people might have 'cellular' phones was still interesting.
A supposedly funny book that I will never open again.
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