David Foster Wallace could be a master of assuming other personalities for the purposes of writing fiction if it wasn’t for the tendency to coldness he has. The characters and situations in his short fiction can sometimes come across as only an experiment or challenge to himself just to see if he could do it. Now, this is only a tendency, it usually suits me fine, and he is an expert at this fictional assumption, if not a master, and anyway this tendency isn’t even always present. Sometimes, usually, in fact, it disappears completely as you suffer blows from the strange, emotional, yet still slightly cold, gut-punching particular to Wallace’s fiction.
You may want to read the short work, another experiment I think, that prompted this short post. The Good People, is available, for now, here.
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