Girl With Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace

 

Alex Trebek goes around the “JEOPARDY!” studio wearing a button that says PAT SAJAK LOOKS LIKE A BADGER. He and Sajak play racquetball every Thursday.

– from “Little Expressionless Animals”

That’s a pretty typical moment from this collection of ten short stories by David Foster Wallace, a writer who often uses celebrities, politicians and other cultural icons as characters. Lyndon and Ladybird Johnson, David Letterman, Jack Lord (from Hawaii Five-O) and Ronald McDonald all make appearances here.

Girl With Curious Hair

As you can imagine Wallace is able, with characters like that, to create some pretty hilarious situations. But he actually takes pop culture very seriously. He encourages his readers to examine how these people function as symbols in our culture.

Wallace also takes the craft of writing seriously and is interested in pushing the boundaries of text: dialogue changes speakers unannounced; quotation marks are eliminated altogether; newspaper headlines or quotations interject.

“Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way”, the novella which closes the book, is probably the best example of this kind of experimentation. A simple narrative about grown child actors driven to a reunion of 44,000 McDonald’s commercial alumni by a man in a Ronald McDonald costume is expanded into 140 pages by repeated interruptions – usually in the form of metafictional musings on the act of writing itself. This kind of thing makes reading more challenging but not necessarily more enjoyable – unless, perhaps, you are that peculiar sort of college student who thinks talking about it in class will really impress your English lit professor.

But most of the stories are challenging in a good way – they’re playful and inventive, often humorous, and only sometimes academic. They make better coffee shop reading than beach reading, but definitely check out “Girl With Curious Hair” (a group of punks raises hell in L.A.), “Lyndon” (a gay man works for Sen. Lyndon Johnson) and “My Appearance” (a television actress appears on The Late Show) if you can.