The Gospel according to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in and Age of Distraction by Adam S. Miller (review)

Adam S. Miller has crafted a highly approachable, quasi-devotional, religious reading of David Foster Wallace’s most popular fiction. His study argues that Wallace’s corpus is consistently and essentially combating idolatry, defined as that which gives the promise of transcendence, endorsing, instead, a return to religious practice in the form of immanent awareness and a sort of (but not entirely) fatalistic openness to the limited and fallible nature of individual experience. He argues primarily from Wallace’s larger works, Infinite Jest and The Pale King, but also incorporates readings from a few of Wallace’s more popular essays and journalistic pieces, such as A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again, E. Unibus Pluram, and of course Wallace’s famed Kenyon commencement address, posthumously titled “This is Water.” The references are sprawling. Organizing the (very) brief chapters by theme, Miller jumps in and out of a variety of different texts, revealing a thematic consistency throughout the mentioned works—a method that might have yielded more nuanced results had Miller chosen to incorporate broader variety of sources, such as Wallace’s short fiction, or his first novel The Broom of the System. Still, Miller’s thesis does not necessarily suffer given the omission of these less popular texts, for the real contribution of his study is the elucidation of the spiritual and moral underpinnings of Wallace’s most influential works. While Miller does not take the time to situate himself in the ongoing debate concerning Wallace’s religious understanding, any student of the late-great postironist’s work will understand the value of Miller’s insights.

Appropriate to Wallace’s own, explicit refusal to openly endorse any one brand of religious devotion, Miller does not argue, despite the title, that Wallace’s work is categorically Christian. Although, any reader will surely recognize that when Miller is using the word “religious,” it is with reference to Western, Judeo-Christian ideals; Miller, at various times in the study, casually alludes to the Bible, hell, and God. While this might seem misleading, or perhaps rhetorically cunning, it is actually a tact taken from Wallace, himself. As Miller demonstrates, despite the fact that Wallace never openly identified as a Christian writer, thinker, or believer, he persistently infused his work with larger spiritual themes taken from Christian tradition and thought. Miller thus, in Wallacian fashion, does not argue for the Christianity of Wallace, but rather for the moral and spiritual value of Wallace’s work as it relates to the Western religious impulse.

Miller begins with a preface that is highly personal and self-reflexive, and in that sense, also very Wallacian, stating in the opening lines, “I’m serious about television. I watch it religiously” (x). This presents a problem for Miller, the problem of distraction from boredom and the tedium of day-to-day life, the problem of transcendence. Miller quickly turns to Wallace’s commencement address for wisdom on this issue, positioning the speech as primarily dealing with “the failure of a false god” (xi), in this instance the god of TV. In its opposition to transcendence, Miller argues that Wallace’s work is a “vindication of religion, as good evidence that worshiping anything other than the one true God will cannibalize you” (xi). Here, by using the phrase “one true God,” Miller’s angle becomes readily apparent: he aims to do a devotional reading of Wallace’s work. By devotional, I mean a reading that is morally and spiritually didactic, so much so that the book quickly becomes more a Christian lesson on living well, and less a criticism of Wallace’s fiction. In this sense, Miller is really writing a book about proper religion and using the wit and wisdom of Wallace as scriptural authority. While this might sound disconcerting to some, the structure and content of Miller’s...