The Wallace Effect: David Foster Wallace and the Contemporary Literary Imagination by Marshall Boswell (review)

It is a truism of David Foster Wallace scholarship that his work had a wide sphere of influence, one so obvious and accepted that it almost does not merit a great deal of thought. In his most recent book, long-standing Wallace critic Marshall Boswell accords this fact a measured and detailed consideration that brings with it surprising rewards. The second title in Bloomsbury’s much anticipated David Foster Wallace Studies series edited by Stephen Burn, The Wallace Effect, follows Lucas Thompson’s Global Wallace, and in its lucidity and range, establishes the series as one of contexts and connections, in contrast with the sometimes (understandably) narrow focus of other examinations of the author’s work. In this respect, the book is a welcome ventilation of some of the main themes of Wallace scholarship, touching on the primary concerns of the field with lightness and assurance. In many ways, this particular virtue is testament to the continued progress of Wallace Studies as a field; it is no longer necessary to do a great deal of textually-specific groundwork to clear the way for the main argument of the book, since much of that groundwork already exists. Boswell’s book situates itself admirably in this growing body, gesturing to the foundational work of Lance Olsen, James Rother, and Steven Moore, while also engaging with more recent critical work, including Andrew Hoberek’s. Boswell also writes extensively about what he calls “the growing resistance to Infinite Jest” (12), which he links explicitly to Amy Hungerford’s 2016 essay on not reading Wallace. However, while the work naturally draws on these still-developing critical conversations, Boswell is altogether more interested in situating Wallace in a broader context—one that is largely online, like Wallace’s fanbase—and makes extensive use of reviews, blogs, popular websites, and interviews to make his point, which makes the prose feel livelier and more dynamic than you might expect. The work is marred at times by errors of accuracy, with several misspelled names and typos but, minor editorial issues aside, it is marked by an easy, conversational tone that bears its erudition lightly.

In charting what he calls “the Wallace effect” (1), Boswell sets himself the unenviable task of meaningfully getting to grips with Wallace’s debts to and influences on the literary cultures of the latter half of the twentieth century. The book is composed of two parts: “Towards Wallace,” which consists of a chapter each on John Barth and Richard Powers, who were “writers Wallace regarded as competitors” (10), and “The Wallace Effect,” which contains four chapters addressing Wallace’s impact on and presence in work by Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Lauren Groff. It is a wildly ambitious project, covering five decades, a multiplicity of styles, and points of contact and clash. Boswell juggles not only the twin critical and popular discourses around Wallace, but no less than six other bodies of scholarship. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the book feels at times a little slight, despite its clear command of the material. Indeed, my greatest criticism of the book is that I would like to see quite a bit more of it.

More specifically, there is room for Boswell to flex his considerable Wallace muscles a great deal more. The Barth chapter, which opens the work, undertakes a feminist reading of Barth, specifically examining an imaginary of reproduction that undercuts the misogyny with which Barth’s work can be associated. But it is very much an essay on Barth, in which Wallace feels like an afterthought, when a deeper discussion of Barth’s reverberation in Wallace’s early work would be especially welcome. The second essay, on Powers, is similarly light on Wallace. While both essays offer incisive and unusual readings of the authors at their cores, a closer focus on Wallace would have given the rest of the volume a greater sense of wholeness; as it...