Or even: readers who can have fun with Jonathan Franzen in the morning while wrestling with William Gaddis at night.ĭavid Foster Wallace has long straddled the worlds of difficult and not-as-difficult, with most readers agreeing that his essays are easier to read than his fiction, and his journalism most accessible of all. There might even be - though it’s impossible to prove - readers who find it possible enjoy Thomas Pynchon one day, and Elmore Leonard the next. These readers might actually read both kinds of fiction themselves, sometimes in the same week. They believe, though not too vocally, that so-called difficult books can exist next to, can even rub bindings suggestively with, more welcoming fiction. That it was written in three years by a writer under 35 is very painful to think aboutīut while the polarisers have been going at it, there has existed a silent legion of readers, perhaps the majority of readers of literary fiction, who don’t mind a little of both. Much in the way that would-be civilised debates are polarised by extreme thinkers on either side, this debate has been made to seem like an either/or proposition, that the world has room for only one kind of fiction, and that the other kind should be banned and its proponents hunted down and, why not, dismembered.
On the other hand, there are those who feel that fiction can be challenging, generally and thematically, and even on a sentence-by-sentence basis - that it’s okay if a person needs to work a bit while reading, for the rewards can be that much greater when one’s mind has been exercised and thus (presumably) expanded.
In essence, there are some people who feel that fiction should be easy to read, that it’s a popular medium that should communicate on a somewhat conversational wavelength. In recent years, there have been a few literary dustups - how insane is it that such a thing exists in a world at war? - about readability in contemporary fiction. But first, enjoy Dave Eggers's brilliant introduction to Infinite Jest, written in 2006 two years before David Foster Wallace's untimely death at the age of 46. See a selection of the jacket designs in the gallery at the bottom of the piece. They include monolithic memoirs by Primo Levi and Nelson Mandela, seminal British fiction from the likes of Beryl Bainbridge and Iain Banks, and significant works of contemporary American literature such as Infinite Jest and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City.
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