Some Brief Thoughts About DFW’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
John Madera
Last night, I finished reading David Foster Wallace’s first collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. While reading it, I often laughed aloud at his mordant descriptions, his perspicacious takedowns of consumer culture, his withering commentary on just about everything that hits any of his senses; and I often marveled at his numerous outrageous digressions, scathing self-scrutiny, daunting yet still paradoxically approachable erudition. Page after page, I couldn’t help feeling that Wallace had embodied Henry James’s admonishment “to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” (Actually, Wallace has a number of blind spots, but still far less than most us.) Rather than cherry-pick passages from the book, let me instead suggest you read these essays for yourselves, in the book itself or at the following links:
“Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness (appeared as “The String Theory” in in Esquire, July 1996)
And here is Wallace reading excerpts from “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” Sandwiched between them is an interview snippet:
John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024) and Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press, forthcoming in 2026). His fiction is also published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill,Hobart, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His poetry is also published in elimae, Sixth Finch, Contrapuntos, and elsewhere. His criticism is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, two-time New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.
