Field Recordings

From the Broadkill Review Archives: The Pale King : Absurdity and Anxiety: David Foster Wallace’s comedic and paranoid voice I first read David Foster Wallace’s  Infinite Jest  while I lived in Brighton, a borough of Boston, MA, where most of the novel's action occurs, and at the time I worked as a registrar/teacher at a small immersion English language school for rich foreign kids and corporate big-Whigs who needed a tune up on their idioms before undertaking university or new business campaigns, and the school, located near St. Elizabeth’s hospital where Wallace’s bodily Tennis academy lies with its giant inflated lung, and being a pedestrian, spent hours walking the novel's map, through the copper autumn. I've revisited the novel twice since, and I’ve taught sections, and led students to his essays, his short fiction.  A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again  was required reading for my college composition course.    Wallace can be chall...