Paperback review: Both Flesh And Not, Essays by David Foster Wallace

Both Flesh and Not is the third collection of David Foster Wallace’s non-fiction, and the first to be published after his death in 2008. There is an element of barrel-scraping here: where previous collections boasted essays on Kafka, Dostoevsky and 11 September, this one features dry pointers on word usage and a stodgy survey of American fiction from 1988 that probably seemed dated by 1989.

And yet, when it comes to the Wallace oeuvre even the scraps are worth saving. The title piece, on tennis, wriggles at the limits of language, offering a sort of negative theology of the Federer forehand (one can only define it “in terms of what it is not”); and there is a fine tribute to the stories of Borges. Best of all is a generous, discursive review of David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress that only Wallace could have written; ranging across philosophy and literature, and containing shrewd observations on the nature of experimental fiction, it had me nodding so often in assent that I finished it with a crick in the neck.