Why Isn't It Boring?
This is a book about boredom--mind-numbing, gut-aching, apparently eternal boredom. It goes on for pages and pages of ever-so-detailed descriptions of boring people being bored in the most boring of ways. And yet, magically, it was not ever for me the least bit boring. What I can't figure out is how Wallace managed to make such authentic-feeling descriptions of sheer boredom so totally fascinating. Wallace didn't finish this book himself before he died, and maybe he would eventually have found a way of making the writing as sutiably boring as its characters and its non-events. But as it is, it brilliantly defies its subject be being almost always so very interesting about it.
