I have heard upscale U.S. citizens ask the Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the skeetshooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the Midnight Buffet is.

Of course, it helped a lot that I've become such a huge fan of David Foster Wallace after reading Infinite Jest a couple of months ago. This particular book is a collection of seven of his essays written between 1992 and 1996, and Wallace turns out to be a wonderful essayist in addition to being a brilliant novelist.

Having said that, though, I should note that the quality of the essays in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is pretty variable, and one of them, an incredibly long and hagiographic essay about David Lynch and his films, I wasn't even able to finish. There were also a couple of lit-crit pieces that, although witty in spots, could have been deleted with no loss.

The two highlights of the book, however, are worth the price of admission alone. The first, "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All," is about Wallace's visit to the Illinois State Fair (near where he grew up), which he suspects Harper's commissioned him to do because

...every so often editors at these magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90% of the United States lies between the Coasts and figure they'll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heartlandish.

Much of the charm of Wallace's essays is that he's basically an intellectual snob who can't help being snide about things like the Illinois State Fair, but he's also an intellectual snob who watches a lot of TV, chain smokes, and eats junk food, so he finds it hard to take himself too seriously. For example, after a paragraph-long meditation on people's attachment to the land in the Midwest, directed at a friend who has accompanied him to the first day of the fair, he confesses that "Native Companion, rummaging for her lighter, is about as interested in this stuff as she was about the child-as-empiricist-God-delusion horseshit back in the car, she apprises me."

But beyond even this piece, the true highlight of the book is the title essay, a hundred-page monologue about a 7-day Caribbean cruise that kept me in stitches (and awake until 1:00 AM). Wallace records in almost excruciatingly honest detail his trip aboard the m.v. Zenith (paid for by Harper's), including every embarrassment, misstep, and mental lapse during the voyage, of which there are many. Wallace appears to alternate between a morbid fear of human companionship (he spent the entire last two days in his cabin) and a neurotic desire to deserve his paycheck by participating in the shipboard activities he is supposed to be reporting on (he enters the "Best Legs" competition and tries skeetshooting off the stern of the ship). It may be that I found this funny because it so closely approximates my own attitude toward life, but even so I don't think I'd want to have dinner with anyone who could read this essay without laughing out loud at least twice.

On the other hand, it contains the word thanatotic not once, but twice. Bewarned that Wallace's vocabulary, as always, is immense, but also, as always, somehow natural and never pedantic sounding. Don't ask me how he manages to pull off this trick....

Bottom line: this is a good book, but since only two of the essays are truly outstanding, you're probably best off waiting for the paperback.

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