(((This is what an 'editor' for one of those essay compendiae does, I guess. I've never read Wallace , so I don't understand his very particular style. Must read "Infinite Jest." Or Balzac. Rachel Van Pelt clued me in on this thing.))))
"There’s a rather more concrete problem with the cover’s
word ‘editor,’ and it may be the real reason why these editorial introductions
are the least appealing candy in the box. The Best American Essays 2007’s
pieces are arranged alphabetically, by author, and they’re essentially reprints
from magazines and journals; whatever (light) copyediting they receive is
done in-house by Houghton Mifflin. So what the cover calls your editor isn’t
really doing any editing. My real function is best described by an epithet that
may, in future years, sum up 2006 with the same grim efficiency that terms
like ‘Peace with Honor,’ ‘Iran-Contra,’ ‘Florida Recount,’ and ‘Shock and Awe’
now comprise and evoke other years. What your editor really is here is: the
Decider.
Being the Decider for a Best American anthology is part honor
and part service, with ‘service’ here not as in ‘public service’ but rather as
in ‘service industry.’ That is, in return for some pay and intangible assets, I
am acting as an evaluative filter, winnowing a very large field of possibilities
down to a manageable, absorbable Best for your delectation. Thinking about
this kind of Decidering (2) is interesting in all kinds of different ways; (3) but
the general point is that professional filtering/winnowing is a type of service
that we citizens and consumers now depend on more and more, and in ever-
increasing ways, as the quantity of available information and products and art
and opinions and choices and all the complications and ramifications thereof
expands at roughly the rate of Moore’s Law.
The immediate point, on the other hand, is obvious. Unless you
are both a shut-in and independently wealthy, there is no way you can sit
there and read all the contents of all the 2006 issues of all the hundreds of
U.S. periodicals that publish literary nonfiction. So you subcontract this job —
not to me directly, but to a publishing company whom you trust (for whatever
reasons) to then subsubcontract the job to someone whom they trust (or
more like believe you’ll trust [for whatever reasons]) not to be insane or
capricious or overtly ‘biased’ in his Decidering."
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Interesting--I'm going to pick this up. The thing about Wallace is that he really doesn't have a "particular style". Every story or project he embarks upon is defined by its own trajectory, to varying degrees--each project (and projects within projects) is self-regulated and unique. I had an extra copy of Infinite Jest and I just gave it away. Please read this. I don't even like reading novels usually, and this 1100 page behemoth to me was a joy to read. I can't say anything expository on it, and can provide no description of it. Just to say: read it, and read all 300 of the footnotes. Wallace is a dazzling talent--truly. The way he is able to construct a sentence is fascinating, as silly as that sounds. As a writer, I stand in awe at how Wallace is able to keep a sentence (or paragraph, or section, or novel) taut for so long, never allowing it to lag, and remaining (largely) faithful to grammatical rules, even as he gloriously flouts them.
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