Infinite Confusion

摘要

David Foster Wallace is a great writer, known for his stories and essays as ell as the inspiring novel Infinite Jest (1). Wallace's work is revelatory, funny and post-ironic.I fully expected to enjoy Everything and More. But it's a train wreck of a book, a disaster. Nonmathemati-ciass will find Everything and More unreadable, and mathematicians will view it with, at best, sardonic amusement. Crippling errors abound. Wallace formats his book as a parody of scholarship. He provides no table of contents, and he titles his sections with numbers, possibly as an homage to the style of 19th-century mathematicians. There are over 400 footnotes squeezed into the book's 305 pages of text. Wallace uses idiosyncratic, pettifogging abbreviations such as "G.C.P.F.S." for "General Convergence Problem of Fourier Series," "IYI" for "If You're Interested, "E.G." for "Emergency Glossary," and "Q.E.I." for "Quick Embedded Interpolation." Here's how he ends one of his subsections: END Q.F.-V-T.I. RETURN TO para 7c AT THE ON p. 256 W/ ASTERISK AT END.