David Foster Wallace on Bret Easton Ellis, shared here for Stephanie aka Bookavore aka WORD Brooklyn.
So I stopped into WORD last night to pick up Freedom, which felt hilariously clichéd what with the whole “ha, yeah, look at me, I’m thirty and I live in Brooklyn and I’m walking into my local independent bookstore with my right pant leg rolled up and my single-speed parked outside so I can fork over thirty of my finest bourgie dollars for the latest Jonathan Franzen” thing, but really I wasn’t left much of a choice after seeing Emily describe it as “a book I loved so much that I actually can’t talk about it, in print or IRL” because, I mean, really! Emily Gould! Speechless! Has that ever happened ever?! And anyhow Stephanie and I got to talking about the last book I’d come in to buy, a book which neither of us liked very much but which seemingly everyone else among the New York literati were positively orgasmic over (a book whose title won’t be named here because I’m not in the business of shitting all over other people’s babies), and I tried recalling this quote because it reminded me very much of this particular novel’s cast of wholly underdeveloped characters and the thoroughly shallow postmodern apocalypse in which they found themselves, but I totally bungled it because it’s pretty long so now I’m sharing it here because it’s great and and it’s timely and because it’s DFW talking shit about BEE and who can’t get behind that?
