Book review - Good Old Neon by David Foster Wallace

There’s something very sad about witnessing a mind that has the compulsive need to deconstruct every experience it has, as if it’ll finally reveal the interior and normalcy it so desperately craves. As if through the application of sheer logic and reason it can ferret out its innermost desires and it can finally spend the rest of existence in a state of meditative bliss and complete equanimity with the world. Spoiler alert etc etc

My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired.

Good Old Neon is a first person narration of someone with memetic desire turned up to 11, where he only wants whatever other people want, for no other reason than that other people want it. The catch 22 here is that everything he tries to fix his underlying condition from cocaine to sex to psychoanalysis to religion only makes him more aware of how there’s nothing intrinsic about him at all, it’s all social mimicry. Finally he comes to the realisation that there is nothing really special about hating yourself and feeling fake, which is what finally drives him to jump off a bridge.

Of course, in typical DFW style, the story is not just a story. It’s a self imposed reconstruction he (the author) is ascribing to the death of a guy he knew in high school. So the confession, which was supposedly the only real thing he ever did, is also the imagined fantasy of someone who never actually knew him.

It seems like it’s very hard for people to like his writing if they don’t immediately feel a sense of nakedness, as if someone has reached straight into their brain and plucked out their innermost desires and laid them bare for everyone to see. That’s how I feel whenever I read his writing, which makes the whole experience somewhat sadomasochistic since it’s pretty evident that he doesn’t actually like any of this about himself. He tries to reach for an answer in This is water but it’s unclear if he ever really found one, especially knowing how his story ends. In some ways This is water is the answer to the question ‘Good Old Neon’ poses, namely how to engage with the world with the vivid knowledge that all of your desires are self-constructed delusions, while also suffering from the peculiar brain virus of instinctive, almost violent introspection.

Thinking ain’t gonna get you out of it, because thinking is what got you into it

This is a pretty common trap that a lot of us rationalist types fall into which is the old “when all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like nails” thing. In fairness the application of reason got us into the futuristic science fiction reality we live in today so it’s not the worst of the tools in the toolbox, but there’s something about turning the torch onto itself to examine it’s own contents that makes the whole thing fall apart. Dostoevsky touched on the same thing when describing the underground man — when he is insulted, he does not strike back; he thinks about what striking back would mean, how it would be interpreted, how his interpretation of the interpretation retroactively contaminates the purity of the impulse. In some ways Dostoevsky seems like what DFW would have been like if he was contending with the rise of post-enlightenment Rationalism rather than the ingrained narcissism and nihilism of the post 9/11 world.

Some people say reading is a form of inhabiting the authors’ mind, if only for a moment. This is what it feels like if the mind is actively trying to harm the parasite that’s inhabiting it. Like it’s holding a twisted funhouse mirror to yourself and letting you soak in all the uncomfortable realisations that entails.