be delivered. That urgency is palpable in the language of the ancient Gospels. It’s also palpable in the ever increasing acceleration and complexity of our contemporary society.

It’s not that novelistic
description is wrong. The prob-
that reads as if that equipment
were standard-issue at the
maternity ward. Art doesn’t
have to mimic or be limited by
reality, but it needs to feel as if
it operates sub specie realitatis.
Let’s just ensure that descrip-
tion is pertinent, shall we?

previously alluded. Wallace’s novels are not easy, and by strictly commercial considerations their success pales in comparison to the revenue brought in by a Hollywood blockbuster. However, he sought and found a way to write that

Photograph by Nick Garrod

lem comes when writers use
carefully crafted language to
hide the fact that they don’t
know how to tell an engaging
story. Nobody’s equipped with
the equivalent of a 360-degree
real-time scanner that immedi-
ately ascertains every peculiar
detail of our surroundings, as
well as the inner mappings of
our feelings. And yet, I’m con-
stantly assaulted by literature
To return to the late and
quintessentially contempo-
rary novelist, David Foster
Wallace—a writer who didn’t
shy away from description,
but who made it crucial—his
prose is in a sense contrary
to the style found in the New
Testament but, paradoxically,
and because of its immediacy
and currency, it partakes of that
sense of relevance to which I
felt like our way of living, whose
formulas didn’t draw from the
staid tropes of the past.

November + December 2010