January (Web-only) 2001

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Readers of Science magazine must have been surprised when they opened the December 22 issue and found an essay-review (much longer than the typical Science book review) by David Foster Wallace, writer of fiction and idiosyncratic essays, author of Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and other books said by critics to contain the very quintessence of postmodernism. Not, in short, the typical Science reviewer.

Wallace's essay-review, "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama," takes off from two novels set in the world of mathematics, but his larger subjects are, first, the recent rise in the "cultural stock" of mathematics, as evidenced in the outpouring of books and even the occasional movie with math themes, and second, the implications of writing about matters which most of your readers will not understand (though some will—and how do you maintain your bona fides with the cognoscenti while not losing the bulk of your readers?).

The subject is large, and Wallace approaches it in good postmodern fashion: jokey (for example, there are 24 endnotes, many of them quite long, so that in some ways the piece reads like a parody of a Science article) yet at the same time insinuating a command of the material. (This is most unpleasantly apparent in Wallace's first footnote, in which, having cited G.H. Hardy's 1940 classic, A Mathematician's Apology, he makes the preposterous claim that "There is very little that any of the recent books do that Hardy's terse and beautiful Apology did not do first, better, and with rather less fuss.")

And since even postmodernists, despite their horror of metanarratives, are compelled to tell stories, Wallace tells a story about the vogue for math books. In Wallace's myth of origins, the breakthrough ...