Wallaceblogging: David, Jon and Jeff and everything after that

Today among other things I read "Just Kids," Evan Hughes' feature in New York magazine about (a little about) the relationships between David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and most timely Jeffrey Eugenides (whose new novel THE MARRIAGE PLOT comes out this week) when they were young, frustrated, up-and-coming writers. Not a lot of its information is new or surprising, but it does provide some tidbits like Eugenides' firing from his publishing job that will further flavor the stew for people who enjoy things like this, and I am a person who enjoys things like this.

The Franzen/DFW friendship is fairly well trod particularly in the past year or two as Franzen has spoken and written about it (most notably in the New Yorker). I had no idea Eugenides was friends with them, although I appreciated the early reference to the road trip he took with fellow graduate of the best university ever Rick Moody after graduation. (Moody covers a little of this in his memoir THE BLACK VEIL, which somewhat addresses his literary ambitions before getting down to the business of linking his addictive history with the man he believes to have been his Puritan ancestor, as told about in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil.") Nor does it address, although I'm sure this will be discussed in some interview soon, what in the blue hay Eugenides has been doing for the past 9 years since MIDDLESEX came out, whether he lives in Europe now (I want to say it's Paris?)

I guess this is my disgruntled way of saying I wish the essay had been longer -- say at least the length of the Atlantic cover story on single women in the U.S. which I also read today (, is also worth a read,  could also be book-length etc.)

As to how it relates to THE MARRIAGE PLOT, I believe that was just a convenient temporal hook; although the book is about 20somethings with ambitions, they aren't writerly ones.

What draws me to these pieces, personally, is not just the temptation of some long-preserved literary gossip, the hiss of a jar lid being opened, the whiff of something musty and strange. The glimpses of these writers who were not all that noble and good to each other, nor easy on each others' work, nor frank about their jealousy for each other, are also nice... but not just that either. I think it's because of the coincidence as presented here of these authors all coming up at roughly the same amount of time and being friends, or friends of sorts, what you prefer.

I'm sure there were gaps in time and communication Hughes elided to make his portrait and I don't begrudge him doing so, to overcome the odds of having this kind of group persist over time and varying levels of success. It humanizes them and makes them figures of envy at the same time.

Also, whenever the city of Syracuse decides to start offering authors-who-lived-here-for-a-while tours I will be the first one standing next to the tour guide, expectantly. Or, road trip? I probably have at least two weeks before it starts to snow there.