SansPoint

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Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you.

David Foster Wallace’s story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was my first introduction to truly experimental short fiction. Wallace dissects, plays with, and reassembles the short story into a variety of bizarre and intriguing compositions that are recognizable as narratives, but turn expectations on their head. Among the most striking examples of this are “Octet,” which takes meta-fiction to an illogical extreme, “The Depressed Person” where the true story is contained in multi-page footnotes, and the series of title stories. By their standards, “Forever Overhead” is amazingly simple and straightforward, yet its surface simplicity belies a clever and impressive command of language and narrative.

The main “trick” of “Forever Overhead” is its use of second-person narrative. The narration is subtle, not speaking to the reader/protagonist you, but about them. Wallace restrains his narration to simple sentences or fragments with one or two images for the majority of the work.

Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning.

Yet, he is able to switch this up, moving to complex, flowing writing when appropriate, such as the powerful description of a wet dream.

And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of yielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of a feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights though your window blinds cracking into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling, and on you a dense white jam that lisps between legs, trickles and sticks, cools on you, hardens and clears until there is nothing but gnarled knots of pale solid animal hair in the morning shower, and in the wet tangle a clean sweet smell you can’t believe comes from anything you made inside you. This masterful, clever, and deliberate switching of tone and language draws the reader in, grabs their attention and establishes what is to come as important and impactful, as one’s first wet dream.

Even beyond the simple considerations of the language, Wallace’s masterful use of second-person speaks to, and connects with the reader. There is a certain universality of terms, familiarity with the emotions, and the sensations, if not the exact events.

You are in line. Look around. Look bored. Few talk in the line. Everyone seems by himself. Most look at the ladder, look bored. You almost all have crossed arms, chilled by a late dry rising wind on the constellations of blue-clean chlorine beads that cover your backs and shoulders. It seems impossible that everybody could really be this bored.

What thirteen-year old or former thirteen-year old, cannot relate to this?

Even more stunning is the story’s anti-climax, a surprising, intimate look behind a facade of banality. There is something to even a simple story of a birthday visit to a pool, behind a first try at the diving board, and it clicks, it connects with the reader in a way that could not be done through first or third person. This is a narrative that requires the reader to feel there, and be there. No work I have read in second-person before, and none since, has had the same level of impact and connection as “Forever Overhead.” It’s what made me fall in love with David Foster Wallace’s writing, and I hope it does the same for you.