What Makes a Great Jacket?

Via my friend/coworker/mentor Keith Hayes, who has three covers in AIGA's latest 50 Books/50 Covers, comes a post by Peter Mendelsund (one of my favorite non-Keith-Hayes designers) about the jacket for Infinite Jest. Mendelsund gives a great summation of what makes a good book cover:

Book jacket design should concern itself with, in my estimation, equal parts enticement ("Come buy this book") and exegesis ("This is what this book is about, more or less.") A good cover doesn't let one category trump the other. A good cover should not resort to cliché in order to accomplish either. But the real key here, in both categories (enticement and exegesis) is the designer's ability to work the sweet-spot between giving-away-the-farm, and deliberate obfuscation.

Book jackets that tell you too much, suck. Book jackets that try to change the subject also suck, and are furthermore, too easy.

Mendelsund goes on to explain why Wallace's suggestion (a design based around a photo of the making of Fritz Lang's Metropolis) would have been a huge mistake (too heavy-handed, too many cultural associations, not really what the book is about). On the other hand . . .

[. . .] a perfectly blue sky... A sky that only an advertiser could have dreamed up- a sky that could have been subsidized...A sky that stands in for satisfaction, but a satisfaction that is almost sinister in its perfection...(and, of course, HUGE type, because, well, that's just what's called for)...I think that was a very elegant solution. It tells you something very important, but leaves everything to the imagination.

What's curious about this cover in particular is that I've never quite thought about it. I judge covers all the time, but this one has always just had a sense of authority to it. I look at it and think, That is the cover for Infinite Jest, excluding in my mind the possibility of any other cover (though, in fact, there are three variations on the same theme in print). Which I suppose is a measure itself of the cover's greatness.

Prose Television

The Fiction Advocate has a nice little run-down of David Foster Wallace's 1990 essay, "E Unibus Pluram."

Brian's particularly interest in Wallace's take-down of what he (Wallace) calls "witty, erudite, extremely high-quality prose television." Brian writes, "If he were still alive, I would love to hear him pick apart the layers of irony in a show like 30 Rock, or a writer like Tao Lin."

I'm curious too, but I think it's worth pointing out just how self-conscious the essay is. Wallace rarely commented on his peers and only occassionally wrote about his forebears, but he was extremely aware of the weaknesses of his own writing, which he worried was shallow, cute, and primarily concerned with making himself look good rather than revealing deep truths. When he talks about "prose television," he's almost certainly referring to his own early writing, which explains the progression of his writing from the neurotic slapstick of The Broom of the System to more interior, increasingly discursive narratives like "Mr. Squishy."

David Foster Wallace

A couple weeks ago, my friend Brian wrote a short post at The Fiction Advocate in response to David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College (now published as This is Water). I've been thinking a lot about Wallace lately, probably more than is healthy, and I intend to post more later, but for now, I'm going to stick to countering several points in Brian's argument.

According to Brian, the thought processes that made Wallace's life so hellish were also those that made his writing great. On this much, we agree. Wallace's great talent was being able to make sense of a great deal of chaos. On a basic level, all narratives are about ordering facts and creating meaning, and no one needs narrative and meaning more than a depressive.

The general thrust of Wallace's Kenyon speech is that it's crucial and yet very difficult to stay fully attentive to the world around you. This has been a theme in much of Wallace's writing, though the distractions are often externalized. Wallace was very interested the way individuals filter through the barrage of often conflicting messages delivered through various media, an experience he tried to recreate in his writing through his liberal use of endnotes, footnotes, digressions, and asides. The Kenyon speech, however, is concerned specifically with the problem of getting lost in one's own thoughts and losing track of what's occurring in reality. This is also a feature of Wallace's writing, one that takes the forefront in his essays and many of his short stories, but it's clear that in the Kenyon speech Wallace is speaking more candidly than in much of his other writing if for no other reason than that he directly addresses one of the most common criticism lodged against Wallace's work.

Where I perceive candor, however, Brian sees "someone who's been exposed to too much clinical therapy and prescription drugs." My problem with Brian's assertion is, first, that it misconstrues the main point of the the speech and, second, that it seems emblematic of a certain knee-jerk disdain for modern psychiatry that both glorifies and oversimplifies depression.

As Brian sees it, the speech employs "psychotherapy jargon" to "implor[e] the graduating class to regulate their lives to the point of normalcy." Here's the passage he cites:

Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education—at least in my own case—is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

That sounds vaguely academic, but it's hardly full of psychological argot. Moreover, the point isn't to regulate one's life but to simply pay attention and try not to be a self-absorbed asshole. Sure, self-absorption is a problem that depressives struggle with more than most, but the tendency to get lost in one's own world to the exclusion of other people is natural and plagues everyone. It's as universal a theme as you'll find anywhere in his work.

The issue I take greater umbrage with is the claim that Wallace had undergone "too much" treatment for his clinical depression. While it may be arguable that Wallace could have been better served by different treatment, had he not received treatment at all, he'd have died much earlier. What the D.T. Max's profile in the New Yorker makes clear is that neither Wallace nor his wife and family believed his treatment was the problem. His widow, Karen Green put it bluntly: "The person who would go off the medications that were possibly keeping him alive was not the person he liked."

Toward the end, of course, Wallace, did choose to go off medication. He had been struggling with writer's block for a long time, and if the naysayers of therapy had been right, he'd have begun working on a new opus. Instead, it exacerbated his paralysis. David Foster Wallace penned his last words in a private letter to his wife on September 12, 2008, and while there may still be writing to be found in his personal records, there certainly won't be anything new. He finally got lost in his own head for good.

The Kenyon speech's main theme is that one should try, against all obstacles to avoid too much indulgent and abstract navel-gazing. It's a very simple, even common idea, but it's important. That Wallace struggled to extract himself from the labyrinth of his own mind is not lost on me, but the struggle itself wasn't what made his writing great. Rather, it was his frequent triumph. Had he merely succumbed to it, he'd have never written a word. That Wallace was capable of talking opening about the difficulty of trying in the most basic way to be good—that is, by simply paying attention to other people and the world around you—without resorting to platitudes nor skirting the complexity of the problem is miraculous. The result is a sort of secular homily for our age. That it's central theme can be dismissed out of hand seems like a great shame.