A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
Published 1997 · 128,575 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Essays & Criticism
How hard is A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again to read?
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again scores 69 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 78 out of 100
- Wallace deploys an extraordinary range of registers simultaneously — scientific and mathematical vocabulary ('intercalated,' 'saprogenic,' 'hypotaxis,' 'synecdochic'), invented compound nouns ('metatelevisual,' 'telecomputer'), and Latinate academic terminology jostling against demotic slang and Midwestern vernacular. The TV essay alone references Duchamp, Octavio Paz, de Tocqueville, and Emerson while using words like 'pablumizing' and 'otiose' in the same paragraph. Closer to Gravity's Rainbow (80) than Lolita in density, though grounded by essayistic accessibility.
- Sentence structure: 82 out of 100
- Wallace's signature sentences extend for hundreds of words through nested parentheticals, dashes, em-dashes, and subordinate clauses that fork and re-fork — the tennis essay contains passages of 200+ words that pivot through self-interruption before resolving. The State Fair journal uses fragmented timestamp notation as structural counterpoint. Footnote logic (implicit even without visible endnotes) demands that readers track multiple simultaneous argumentative threads, placing this close to Absalom, Absalom! territory.
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- 'E Unibus Pluram' spends 80 pages constructing a theory of television, postmodern irony, and American self-consciousness entirely through abstract argument — invoking media theory, Emersonian transcendentalism, and cultural semiotics. The tennis essay maps Midwest geography onto mathematical philosophy and pubescent psychology. Even the most concrete pieces (Illinois State Fair, cruise ship) become frames for extended meditations on consumerism, death-anxiety, and American loneliness. The abstraction never fully detaches from the sensory, but it dominates.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Each paragraph in the theoretical essays packs multiple citations, 5-8 cultural references, and several distinct argumentative moves — the TV essay references Pynchon, DeLillo, Barth, Gaddis, Warhol, Elvis, MTM Studios, and specific Nielsen statistics within a single page. The journalism pieces use a density of observed detail (livestock breeds, vendor pitches, baton-twirling division names) that functions as its own form of information overload, thematically mirroring the saturation Wallace analyzes.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- As essays, these pieces state their arguments more explicitly than fiction, but Wallace constantly ironizes his own positions and constructs a layered narrative persona — the naive tourist, the self-aware critic who catches himself being televisual, the Midwesterner performing East Coast sophistication. The reader must constantly assess how seriously to take Wallace's stated conclusions against his meta-commentary on those conclusions. More direct than Lolita (72) but far less than Beloved (50).
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The Illinois wind operates as externalization of Wallace's mathematical-philosophical sensibility; the cruise ship becomes a floating emblem of American consumer death-anxiety; Joe Briefcase functions as a composite Everyman prisoner to spectacle. These symbols are essayistic and explicitly named rather than literary-symbolic in the Woolf sense — the lighthouse is never not named a lighthouse. Score sits between Heart of Darkness (65) and The Idiot (55).
- Ironic distance: 82 out of 100
- Recursive irony is Wallace's central mode: he critiques TV's institutionalization of irony while being profoundly ironic, then explicitly acknowledges his critique is itself a televisual gesture ('my reading of Gilder is televisual. I am in the aura'). The State Fair piece maintains a persona of anthropological observation while repeatedly catching itself in snobbery it can't escape. This double-bind irony — using the tool to analyze the tool — pushes the score near the Ulysses range (88) though essayistic earnestness pulls it back.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- The TV essay ends without a prescription — 'Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels' — offering only ironic speculation as conclusion. The title cruise essay famously ends in unresolved ambivalence about pleasure and death. The tennis essay resolves its childhood arc but leaves its philosophical claims open. These are not mystery-withholdings (as in 2666) but principled refusals of closure that leave the reader bearing the weight of the argument.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- Seven essays each structurally distinct: the TV piece is extended academic argument with layered citations; the State Fair piece uses 24-hour timestamp journalism as fragmented log; the tennis piece is lyric memoir; the Michael Joyce profile uses embedded match commentary; the cruise essay interweaves observation and meditation. Within the TV essay, nested quotations-within-arguments create a kind of documentary montage. Less extreme than Flights (88) but significantly more complex than linear essay collections.
How A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is regarded
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again holds a literary regard score of 76 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.