On the one hand, this book is a huge disappointment. Publishers are clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to David Foster Wallace. They know that certain people (like me) will buy pretty much anything with his name on it, so they’re searching for anything that could possibly be slapped between two covers and called a ‘book’. So now we’ve got Both Flesh and Not which includes publicly-accessible pieces he wrote for newspapers and magazines, as well as weak 500-word nothing-pieces like “Just Asking”. These aren’t his best works and, what’s more, every essay in this collection represents a step closer to the moment when there is no more DFW left to publish in book form.
But on the other hand, even the worst DFW is better than almost all of the rest of the shit on my bookshelf. So there’s that.