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Thomas Jefferson, author of the Dec-laration of Independence, receives a fourout of five on vision (the same score asZachary Taylor). This points to the secondmajor problem with the methodology: Itrequires judgment calls that stretch farbeyond the reach of the data. Granted, wecan detect differences between HerbertHoover and Abraham Lincoln; but Fel-zenberg claims to find much smaller dif-ferences. For instance, he gives JamesMonroe a vision score of four, whileGeorge H. W. Bush rates merely a two. It isdifficult to believe that the data allow forthis kind of fine-grained distinction. Yetit is these seemingly minutedifferentiations that producemuch of the final results.

The third problem with thesystem is that no criterion cap-tures the effect a president canhave on the institution itself.Presidents make and remakethe office, and in this way caninfluence the country beyondtheir policy achievements. ButFelzenberg has no category toaccount for thisand this, too,occasionally produces strangeresults. For instance, ThomasJefferson, a paradigm-shiftingpresident who helped trans-form the office, receives thesame final score as James Mon-roe, who was working withinthe Jeffersonian framework.

This problem is most pro-nounced with Jackson. We can,of course, criticize Jacksonwhen it comes to the wisdom ofhis bank policy, or the morality of hisIndian policy, but there is no doubt that OldHickory helped make the presidency whatit is today. Indeed, Lincoln drew uponJacksons stand against Nullification todefend the Union. Felzenberg faults previ-ous historians for overestimating Jackson.He may be correctbut, by excluding acategory to account for the institutionalchanges that leaders like Jackson helpedcreate, Felzenberg has ended up underes-timating him.

More broadly, Felzenbergs omissionof any institutional variable means thathis ratings retain the strange apples tooranges quality that prior ratings havehad. How, for instance, can Bill Clintonbe judged in relation to Chester Arthur?The presidency in 1881 was a very dif-

ferent institution than it was in 1993.How can we profitably compare its occu-pants across time? Felzenberg, like pre-vious raters before him, does not givea satisfactory answer to this importantquestion.

Given that one of Felzenbergs professedpurposes is to cleanse the presidential-ratings game of past liberal biases, thefollowing must be mentioned. Being aRepublican is positively associated with ahigher score along all six criteria. Beinga Democrat is negatively associated alongall six criteria. That is, in the aggregate,Felzenbergs analysis slightly but consis-

tently tilts toward the GOP.This analysis jibes with sever-al noteworthy results: There isno Democratic president inthe top five. FDR, the highest-rated Democrat, sits in theseventh position, sandwichedbetween Eisenhower and Tay-lor. The Jacksonian Demo-cratsfor whom Felzenberghas barely a kind wordneverbreak the bottom half; all butone (Polk) are in the bottomthird. If conservatives havebeen rightly unhappy withthe results of surveys likeSchlesingers, liberals mighthave reason to be unhappywith Felzenbergs conclusions. Nevertheless, Felzenberg is tobe credited with bringing tothe presidential-ratings gamea quality that had been sorelylacking: an opportunity todebate. Though I disagree

with Felzenbergs methodology andmany of his conclusions, it must be notedthat heunlike othershas offered athorough explanation of his reasoning.Previous ratings typically relied upon apoll of the experts. This made themseem less like the initiation of a public dis-cussion and more like the final word fromthe Ivory Tower. Felzenberg has offered acorrection to that condescending attitudeby giving us clear reasons for his ratings.He offers us an opportunity to deliberate,discuss, and ultimately sharpen our viewsof the presidents. In this regard, he hasdone us a service. The book can be rec-ommended to those with an interest in thissubjectnot as the final word, but as theopening argument in a long-overduedebate.

T HE recently deceased novelist,essayist, and journalist DavidFoster Wallace was a genius.And a big, showy one at that.His style, laden with his trademark foot-notes, was that of a man whose brain waspermanently stuck in overdrivea mindso bright, an observer so exactingly acuteas Wallace seemed to have no other op-tion. He was going to struggle mightily toconvey the whole of his experience andinsight on any given topic, and lest any-thing slip through the cracks he wouldinsert it on the bottom of the page where hehoped that there was still room, given histypically voluminous outpouring. Theysay brevity is the soul of wit, but Wallacesagile mind was witty enough to rewrite therules.

Wallaces two collections of journalismand essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing IllNever Do Again and Consider the Lobster,remain his most accessible works. Butmost of his career came in the shadow ofhis magnum opus, the dystopian doorstopof a novel Infinite Jest. The book describesa future in which the U.S. has turned ahuge section of its Northeast into a toxic-waste dump (where herds of feral ham-sters roam) and declared that region partof Canada, angering our neighbors to thenorth to the point that theres a terroristgroup made up entirely of Quebecoisassassins in wheelchairs frantically search-ing the country for an avant-garde filmthe Infinite Jest of the titlethey plan onusing as a weapon. The film is said to be socompelling that all who see it want to donothing but watch it until they waste away.Even more oddly, most of the bookscharacters are either youths at a tennisacademy or the occupants of a drug-rehabcenter.

The novel is about addiction, and aboutthe whole of the American experience. Itsvery, very funny and very, very sad and,according to the jacket copy, which foronce is not exaggerating, is one of thoserare books that renew the very idea of whata novel can do. But as is most often

M A R K H E M I N G W AY

An EpicTalent

Felzenbergis to becredited

with bringing

to the presidential-

ratingsgame a

quality thathad been

sorely lacking: anopportunityto debate.

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trying not to be self-centered] is not a mat-ter of virtueits a matter of my choosingto do the work of somehow altering orgetting free of my natural, hard-wireddefault-setting, which is to be deeply andliterally self-centered, and to see andinterpret everything through this lens ofself. People who can adjust their naturaldefault-setting this way are often de-scribed as being well adjusted, which Isuggest to you is not an accidental term.

Wallace went on to note that once youbecome well-adjusted, youll realize thatthe really important kind of freedominvolves attention, and awareness, and dis-cipline, and effort, and being able truly tocare about other people and to sacrifice forthem, over and over, in myriad petty littleunsexy ways, every day.

For better or for worse, the spirit that

defines Wallaces writing is that of some-one striving to be self-awaresometimespainfully, cringe-inducingly so. It thusbecomes hard not to see his writing assomething of a cri de coeur against manyof his immediate literary forebears.

Thats how Wallace, whose writing nor-mally oozed decency and compassion forall but the most contemptible subjects,came to write just about the only causticthing of note in his entire career. It was aparticularly savage and devastating reviewof John Updikes Toward the End of Time,in which Wallace threw down the gauntletagainst what he termed the Great MaleNarcissists of postwar literature: Updike,Mailer, and Roth. Here Wallace finallymade clear his feelings about the previousgeneration of literary masters: Whena solipsist dies, after all, everything goeswith him. And no U.S. novelist hasmapped the solipsists terrain better thanJohn Updike, whose rise in the 60s and 70sestablished him as both chronicler andvoice of probably the single most self-

an air of wild Pynchonian intrigue, Scottwrote. The novella, set in a creative-writing workshop, adeptly mimickednearly every major postmodern writersolely for the purpose of exposing thelimitations of their cleverness. (Wallacesingles out Barths unbelievably self-referential book Lost in the Funhouse foran especially delightful skewering.)

Which is not to say that Wallaces owndisplays of literary pyrotechnics wereinsincere. Wallace truly did believe inpushing the envelope of what languagecould do and how it could be employed.But in a very contradictory and un-postmodern fashion he was also acutelysensitive to the rules and limitations of lan-guage. He wrote a very credible and amus-ing essay for Harpers on the debate overwhether English usage rules should be

prescriptive or bend and break as usagechanges. And one of Infinite Jests manyamusing asides concerns an organizationknown as the Militant Grammarians ofMassachusetts, which, among other things,organizes boycotts of stores featuringsigns that read 10 items or less.

Wallaces biggest indictment of post-modernism was that he never stopped rag-ing against solipsism, literary or otherwise.Wallace, whose academic backgroundleans heavily on math and philosophy, tookthe topic on directly in his now-classiccommencement address at Kenyon Col-lege, where he said:

Think about it: There is no experienceyouve had that you were not at theabsolute center of. The world as you expe-rience it is right there in front of you, orbehind you, to the left or right of you, onyour TV, or your monitor, or whatever.Other peoples thoughts and feelings haveto be communicated to you somehow, butyour own are so immediate, urgent, realyou get the idea. . . . This [i.e., the act of

remarked upon, it is nearly a thousandpages long, not counting the additional 97pages that contain the books 388 foot-notes.

To say Wallace needed an editor is anot-altogether-unfounded criticism, butInfinite Jest is surprisingly readable. Itstrue that its length is almost unmanage-able; its overstuffed with textual gamesand knowing pop-culture references and,as such, appears to bear all the hallmarksof postmodern literary self-indulgence.And yet, the two most common assess-ments of Infinite Jest and, to some extent,of Wallaces entire literary outputthat itis self-indulgent and postmodernarefundamentally wrong.

To put it plainly, Wallace was the post-modernist who wasnt. What Wallacewrought in Infinite Jest and elsewherewasnt just brilliant writing in the vein of aprevious generation of postmodernists(think Gaddis, Pynchon, Barth, DeLillo) somuch as a response to them. Where a gener-ation of writers before him saw America asa vast canvas for their expansive intellectsand decried it as a hollow, satire-demandingplace, Wallace almost never wrote withoutempathy for the world of flesh and bloodand feelings and those who inhabit it.

As the critic A. O. Scott observed, Wal-laces early novella Westward the Courseof Empire Takes Its Way (published in hisfirst short-story collection, The Girl withCurious Hair) pulled off a neat trick. Itfeatures authorial intrusions in the mannerof John Barth; whimsical collages of wildfabulation and deadpan realism that recallRichard Brautigan, or maybe middle-period Kurt Vonnegut; and long, long sen-tences in the style of Donald Barthelme.The proceedings are shot through with

bbooookkss,, aarrttss && mmaannnneerrss

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absorbed generation since Louis XIV.Toward the End of Time, he continued, is abad book, unbecomingly obsessed withsex and death. [The narrators] unhappi-ness is obvious right from the books firstpage. But it never once occurs to him thatthe reason hes so unhappy is that hes ana**hole.

Wallaces anger at what he perceived asUpdikes narcissism reveals somethingabout who Wallace was. For all the cranialfirepower he possessed, he was actually amodest person. He was just Dave Wallaceto most (his literary agent suggested he usehis middle name, as there were a number ofother David Wallaces already writing), theunfailingly courteous midwesterner whosent thousands of immaculate and mostlytypewritten notes to his friends throughouthis life. As literary titans go, he wasnt pre-tentious: He liked dogs, he rather ashamed-ly chewed tobacco in nearly every socialsetting, and he almost never wore anythingresembling formal attire. In his later years,he was enough of a literary rock star toinhabit an extremely well-endowed acade-mic position created especially for him; yethe never took advantage of his success toretreat to writerly solitude and avoid shar-ing his gifts. Professor Wallace taughtthousands over the years and was consis-tently rated an outstanding and thoroughteacher, wildly popular with his students.

But to the extent that Wallace appearedto be well-adjusted, this was the result ofa profound lifelong struggle. He droppedout of Harvards graduate philosophy pro-gram to wage a rumored battle with drugaddiction and other psychological prob-lems, and an anonymous and hyperliteratetestimonial on the website of a drug-treatment center in Massachusetts iswidely assumed to have been written byWallace. If he hated solipsism, that hatredmight well have been a result of hating thething he feared the mostthat he wouldgive in to his own demons.

Which, in the end, is exactly what hedid. David Foster Wallace committed theultimate act of solipsism, hanging himselfon Sept. 12, 2008, at age 46, leavingbehind a lovely wife. However self-centered and sadly clichd his demise, itseems unlikely that it will overshadow aliterary voice so powerful that at times itfelt as if Wallace could singlehandedlyhold back the postmodern mudslide and bethe moral conscience of American fiction.May he rest in peace.

I F youre the sort of filmgoer whothinks of the Coen brothers asAmerican cinemas most nihilistic,misanthropic double threat, titter-ing behind their movie camera at theduncery and pointlessness of humanaffairs, youll find vindication aplenty inBurn after Reading, the sibling acts 13thfilm and easily one of their most unpleas-ant. As for those of us who prefer to thinkof the Coens as misunderstood human-ists whose taste for the absurd and thegrotesque obscures their underlyingmoralismwell, theres nothing to bedone after a film like this except slink offto our dens and slip Raising Arizona oreven Fargo in the DVD player, in thehopes that the bighearted charms of H. I.McDunnough or Marge Gunderson willwash the sour taste of Burn after Readingfrom our palate.

This is not to say the brothers latesteffort is without its pleasures. Criticalaccolades seem to inspire the Coens topursue parody: The much-lauded Fargowas followed by The Big Lebowski, ashaggy send-up of a Raymond Chandlerwhodunit, and now theyve followed uplast years much-garlanded No Countryfor Old Men by taking aim at the D.C. spythriller. All the familiar elements are inplacethe Langley corridors, the glidingblack cars, the Georgetown gunshots, theA-list stars (George Clooney and BradPitt), and of course the much-prized,much-pursued disc encoded with top-secret information. Except that the infor-mation on the CD is worthless, the A-liststars are playing dolts, the guns go off byaccident, the gliding cars are carryingprocess servers, and Langley doesnt havea bloody clue whats going on.

At the center of the idiocy is OsborneCox, an aging spook with a penchant forbow ties, mixed drinks, and pronouncingwords like penchant with a distinctlyFrancophone lilt. Cox is played by JohnMalkovich as a man oscillating between

FILM

Burn beforeWatching

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