There is undoubtedly a certain inclination towards romanticism in contemporary discourses around the writing of David Foster Wallace. Wallace himself is romanticised as an author, as a cultural figure, as an individual, as a hero and a villain, as an exemplar and as a cautionary tale. Like the looming figures of the “British poets” (The Pale King, 171), as Chris Fogle refers in sweeping elision to both Mary and Percy Shelley, implicitly among their peers, during his long soliloquy in The Pale King, Wallace as an individual occupies a place in the cultural imaginary as a touchstone both connected to and separate from his work – sign, symbol and self. In his book, Fictions of Proximity, Tim Personn teases out some of the more specific ways in which positioning Wallace against a critical backdrop of romanticism offers productive and provocative angles of understanding, often countervailing some of the more embedded readings of his relationship with postmodernism and irony. Taking Wallace as the centrepoint of a contemporary eddy around romanticism, both literary and philosophical, Personn sketches a constellation of response points that challenge the positivist direction of critical reading of the early twenty-first century. The book’s recuperation of romantic and skeptical approaches allows Personn to weave a rich image of contemporary fiction’s relationship with the world. Drawing together Wallace’s writing with the work of David Markson, Bret Easton Ellis and Zadie Smith, and positioning all of these authors against a critical backdrop richly informed by a signally American inheritance of romanticism, the book takes the conceptual framework of “proximity”, which Personn proposes as a term that comprehends at once closeness and separateness, as a structuring principle through which these writers understand being in the world. Wallace, of course, talked extensively about separateness and absorption, referring in “Lyndon” to “love and right and wrong and responsibility” as “arrangements of distance” (Girl With Curious Hair, 115, emphasis original). Although “Lyndon” does not specifically appear in Fictions of Proximity, the model of close separateness that Personn advances is deeply rooted in this idea.

The “nexus” Personn identifies is a provocative one; while it may appear scattered in its conception at first glance (or did, at least, to this reviewer), in fact it instantiates exactly what it sets out to – a nexus, rather than a legacy, a network with both temporal and critical mobility. Taking three very different counterpoints – a writer Wallace revered, a writer he decidedly did not revere, and a writer who revered him – adds a depth and completeness to the work that is most welcome. Personn’s depth of understanding of all the texts in his sights makes the book both richer and more challenging to the reader, and the coherence of his “proximity” framework is a much-needed through-line linking the chapters and sustaining a sense of argument through a work that ranges widely. Personn is a gifted close reader, and takes the reader deep into the texts under discussion, and it is easy to be seduced by the amplitude and focus of his writing. Chapter 3’s reading of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, for instance, persuasively argues for a move away from the conventional deconstructionist interpretation of protagonist Kate’s journey through silence, arguing that while there is a Derridean energy to her methodical dismantling of the house (commonly read, of course, as language), in fact the breakdown of the house as object highlights its purposive failure, and that inside this failure inheres a romantic attachment to the world that overcomes skeptical detachment. The reader is drawn along with this depth of argument, and there is no small risk of losing sight of the overarching direction of the book’s thrust, but Personn manages to signpost back and forth with clarity and elegance; here, for instance, he looks ahead from Markson to Smith, noting that Smith displays “a similar investment in the aesthetic value of ‘unworn’ romanticism by romantic means” (132), deftly reminding the reader of the wider purpose of the book. Indeed, while the book does focus on the four authors already mentioned, it also touches on a much wider range of textual touchstones with a lightness and command that mitigates the risk of becoming mired in critical swampland. Interestingly, many of these additional touchstones constitute more popular fiction – Richard Bach, Steven King – than the mainstream literary fiction the book is ostensibly interested in, along, naturally, a range of nineteenth century texts more firmly associated with Romanticism. As a consequence of this digressive pattern, the book feels less isolated in its execution than in its description, and holds the reader’s attention throughout. However, while Personn demonstrates admirable deftness in his engagement with existing scholarship on Wallace, including judicious engagement with some lesser-read critics, there is still much scope for further conversation. Two critics whose voice would be welcome in the text – or in response to it – are Alice Bennett, whose work on attention would significantly enhance the chapter on aporia in Infinite Jest, and Jamie Redgate, whose beautiful development of the I in Wallace’s writing would enrich the construction of the self Personn discusses at length in Chapter 1.

While Personn’s skill at close reading is a highlight of the work, there are a few points that would have benefitted from further interrogation, including the reading of Signifying Rappers in Chapter 2. This chapter proposes to counter the prevailing negative readings of Wallace’s co-authored early work (including my own) by reading Wallace’s attraction to rap as a romantic iteration of the proximity model Personn proposes as a lens for all of his writing, which works well in places. However, while the chapter alludes to the book’s complicated relationship with the radicalisation of its subject and its authors, it falls – like the book itself – into a too-symbolised reading of the topic; Personn argues that Wallace sees rap as “a distillation of the slogans of the ‘Supply Side Republican vision of America’s 80’s’, a litany of phrases that would’ve made Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko – and, for that matter Patrick Bateman […] proud” (89). While the overlap of vocabulary here is telling, it seems important also to acknowledge that the role of conspicuous consumption in the music of young, dispossessed, urban Black musicians in the 1990s might differ from its role in the cultural artefacts of yuppiedom, a community distinction that neither Wallace and Costello nor Personn have addressed in any detail; arguably, such an interrogation might work to strengthen the book’s contention that the “community view” (37) is insufficient to a full understanding of Wallace’s engagement with models of communication. This tendency to accept rather than challenge Wallace’s stated position on a number of issues is a systemic one, including in the same chapter a somewhat troubling casting of unrequited love (in this case of the white listener for rap music, from which he feels excluded) as the blind rejection of rejection; Wallace he notes, compares “such love – I will call it ‘romantic’ – to chasing after the girl not despite but because of the fact that she wants no part of you – especially that part’” (82). Again here, the inflection of power and entitlement (both racial and gendered) merits further and more critical attention. While Wallace’s position at the centre of the book’s proposed nexus naturally privileges his engagement with the other authors (or theirs with him), there is scope in each chapter to depart from Wallace’s own assessment of the texts, whether written by his own hand, or by those he admired or dismissed. I would like to have seen more of Personn’s considerable skill directed at moving beyond or outside the Wallace nexus as a guiding structure, and establishing his own critical “proximity” more forcefully.

In this vein more generally, the book’s deployment of the term “romantic” is varied and occasionally a little murky; while it is clear that Personn has a very clear understanding of how he wishes the term to be understood, it would perhaps be useful to spend a little more time glossing the context of the term in the introductory chapter, for the benefit of those whose understanding of the long tails of romanticism and skepticism may not be as nuanced as his own. In places, too, this easeful command of the material, and the author’s palpable desire to bring the reader with him slips into an almost oral use of emphasis that can be slightly disconcerting to the reader. This minor lack of critical legibility is indicative rather of the author’s impressive command of his material than of any weakness in its development: the text rewards slow perusal rather than intermittent engagement, and the density of its register enforces this slow attention with poetic grace. The thesis of the book adds a facet to Wallace Studies that has hitherto been lacking articulation, giving form to a clear gap in the scholarship and adding depth to the ongoing conversations about meaning, attention, and disposition, and Personn’s book is a welcome and very capable framing of the debate. There is a great deal to admire in this careful and measured study, perhaps most of all the feeling one comes away with that it is just the beginning.

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