| Critics' notebook: Thanks ... whoever you are 04/08/2001 A compendium of outtakes, reactions and follow-ups by our arts writers
BOOKS
It's not every day a person gets called a "near genius." Particularly if you're a lexicographer – a word expert – and the praise appears in a cover story in Harper's, and it comes from David Foster Wallace, aka DFW, the acclaimed young author of Infinite Jest, the thinking person's Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius).
In the April Harper's, in a 20-page essay called "Tense Present: Democracy, English and the Wars Over Usage," Mr. Wallace reviews the longstanding and politicized conflict between finger-wagging, traditionalist prescriptive grammarians ("this is how people should talk and write") and more "scientific," "anything goes," descriptive grammarians ("this is how people actually use words"). And he finds a brilliant, admirably democratic resolution between the opposing camps in A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (Oxford, $35) by Bryan A. Garner.
"I was pleasantly surprised," Mr. Garner said, contacted at his Dallas law office – his other books are on legal usage. When it came out two years ago, it received generally positive reviews, including selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club. But a cover rave in Harper's is more than most lexicographers could ever dream of.
"It's a very closely reasoned piece," Mr. Garner says, and it features the DFW trademarks of lengthy, often hilarious footnotes, slangy jokes and a highly articulated self-consciousness that doesn't prevent a heartfelt argument from being made. "He has seen some things [in the book] that nobody else has. It's essentially the first major review to understand that this book uses descriptive means toward prescriptive ends."
Mr. Garner was first contacted by Mr. Wallace more than a year ago – "my secretary knew who he was; I didn't," he admits. But since then, he's read Mr. Wallace's essay collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (Little, Brown, $14.95), and become a fan. Now, he says, he just wishes the attention DFW has brought to A Dictionary of Modern American Usage might actually get some bookstores to stock the book.
Jerome Weeks
|
