Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ by David Foster Wallace
(W. W. Norton) $23.95
Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ is a difficult and maddening book. It’s difficult for good reason–math is indeed hard, especially when topics extend to transfinite cardinals and the ontological status of numbers. But the reasons Everything is maddening are piss-poor. Most pertain to author David Foster Wallace, who functions as both bait for the thousands of readers who would have never otherwise picked up a book on the history of math (not to mention the papers that would’ve never otherwise reviewed one) and as a major obstacle to those same readers’ (and reviewers’) struggle to understand the concepts they encounter therein.
Everything is the first volume in the “Great Discoveries” series, through which the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, intends to “bring new voices to the telling of stories of scientific achievement.” Which goal, as DFW’s habitual syntax would have it, is somewhat suspicious. What’s wrong with existing science writers? The answer probably has less to do with the ability to convey dry information in an invigorating way and more to do with marketing. DFW is best known as the author of Infinite Jest, a massive novel that influenced domains ranging from the use of footnotes in journalism to the nomenclature of American military operations in Afghanistan1. What better hook to sell a narrative about infinity than to attach it to the cult writer whose voluminous prose is most closely (if imprecisely) associated with the concept?
But perhaps the original idea wasn’t so explicitly crass. As DFW acknowledges throughout Everything, the romantic ideal of higher math as beautiful, of its proofs as elegant, and of its symbology as sexy, holds a great deal of sway over the popular imagination. Perhaps nowhere is this romance more potent than in the perception of those who identify as “humanities” rather than “math/science” types–it’s far easier to fetishize concepts when you don’t regularly use them as tools. And so there exists a whole population of people who admire math from afar, who devoutly wish they’d taken more in college (or maybe that’s just me, with my single, hastily aborted linear algebra course), and who think it might be swell to learn about infinity from a clever novelist and essayist who happens to have an amateur interest in set theory.
Unless those readers are exceptionally patient and self-loathing, however, they are unlikely to find what they are looking for here. And this is despite the fact that the actual math in Everything and More is relatively fun. Once readers reconcile themselves to the fact that the real issues surrounding ∞ are about classifying and comparing different kinds of ∞s–rather than about gaining access to some sort of extra-fancy symbolism that might assist in pondering the great void–the proofs are absorbing and the controversies intriguing.
The problem is that for all DFW’s “noodling” about the intellectual challenges of technical writing, he persists in wrestling his own prose like he’s still proving himself with that first great postmodern novel. In his other writing, DFW’s style is eccentric but sort of endearing, with all the nota benes and “w/r/t”s and, yes, even the footnotes serving as prose tics rather than outright flaws. In technical writing, however, the goal is not to spray your scent on the document; it’s to communicate ideas.
DFW gets off on the wrong foot on page two, when he concludes that, given the range of expertise readers will bring to the book, he’s going to need two sets of narratives, one for all readers and another (designated “IYI”–if you’re interested) for those who have had “some college math.” The IYI thing reads like a ploy to get out of explaining the complex stuff to neophytes. Even if you start out grateful that you don’t have to deal with certain conceptual difficulties, it quickly becomes clear that this division of audience also permits the tone of the narrative to devolve from breezy to bossy. Those with college math get to choose one adventure, and everybody else has to settle. (The “college math” thing becomes even more annoying once you realize that DFW apparently studied a ridiculous amount of graduate-level pure math in his Calc II class in prep school.)
The missteps continue throughout; suffice it to say that every time DFW quotes Bertrand Russell, whose “prose on all this is extremely pellucid and fine,” you’ll find yourself wondering why you didn’t go directly to the original. But there are moments, however brief, when the author of Infinite Jest forgets about shoving insipid analogies into convoluted grammatical packages and instead concentrates on explaining the material. I have no doubt that DFW could have written a very nice book on any number of math concepts, but as for this one, it just isn’t worth the frustration.
1. Okay, maybe that’s overstating things a bit, but I never bought Donald Rumsfeld’s claim that he was scrapping “Operation Infinite Justice” in favor of “Enduring Freedom” merely because the former was offensive to Muslims.
