lots of the things that exist in big cities are equally fatuous

[...] the track is not for staying on, it’s for leaping off and then returning to. The notion of the page-turner always seemed foreign to me. I don’t want to be sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to find out what happened next. I want to be falling off my seat in ecstatic pain because of what language and consciousness are doing on the page. With The Ask, the plot may not be up to Grisham standards, but I’m certainly trying to achieve a sense of hurtling that I think all good books have—maybe not toward a plot point, but toward something more devastating.

There’s a passage in The Ask where Milo likens himself to a figure in Hopper’s Nighthawks, and he mentions how, as a painter, he’d always described it in terms of “the stark play of shadow and light.” This is a perfectly appropriate way of looking at Hopper’s work, but then Milo says, “to be the fucker on the stool is another kind of stark entirely.” It’s a funny line, a throwaway almost, but it strikes me as an encapsulation of the burden of writers working today. Yeah, we’re concerned with form, with language, with allusiveness and scaffolding—the legacy of modernist and postmodernist writing—but a lot of us also want, to a degree maybe not countenanced by more playful antecedents, to get at the starkness of being “the fucker on the stool.” That seems like the project David Foster Wallace was working on for his entire career: getting at that, at how the methods of getting at it sometimes work at cross-purposes to the goal.