Review: “Something to Do with Paying Attention”

There are books that reward attention, and then there are books that audit it.

David Foster Wallace’s “Something to Do with Paying Attention” doesn’t so much invite reading as administer it, like a slightly underfunded institutional test you didn’t realise you’d enrolled in until you started answering the questions.

The setup - a tax class, a substitute instructor, the ambient despair of administrative adulthood - feels almost aggressively minor, as though Wallace were stress-testing how little narrative scaffolding you need.

A line-by-line, page-by-page forensic examination of boredom that achieves the rare feat of being both conceptually interesting and experientially indistinguishable from its subject.

Wallace’s sentences, famously hypertrophic, here perform a kind of moral aerobics. Qualifying, refining, second-guessing, and occasionally suffocating under the weight of their own conscientiousness. The prose insists on its own seriousness with the quiet intensity of someone who has already decided you aren’t taking this seriously enough. Which, to be fair, you probably aren’t.

There’s an argument embedded in the text that attention is a form of care, that discipline might redeem the otherwise airless vacuum of contemporary consciousness but it arrives wrapped in so much deliberate tedium that one begins to wonder whether the medicine has metastasised into the disease. The book doesn’t merely depict monotony, it manufactures and maintains it.

And yet (and this is the faintly irritating part) it works, intermittently, like a trick you resent even as you fall for it. You notice more. You think more. You become uncomfortably aware of how rarely you do either.

By the final pages, you’re left with a choice. Interpret the experience as a rigorous ethical exercise, or as a brilliantly executed piece of literary hazing.

The text, naturally, declines to clarify. It’s up to you to determine what you’ve been paying attention to.