Itinerantdaughter's Blog

So friends! Remember this? The early DFW story about a man who pretends to be Jewish, called “Solomon Silverfish”? Well, I found a copy of the literary magazine it was published in (Sonora Review, issue 55, in which it is re-printed as a tribute) on Ebay and bought it for a cool $10 so I could read! And the verdict is…

… it wasn’t good!

I mean, the truth is, I kind of saw this coming. I am actually a fan of what James Wood called “hysterical realism”: I’m a maximalist and I enjoy things that are fast-paced, so Infinite Jest suited me just fine (as did, for what it’s worth, White Teeth). But I think that in order to pull off hysterical realism, every detail needs to be absolutely not one tenth of a centimeter out of place, or else the rapidity of the tone gets thrown off. And so perhaps I’m at a disadvantage reading this piece as a Jew, because it just became so clear, via the details, that David Foster Wallace knows nothing about Jews.

The basic plot is as follows: Solomon Silverfish, a lawyer of indeterminate specialty (sometimes he represents his brother-in-law, prone to drunk driving, and sometimes some unsavory pimp-types) has long been devoted to his wife, Sophie, who is in the end stages of dying from cancer. He’s called out by said brother-in-law in the middle of the night to fetch him from the drunk tank, but when Solomon goes, his friend is there with another acquaintance and Silverfish’s otherbrother-in-law. The trio tells Silverfish they know he isn’t really Jewish and he’s been lying about it all these years; Silverfish essentially says he never told them one way or another, so it doesn’t really count as lying. Meanwhile, Sophie’s parents visit her at her home and tell her what’s happening; Sophie stands by her husband, but in the midst of her defense, gets violently ill and is rushed to the hospital. The piece ends with a section in the first-person (most of the rest is, like Infinite Jest, sections in rotating close-third) voice of the pimp, who’s describing Solomon’s first attempt to buy weed for Sophie, to alleviate her nausea, and then a questionable vision of Silverfish committing adultery (I think it’s a hallucination but what do I know).

At the risk of sounding like a total philistine, I really have no idea what the… point of this story was, overall? There were nods, I think, to the all-consuming power of romance and partnership––Solomon and Sophie’s devotion to one another is total and, at times, sweet––and to the great equalizing indignities of dying, but there seemed to be some kind of Bigger Meaning that was just completely lost on me. I say “seems to be,” because a non-Jew pretending to be a Jew––and maybe I’m biased here but it’s what I think––is an idea very pregnant with symbolism, and it was just completely unclear what it was symbolic of. Literally the only thing I can come up with is that Solomon feigned Jewishness because he was so instantly enamored of Sophie that he decided on the spot to live a lie, and the fact that they remained the Platonic image of love means that Solomon’s choice was the right one in the face of his small-minded identity-obsessed compadres. Translation: love conquers all, love is love, whatever. But this seems way too saccharine and quotidian for a guy who characterized his first novel as “a conversation between Wittgenstein and Derrida,” and who generally is not a sentimentalist nor one whose work betrays any interest whatsoever in community norms and politics.

The other trouble here for me was again, the details. The characters were completely unbelievable Jews. And I recognize that I’m shooting myself in the foot here, because one hallmark of hysterical realism is that the characters are all kind of meant to be figures/symbols/composites of tics/quirks/antics and not really, well, real. And this largely did work for me in IJ, because I did feel that for the most part, there was some heart and authenticity there (it varied though: I felt it more in the halfway house than the tennis academy). Perhaps this is because DFW knows what it feels like to be a tennis phenom, a depressive, an addict, etc.

But he doesn’t have a clue what it means to be a Jew, and it shows. I don’t mean anything as grandiose as carrying galut around in your soul; I mean he literally doesn’t know what words Jews use. For example, when the trio of Silverfish’s familiars are interrogating him about his deception, one of them says something to the effect of, “You sat with us in Temple! You did the mitzvahs! You ate the matzah at our seder! How dare you!” Never mind that this reads like someone looked up “what are Jewish words” and just threw them on the page; the fact that he used the word “Temple” automatically assumes these are Reform Jews, and for Reform Jews, the stance toward intermarriage ranges from “neutral” to “wholly embraced.” There is some nuance there: I don’t know when this story is supposed to take place, so perhaps the kind of light stigma of intermarriage would have been held by Sophie’s family just as a vestige of shtetl mentality, and obviously, the men are also reacting to the deception in addition to just the fact of him being not Jewish, so some of the anger might be more about that. But the truth is I don’t really think that’s why. I think DFW is trying to imply these are Serious Jews by using this kind of vernacular, but doing so without knowledge of what Serious Jews would look like or say––probably not Temple, probably not “annulment” when they talked to Sophie about ending the marriage (they’d like use afka’inhu, the halakhic equivalent, or say that she should force Solomon to give her a gett, or something like that). This is all to leave aside the fact that they speak basically like low level gangsters with the occasional Jewish term thrown in, nor do they do any of the things Serious Jews would do over the course of the story (like, IDK, pray, wrap tefillin, etc.).

I would be really curious to hear another person’s take on this (and no, DFW bros on Reddit being like “This was great as always” doesn’t count as a “take”). I’m sure there is/are practical and/or philosophical reason(s) for specifically using a goy masquerading as a Jew in this story, and I would love to know what they are. There is a chapter in this book that seems to revolve around the thesis that DFW was interested in language as a way of “self-creation” and that “Solomon Silverfish” was an unsuccessful attempt at grappling with that idea in writing, but it’s $110 to get digital access so I’ll just have to assume her qualms with it were the same as mine.

In closing, I’m still glad I spent the $10, and I still love you DFW! But this story was not good.