What this really is is the leftovers. Beautiful leftovers, better than most writers ever manage, but lesser works of a master nonetheless. Wallace's two previous collections - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider The Lobster - are more substantial and surely worth checking out first, while to say that they are better isn't entirely accurate; not when each collection, despite none being "themed", shows a very different side to Wallace.
Both previous collections focus on particular periods of Wallace's career: Fun Thing on 1991 - 1996 and Lobster on 1997 - 2005. Viewed like this it would be easy to see an evolution of Wallace's writing from one to the other. Fun Thing made the case for him as a hip social commentator, the best pieces being the long wandering ones. It's an insight into a messy writer with more talent than he has places to publish it and more ideas than he has time to properly compose. Lobster makes the case for him as a "genius", or is at least one of the reasons he's been called it so much. The essays are more focused and have an end message; his language had become more dense and complex.
Different from these, BFAN spans Wallace's whole career, from 1988 to 2007. It shows that Wallace's writing didn't change all that much over time, not that it needed to: he was the same prodigiously talented, slang speaking academic show off he'd always be back in '88. In one of the earliest pieces here - titled Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young - Wallace examines the current state of the American Novel circa 1988, of which he himself was obviously part of (and which like always he tries to ignore). Wallace isn't too pleased with the state of modern fiction: it's here that Bret Easton Ellis' long feud with Wallace stems from, and Ellis isn't the only one Wallace singles out in a not so great light - which begs the question: when does a writer earn our right to listen? The essay is a fun time capsule, but undeniably flawed: Wallace starts off making the case for the writers of the past, most of which didn't need any education in writing, yet then goes on to criticize the lack of education of many writers of his own generation.
If it wasn't Wallace who had written this piece but someone who hadn't went on to such big things, and someone stumbled upon it, would they treat it as having the same authority that we give it now? No, no doubt about it. You'll read most of these pieces for their author; some transcend this and some don't.
There's a wide variety of topics here: tennis, AIDs, Terminator 2; although more than anything else Wallace writes about writing itself. This is of course risky, as any writer knows; a legion of fans always waiting for such pieces in the hope that they'll have some back stage pass to a writers talent. Yet in these pieces Wallace distances himself from his own work. In his introduction to Best American Essays 2007, Wallace writes that his selection process for choosing the best essays of the year, the ones with the most "value" as he calls it, are the ones that fight against the "total noise". That's the name he gives to the modern culture: the never ending stream of the web and the TV, or in this case the impossible-to-get-read-them-all quantity of essays released in 2007. Wallace writes that the best essays untangle some part of the Total Noise, and don't just add more to it. This is much more clear in Wallace's other collections, it's the clearest explanation for a piece like Up, Simba (in Lobster), which followed a political rally and deconstructed the whole process of following a political candidate in minute detail. Wallace was simply trying to unravel a mess of a culture; and seemingly doing it singlehandedly.
As I say, this is less apparent in BFAN. The strength of these essays is accessibility: they're surely shorter and much less dense in information or technical jargon than in Wallace's other work. The pieces are more niche, yet they offer their own "value". The most fun I had was with 24 Word Notes which is simply Wallace's guide to certain word usage and is the best case that, given the right output, Wallace could write something short and fitted into a structure and still retain all the qualities of his best writing. Hanging over it all is: would Wallace want us reading this stuff? But in the end does it matter? I imagine Wallace being the sort who obsessed over which pieces went into his previous collections and which didn't, and here is a book where he had no control at all, and surely that is important.
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