David Rylance over at Transductions has posted a substantial review of David Lipsky's DFW book, and presents his opinion after considering the spectrum of criticism and support the book has received:
Whether for it, against it or a little bit each way, all the standard positions have been staked out by now on why writer and Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky’s most recent contribution to the ongoing David Foster Wallace publication memorial is, or is not, a welcome development. A book-length transcript of a five-day interview conducted and caught on tape by Lipsky in 1996, on the road with Wallace in the immediate wake of the publication of the writer’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is, first and foremost, a very compelling melange of two things: love letter and cash cow. On which side, you ask, does it come down more firmly? Probably the former. However, the question of whether the truth lies in one aspect of this text more than the other, of whether it is ultimately more sincere than tasteless, is less interesting than the fact both components exist side by side in the the book together. The very fact that this book manages to so smoothly hold both of these opposites within it, to have its cake and eat it too, thus not only involves David Wallace as subject matter but raises compositional questions of a deeply Wallacian nature.
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