I just read David Foster Wallace’s “Authority and American Usage” from his book, “Consider the Lobster”, which for some reason I bought the other day. I have seen his books before, but by the time I get to W my money is gone and I am not about to give up a book I have set my heart on for an unknown, even if they say he is good.

Well, now that I have read something of his, I know first-hand that he his good - almost great, in fact.

Not quite great because of his use of footnotes. He uses so many of them he calls them “FNs”. While they are almost always worth reading, it makes him hard to read: all this jumping about. People say we live in the age of hypertext, but even on the Web this stuff would not work. That is not how hypertext works, when it works well. (The best use of hypertext I have seen on the Web, by the way, is everything2.com).

But that aside, he is wonderful.

He is like Barack Obama or Jesus: You like him because he is fearless, because he gives it to you straight. Because he cares more about the truth - and therefore more about you - than about making people like him or fear him or respect him.

He got in trouble with his university once for being “insensitive”: for privately telling the blacks he teaches that they have to write in White English if they want to get good marks - and to make their mark on the broader (mostly-white) society. He was trying to help them by being plain and truthful, but because he is white himself, it did not always come off that way. But as an example of his courage and truthfulness, it is priceless.

Wallace knows and cares about the English language and uses it far better than most. He uses words like “stuff” and yet in the same sentence he also uses long words too - some of them even seem to be made up. Yet you do not have to know the long words to make sense of him. He uses long words the same way Rushdie uses Hindi words: for the joy of it. Not, like most, to make you think he knows more than you.

His opinions are also interesting and surprising, because he thinks them through. He is like a Chomsky who can write. But he is not as solidly on the left like Chomsky is.

“Authority and American Usage” is great to read because it makes you laugh and makes you think. Like Orwell, he makes the case for good, solid, written English against Academic English, but then Wallace goes on to make the case against Politically Correct English and Black English as well.

And, by his own example, he makes the case for writing the truth, like Orwell, but writing more in the way people talk, like Hemingway.

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