What Should Teenagers Be Reading? I Have One Suggestion

The modern urgency of David Foster Wallace’s Something To Do With Paying Attention

Imagine this scenario: A talented artist takes their own life, leaving behind an unfinished potential masterwork.  Their fans and admirers are left to wonder what could have been, if only this person hadn’t lost that argument with themselves and decided to stay with us.

While this sounds like a dreamy romanticization of the tortured genius myth, it’s the true story of writer David Foster Wallace and his novel The Pale King.  Wallace committed suicide in 2008 and left behind an unfinished manuscript centered around IRS agents at an office in 1980s Illinois.  His publisher, Little Brown, tried to piece as much of it together as they could and released it to the world in 2011.  It’s a fantastic book in parts, but it’s very clearly not complete.  By all accounts, it could have been his masterwork, if only he was able to finish.

It’s my contention, however, that Wallace’s true masterwork wasn’t unfinished.  Instead, it was completed and fully formed, nestled within the wider scope of The Pale King.  Chapter 22, all 98 pages of it, tells the self-contained story of a former “wastoid” and his transformation from near college dropout to high-level accountant within the Internal Revenue Service. This might sound boring, but in Wallace’s hands it becomes deeply moving and powerful.  He initially thought about publishing it as a stand-alone novella, but ultimately decided to keep the story as part of The Pale King.

There it stayed, until two years ago, when Chapter 22 was published on its own by McNally Editions under the title Something To Do With Paying Attention.  I was ecstatic when I learned this was happening.  David Foster Wallace is my favorite writer, and this story is my favorite thing he ever wrote.  Having a small, portable copy felt like a major gift.

I’ve been thinking about Something a lot recently, ever since The Atlantic published this piece about college students who don’t want to read, and an entire cottage industry of Discourse sprung up around it. 

Many were wondering what incoming college students should be encouraged to read.  Should they be reading the Great Books Of The Canon, like they’ve always been forced to?  But if they’re not interested in reading, are those books the proper entry point?  And can they even resonate with young, modern readers?  This line of inquiry makes me think of the below tweet from comedian Ian Karmel.

Or maybe they should be encouraged to read whatever is popular.  Sure, The Hunger Games, Harry Potter and their modern day equivalents may not be “Great” books, but at least they engage young readers and help them to form a habit.  But what happens when those readers get to college and are forced to read something a little more challenging?

I obviously don’t have a solution to this problem (No one does), and I’m starting to believe that we’re no longer a literate society and are instead returning to an oral tradition anyway (Three hour podcasts helping decide the most recent presidential election being the surest sign of this).  However, it’s undeniable that reading and writing can still play a major role in shaping the values and thought processes of young people.

This is why I’d recommend Something To Do With Paying Attention to every high school senior in the country.

I think young people can benefit greatly from this book, and there are three specific reasons why it’s particularly suited for them.  First, it’s short.  Second, the language is clear and easy to read.  And lastly, but most importantly, it carries a message that every young person needs to hear before they make their way out into the world.

Wallace was always known as a prolific writer.  His most famous work, Infinite Jest, is over 1,100 pages, including endnotes.  While Wallace fans love the lengths he went to in his writing, it certainly hinders his accessibility, especially among first time readers.  How are you expected to dive into something that massive without knowing if you’re even going to like it?

Something To Do With Paying Attention solves for this.  The stand-alone novella, which has smaller physical dimensions than The Pale King, comes in at a slim 136 pages.  You could show it to a high school senior without intimidating them.  It’s one less point of friction that might stop them from picking up the book in the first place.

While Wallace’s length is certainly challenging, his writing style isn’t easy to digest either.  He’s the king of run-on sentences, digressions, asides, and endnotes.  Even in his more straightforward writing, like his essay collections, there’s a degree of difficulty that is above what a lot of readers are willing to put up with.

This is solved for in Something as well.  Sarah McNally, in her preface to the book, puts it perfectly:

“It is, to my mind, not just a complete story, but the best complete example we have of Wallace’s late style, where calm and poise replace the pyrotechnics of Infinite Jest and other early works.”

I find the writing to be the most straightforward, succinct and impactful of Wallace’s career.  To be fair, there are still long digressions, but they provide the appropriate amount of challenge: enough to make you concentrate, but not so over-the-top as to repel the reader.  The writing passes The Goldilocks Test.

However, the length and lack of complexity are not the primary reasons to read this book.  They are merely the features that smooth over the path to entry.  The real reason high school seniors, or anyone for that matter, should read Something To Do With Paying Attention is because of the message it shares.  And that message can best be summed up in two words:  Awareness and Intention.

I remember exactly where I was the first time I read this story.  It was the summer of 2020, and my wife and I were staying at my in-laws’ house in suburban New Jersey to avoid all of the COVID chaos and rioting happening in New York City.  I was making my way through The Pale King at the time, and I sat down on the back porch one Saturday afternoon, planning on reading for maybe 15-30 minutes.  I opened up to my bookmarked page, right at the start of Chapter 22.  I didn’t leave my seat for the next two hours.

You know that feeling you get when you’re taking in a piece of art - whether it’s a book, a movie, a song or something else - and you just know that it’s going to stay with you and become one of your favorites for the rest of your life?  I had that feeling right from the very first page, which includes the below passage:

“I think the truth is that I was the worst kind of nihilist - the kind who isn’t even aware he’s a nihilist.  I was like a piece of paper on the street in the wind, thinking, ‘Now I think I’ll blow this way, now I think I’ll blow that way.’  My essential response to everything was ‘Whatever.’”

I was completely absorbed the entire way through, each new passage providing some profound insight that I understood and believed intuitively, but never had the ability or presence of mind to articulate.  I think this is the role great art is supposed to play.  It doesn’t tell us something new, it reminds us of what we already know that is lying dormant within us.

The unnamed narrator takes us through his college days, detailing his life as a shiftless layabout caught up in a cycle of indolence.  Over a period of several years, he goes to college, withdraws, gets a job, quits, goes back to college, and starts the whole process over again multiple times, all while living with his no-nonsense father, who can’t help but be disappointed in his lack of drive.  

This period is presented as one long, hazy memory, and that’s intentional.  The narrator makes a point to say that he was practically sleepwalking during this time, never really aware of what was happening around him, or caring.  He doesn’t even realize how unhappy he is.  He just drifts from one moment to the next, not paying attention to anything.

The only time this changes is when he’s taking recreational drugs.

The narrator experiments with Obetrol, which is ostensibly a weight loss drug but is in reality low grade speed.  The amphetamines in it have what he calls a “doubling” effect, where he’s finally able to “wake up”, get a sense of the world around him, and care about his place in it.

There are a lot of passages I could excerpt here, but I think this longer one does a pretty good job of summing the whole thing up:

“I’m not the smartest person, but even during that whole pathetic, directionless period, I think that deep down I knew that there was more to my life and to myself than just the ordinary psychological impulses for pleasure and vanity and that I let drive me.  That there were depths to me that were not bullshit or childish but profound, and were not abstract but actually much realer than my clothes or self-image, and that blazed in an almost sacred way - I’m being serious; I’m not just trying to make it sound more dramatic than it was - and that these realest, most profound parts of me involved not drives or appetites but simple attention, awareness, if only I could stay awake off speed.”

A bunch of stuff happens that I won’t spoil, and the narrator starts to become more motivated and desirous of a change in his life.  The real inflection point comes when he accidentally wanders into an Advanced Tax class during his final stint in college.  He’s supposed to go to exam prep for another class, but he gets lost and winds up in the wrong room.  Once the teacher walks in and he realizes his mistake, he wants to get up and leave.  However, he finds that he’s unable to.  He’s transfixed by this instructor and the class’s obvious reverence for him.  From the moment this man walked in, “The room’s whole voltage changed.”

What the narrator is experiencing is a feeling that is ancient, but brand new to him.  He now knows what it feels like to be surrounded by motivated individuals who have devoted their lives to something.  As the class begins and the subject matter becomes apparent, the narrator realizes that the instructor and the students take accounting very seriously.  Accounting isn’t the most important part though.  It doesn’t matter what they’ve devoted their lives to exactly. The simple fact that they’ve chosen something to focus on and become great at is all that matters.

The narrator can see it in all the tiny little details as he looks at the students around him.  Sharpened pencils at their desks, a perfectly folded Wall Street Journal underneath a chair, an immaculately tied bow tie.  Everyone in this room has found something to care about, and that care informs their actions in the rest of their lives.  By sitting in this room, the narrator is motivated to do the same, and puts it thus:

“I realized, on some level, that whatever a potentially ‘lost soul’ was, I was one - and it wasn’t cool or funny.  If I wanted to matter - even just to myself - I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.”

I won’t spoil the ending or describe exactly how the narrator finds his way into the IRS despite graduating college with a liberal arts degree.  What I really want to focus on is the “Why” of the whole thing.  

Why is this book important, and why should young people read it?

Young people have a lot working against them right now.  It’s easy for them to fall into Doomerism around the climate and society writ large.  They’re also susceptible to a host of frivolous distractions.  If grown adults can’t resist the pull of TikTok, what hope does a teenager have?  With the state of the world and culture as it is, it’s very easy for them (Much like the narrator at the beginning of the story) to respond to everything with “Whatever.”

What Wallace is trying to say in Something is that, while tempting, “Whatever” is never an effective response.  It might feel good in the moment, but your mind and your spirit will always yearn for something greater, something that has meaning.  The real question is, how do you find what that something is?

This is where we come back around to Awareness and Intention.  You have to be awake and aware enough to notice the things that light you up inside, that make you feel the opposite of “Whatever.”  These things aren’t as obvious as you think.  If you’re just drifting through life, believing nothing matters, you’ll miss the signposts even when they’re right in front of you.  The first step, the action that sets off everything else, is keeping your antenna up to see what is calling out to you.

Simply noticing isn’t enough though.  Once you understand what it is you want, you have to care enough to take action, consistently and over a long period of time.  You have to care about the activity, but more importantly, you have to care enough about yourself to believe that you’re worthy of it.  It’s a conscious choice, made and re-affirmed on a daily basis.  It sounds incredibly difficult, but it certainly beats the hell out of saying, “Whatever.”

I can’t think of a better message for a 17-year-old to hear.  High school is a time of tremendous self-doubt, where one can be worn down by the pressures and influence of the world around them.  The younger you are when you learn that you have tremendous agency when it comes to your identity, that you can embrace it and move confidently through the world in it, the better off you’ll be.  You’ll have perhaps a ten year head start on your peers. You certainly don’t have to become an accountant, but you have to become whatever it is that makes you feel the way accountancy makes the narrator feel in this story.

That one can learn this lesson while simultaneously reading, in my opinion, one of modern America’s greatest writers is simply an added bonus.  I think it even makes the lesson more impactful. Wallace had a rare gift for describing interior life, so much so that when you read him, you feel like he’s narrating what’s going on inside your own head.

What I like most about reading is that it’s not a passive activity.  You’re participating in every sentence your eyes come across. You take the words in, comprehend what they mean, and construct a vision of those words in your mind’s eye. Wallace invites you to take this moral journey with him, and the fact that you’re intentionally choosing to go along, page after page, is so incredibly important. To quote him directly, describing what the narrator was missing at the beginning of the story:

“It had something to do with paying attention and the ability to choose what I paid attention to, and to be aware of that choice, the fact that it’s a choice.”

Choose wisely.