Something to Do with Paying Attention by David Foster Wallace
Published 2021 · 152 pages · 35,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Novella, Coming-of-Age
How hard is Something to Do with Paying Attention to read?
Something to Do with Paying Attention scores 54 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Wallace mixes a young narrator's plain, sometimes crude vocabulary (drug slang, sitcom references) with the dense technical jargon of the substitute professor's tax lecture -- terms drawn from double-entry bookkeeping, corporate tax structure, and IRS examination procedure. The register shifts constantly between demotic and specialized, landing between the encyclopedic reach of Gravity's Rainbow and the plainer clarity of The Great Gatsby.
- Sentence structure: 75 out of 100
- The signature move is the single sentence or paragraph that runs on for pages, piling qualification onto qualification the way Wallace's essays do -- the lecture scene in particular unfolds as one extended, self-interrupting monologue. It demands the same sustained attention as Proustian subordination, though it stays this side of Faulkner's page-long constructions.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Concrete scenes of drug use, television, and a lecture hall carry an extended argument about boredom, attention, and civic duty as spiritual disciplines. Like the embedded philosophical debates in Brothers Karamazov, the abstraction arrives inside dramatized scenes rather than as pure essay, but it dominates long stretches of the text.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Outside the accounting lecture -- which compresses real tax-code detail and procedural jargon into a few dense pages -- the prose moves at the unhurried pace of a single extended reminiscence. It sits below Lolita's constant textural richness but above a plot-driven page-turner.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- The narrator directly explains his past self, laying out motives and self-diagnoses with clinical candor rather than hiding behind omission. Some indirection remains in how the piece frames its own turning point -- an accidental, wrong-classroom epiphany the narrator treats with visible embarrassment -- closer to Beloved's mediated memory than to Gatsby's more heavily filtered narration.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- Tax accounting becomes a sustained symbol for showing up, presence, and civic seriousness against a backdrop of numbed adolescent escapism (soap operas, marijuana). It works more like The Idiot's grounded Christ figure than Moby-Dick's totalizing whale -- a clear, legible symbolic frame rather than an inexhaustible one.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Wallace stages a genuinely sincere conversion narrative but frames it inside a fundamentally absurd premise -- a student wanders into the wrong lecture and has his life redirected by a tax professor. That comic setup sits in tension with the earnestness of the message, echoing Brothers Karamazov's blend of sincerity and ironic framing more than Gatsby's steadier balance of sympathy and critique.
- Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
- The piece resolves its immediate question -- will the narrator find purpose -- but as an excerpt from Wallace's unfinished novel The Pale King, it stops at the moment of decision rather than showing where that decision leads. It closes more definitively than Lolita's open aftermath but, like The Great Gatsby, leaves the larger meaning of the choice unsettled.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- A single narrator recounts one specific day and the drifting months that preceded it in a mostly linear, digression-heavy monologue. It carries more retrospective doubling-back than War and Peace's straightforward chronology but nothing like Infinite Jest's fragmented time scheme.
How Something to Do with Paying Attention is regarded
Something to Do with Paying Attention holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.