Looking through a stack of old New Yorkers, while waiting for wife and child, I read David Foster Wallace’s short-story “Good People.” I admit I began reading the story because it looked really short. But when it became clear that it was a deliberate riff on Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” the story began to seem a bit long and verbose.

Foster Wallace is precisely the sort of writer one should look toward for an interesting exercise in, I guess, intertextual wordplay. (Note to self: Use the two stories together in an undergraduate literature class.) But I’m unable to decide whether “Good People” is actually ventriloquizing Hemingway or Christian religious discourse from Peoria, Illinois, or both. And whether that distinction is important to the author, etc. etc.

Here is an excerpt from the Hemingway story:

“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
“I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.”
The girl did not say anything.
“I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.”
“Then what will we do afterward?”
“We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.”

and a bit from Foster Wallace:

One thing Lane Dean did was reassure her again that he’d go with her and be there with her. It was one of the few safe or decent things he could really say. The second time he said it again now she shook her head and laughed in an unhappy way that was more just air out her nose. Her real laugh was different. Where he’d be was the waiting room, she said. That he’d be thinking about her and feeling bad for her, she knew, but he couldn’t be in there with her. This was so obviously true that he felt like a ninny that he’d kept on about it and now knew what she had thought every time he went and said it—it hadn’t brought her comfort or eased the burden at all. The worse he felt, the stiller he sat. The whole thing felt balanced on a knife or wire; if he moved to put his arm up or touch her the whole thing could tip over. He hated himself for sitting so frozen. He could almost visualize himself tiptoeing past something explosive. A big stupid-looking tiptoe, like in a cartoon.

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