"Both Flesh and Not" by David Foster Wallace What qualities did David Foster Wallace most prize in nonfiction writing? In an introduction to "The Best American Essays 2007" he explained the qualities he looked for as a reader. He praised essays showcasing "what a first-rate artistic mind can make of particular fact-sets" - whether those involve cellphone ring tones, the meaning of stage fright or the "near-infinity of ways to experience and describe an earthquake." He celebrated the qualities of "clarity, precision, plainness, lucidity and the sort of magical compression that enriches instead of vitiates." And he looked at how pieces "handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact, context and perspective" that constitutes our "Total Noise" culture today - a culture that so overwhelms us with data and rhetoric and spin that it's difficult to absorb, much less try to make sense of. Essays By David Foster Wallace 328 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $26.99. David Foster Wallace in New York in 2006. Wallace - who committed suicide in 2008 - was his generation's most eloquent cartographer of the Total Noise society. In his fiction and nonfiction he mapped this new America that was entertaining itself to death and reeling at once from overstimulation and boredom, information overload and emotional numbness. He charted the absurdities and sadnesses of life in this land of hype and hyperbole, and he did so in incandescent prose that was as magical as it was elastic. Compression and plainness were not among his gifts, but clarity, precision and lucidity were. His expansive, metastasizing narratives and baroquely detailed descriptions represented efforts to pin down this increasingly incomprehensible reality with exactitude and nuance. "Both Flesh and Not," a new collection of Wallace's nonfiction isn't as choice a selection as "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (1997) or "Consider the Lobster and Other Essays" (2005). There are a couple of disposable entries, and a thoroughly offensive one in which Wallace perversely argues that casually promiscuous members of his own generation "might well come to regard AIDS as a blessing, a gift perhaps bestowed by nature to restore some critical balance, or maybe summoned unconsciously out of the collective erotic despair of the post-60s glut." Even the more compelling essays in this volume - like so much of his fiction - could have done with a little judicious pruning. But at their best these essays remind us of Wallace's arsenal of talents: his restless, heat-seeking reportorial eye; his ability to convey the physical or emotional truth of things with a couple of flicks of the wrist; his capacity to make leaps, from the mundane to the metaphysical, with breathtaking velocity and ardor. An article about Roger Federer moves from a discussion of his skills as a tennis player to a meditation on sports as "prime venue for the expression of human beauty" to musings about "whatever deity, entity, energy or random genetic flux" that could have produced both sick children and a paragon of grace like this athlete. That same article communicates the state of wonder Wallace feels at watching Federer make certain shots on TV: "I don't know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs." A second tennis essay uses Tom Wolfe-ian status details to give us Dickensian portraits of people at the United States Open, from the security guys wearing "lemon-yellow knit shirts that do not flatter their guts" and chomping on chewing gum that "seems to be part of Security's issued equipment" to the Thurston Howell types in the expensive seats who radiate an aura of "Connecticut license plates and very green lawns" to the younger, rowdier types who show up at night. "Their faces are stonier; eye contact seems hazardous the way eye contact on subways can be hazardous." Many of the essays here deal with ideas or themes the author has explored elsewhere. "The Nature of the Fun" probes his efforts to articulate (perhaps to himself) the reasons for writing, noting that what starts out being "a lot of fun" all too often devolves into "an overwhelming need to be liked." And "Twenty-Four Word Notes" reminds us of Wallace's fascination with grammar and usage (interests inherited from his mother, an English teacher). He gives us a little lecture about when to use "whether" and "if," and deems "utilize" a "noxious puff-word" used by pompous twits and insecure naïfs and "feckless" a "totally great adjective" that "lets you be extremely dismissive and mean without sounding mean."