His writing wove itself into our lives. E was going to be in Austin, Texas for a week, so we decided to both read Infinite Jest and have a goofy little two-person book group over the phone. Our reactions to its thrilling experiments and obsessive excess are now forever a part of our marriage.
The stylistic innovation would have been enough for any career. He was as serious and exasperating as Joyce: the footnotes, the technical language and slang, the appropriation of not just unliterary terms but of unliterary syntaxes and forms, the supersaturating detail. Someone has written that he restored the sense of the novel as a form in which you can do anything. His most annoying work prompted me to throw books across the room. His best work deserves to be read, to paraphrase a review of Robert Lowell, for as long as human beings can still read English.
But he went beyond style to wisdom and that makes his suicide even sadder. His death was not the histrionic capstone to a life that relished its own self-destruction. He was not Ernest Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, or Sylvia Plath. As brilliant as those artists were, and as controlled by booze or melancholy, there has always been to me the whiff of the adolescent about them. Their intensity was always a little too close to a tantrum.
He seems closer to Virginia Woolf, who now seems a kindred spirit—why did I never see that connection before?–a creator of new containers for human consciousness. The fact that they both extinguished their own consciousness is simply sad. I mourn their unwritten books.
The irony goes even deeper for David Foster Wallace. His career as both a writer and a human project seemed to be about getting past the silly notion that the artist has permission to be a dick. His attack on John Updike was moral. (See the review in Consider The Lobster.)
And DFW, a man who took human thought to something like its limits of impacted complexity and ethereal subtlety, arrived at a very simple wisdom: believe in something greater than yourself, don’t be an asshole. Be nice to people to grocery stores. Be decent to your wife.
That’s the final sadness. He hung himself while his wife was away and she found him when she returned.
We tend to think of wisdom as being as clean as a mathematical formula. But the real stuff is a dispatch from a battleground. Sometimes you lose the battle.
May David Foster Wallace rest in peace. May those who loved him live in peace.
FOR READING:
This travel blog has captured a man and writer in a short space. The quoted paragraph reminds me how fresh and funny his writing was. The YouTube link (which you can reach here) gives a sense of the man (or at least my limited, fan’s sense of the man.)
His graduation speech at Kenyon a few years back exists in some glitchy versions on the web, but try to find the clean version in Best American Non-Required Reading 2006.
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