David Foster Wallace

The news of Wallace's death--apparently a suicide--has just floored me. By sheer coincidence I had just bought a remaindered copy of his most recent essay collection, Consider the Lobster, and was looking forward to reading it when I wanted/needed to get away from sabbatical stuff. What better way to honor an author you admire, especially on the occasion of his death, than by reading his work? The other reason this has hit so hard is that Wallace is almost my exact contemporary, born only two months before me, but also, I felt, someone I felt some philosophical kinships with.

Wallace was the rare postmodernist who, you feel as you read him, truly, deeply cares about the loss of very Grand Narratives of American culture that he's examining and finding to be lacking: that those narratives, the best of them, really do point to something needed that we dismiss at our societal peril until or unless something "better" comes along. Irony and humor were his Cuisinart, too, but always, I feel, with the end goal of showing us the dangers of a media- and image-obsessed culture. His extended meditation on Alcoholics Anonymous in his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, is a model of what I mean: he notes the power of the idea of the Higher Power even among those AAers who aren't religious and asks how that can be, yet even though it lacks a logical explanation it is nevertheless so--it can't be denied.

For those curious about his work, I highly recommend as a starting place his first collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. The title essay alone, a hundred-page recounting of a week he spent on a cruise liner, is vintage Wallace and more than worth the cost of the book: by turns guffawingly hysterical, detail-obsessed, and piercingly analytical. Do NOT skip over the footnotes, here or anywhere in Wallace's work--they are not just chock-full of information but a crucial part of the show as well. That collection also includes essays on tennis stars, on television, on David Lynch, on a trip to a state fair, on contemporary fiction that, though now over ten years old, are striking in their immediacy and urgency.

Infinite Jest is Wallace's Ulysses:it's not only bigger than that novel, it's every bit as demanding in its way. I completely understand it if its size causes you to hesitate; but if you enjoy his essays, you'll want to take on that novel some time. I can also recommend his second collection of stories, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: a collection that will, quite simply, cause you to entirely reconsider what the short story form can be made to do. He has two other collections of stories as well that I've not yet read all the way through, Girl with Curious Hair and Oblivion; his first novel, The Broom of the System; and a non-fiction work discussing the concept of infinity, Everything and More.

Mary of Either/Or has a nice remembrance of Wallace as well, comparing his work to that of Douglas Coupland.

I will miss this man and the work he will now never write.

UPDATE: Wallace here reading an excerpt from his essay on the Illinois State Fair. "None of this is made up."



UPDATE II: Trysh Travis of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society was kind enough to e-mail me a link to this remembrance of Wallace that speaks eloquently of how Wallace valued his experiences as he attended AA meetings to gather material for Infinite Jest. I hope you'll go have a look.