The latest—and best—retrospective on the life of the prodigiously talented David Foster Wallace
Photo via flickr user Steve Rhodes
Journalist D.T. Max has a piece in this week’s New Yorker on the life of the late author David Foster Wallace, the immensely talented and tortured writer who committed suicide last fall. You should read it. Here’s why.
Max’s piece joins an already voluminous collection of D.F.W. retrospectives (including my less articulate but equally heartfelt own), though I’d say this piece is likely the best of them all. It centers mostly on the author’s inability to complete a follow-up novel after his 1,100-page work Infinite Jest, and on the uncompleted work D.F.W. left behind after his death. David Lipsky’s piece on D.F.W. for Rolling Stone (where Wallace published his massive profile on McCain—a fascinating, imperfect piece that slips into adoration at times) is the other retrospective I’d recommend—but not as much as the New Yorker story, which also includes extensive excerpts from D.F.W.’s unfinished third novel, titled the The Pale King. (Which will be published in 2010 by Little, Brown and Company.)
In one of the more telling passages of the New Yorker story, titled “The Unfinished,” Max writes:
The sadness over Wallace’s death was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete. Wallace, at least, never felt that he had hit his target. His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said. Good writing should help readers to “become less alone inside.” Wallace’s desire to write “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction,” as he put it in a 1996 essay on Dostoyevsky, presented him with a number of problems. For one thing, he did not feel comfortable with any of the dominant literary styles. He could not be a realist. The approach was “too familiar and anesthetic,” he once explained. Anything comforting put him on guard. “It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most ‘familiarity’ is meditated and delusive,” he said in a long 1991 interview with Larry McCaffery, an English professor at San Diego State. The default for Wallace would have been irony—the prevailing tone of his generation. But, as Wallace saw it, irony could critique but it couldn’t nourish or redeem. He told McCaffery, “Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?”
As a huge admirer of D.F.W.’s writing—both the fiction and nonfiction, the latter of which I discovered first and will always be my first love for D.F.W.—it’s saddening to continue reading about the loss of such an incredible writer and thinker. I could go on and on about him, but I’ve already done that, so I’ll say only that each piece written looking back on D.F.W.’s life again reminds me of the massive hole he’s left behind. Few made sense of modern culture in such a way as he did, and it’ll be quite awhile before someone else comes along who can do the same. That and I’ll miss all of those goddamn footnotes, too.
