Earlier this evening I was at a friend’s house, playing both The Force Unleashed and a drinking game based on the number of exceedingly graphic deaths in Rambo, when two old friends sent me emails and another texted me. All three messages informed me that David Foster Wallace hanged himself on Friday night.
Wallace is (was? is), most likely, my favorite writer. The first time I read Infinite Jest it was a life-changing experience, and the second time was better; that’s not to mention Consider the Lobster (which I clumsily wrote about for the Mercury here) and Oblivion (ditto) and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. I never managed to make it through Everything and More.
I’m still stunned by this news, and even if I wasn’t, like I could come up with a fitting thing to say about it anyway. For those interested, obits from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times are here and here, while a roundup of obits can be found at the Wallace fansite The Howling Fantods. For some inexplicable reason, I feel like I should link to this, too.
Jesus, I’ve been up all night, actually crying and every few minutes gasping for breath due to my filling and refilling clogged nostrils, thinking, what now? I went to Pomona and took a class with dear old old DFW called Selected Obscure and Eclectic Fictions for Writers. In the course catalogue the description of the class read: ‘Intense amounts of reading and writing. Not for the craven.’ He was impossibly uncomfortable in class, always, and yet always he was one of the most deeply human teachers I’ve ever had. As I drip yet more snot and tears all over myself all I can say, utterly desolated by this, is that I can think of only one person with the depth of understanding to help me understand this, and now he’s gone. God, god, god. What the hell now??
-N
it sucks
i’m not crying
but it definitely fucking sucks
When I hear about this last night, it felt like a punch in the stomach. When IJ first came out, I was a high-school sophomore that bought it because it was huge and imposing and my intuition told me that it might be a detour out of suburban boredom. I slogged through it over the course of a year, finally finishing it on the third attempt. Soon I had finished The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair, and I started to explore all the cultural references that littered these stories (and their footnotes).
DFW was my introduction to literature and critical theory as a life-expanding adventure to be pursued by the pure of heart and courageous of spirit. As much as his formal experiments could occasionally fall flat, they were always underpinned by a tender human touch that viewed the fucked up comedy/tragedy of life with an infectious awe. Both the longing and the absurd humor that ran through his work rang true in a way that none of the other writers dealing “generation x” could muster, and I’m deeply saddened that we won’t be hearing more from him…
when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.
Infinite Jest was one of the most amazing and challenging books I’ve ever read. Complete genius, way ahead of his time. Prophetic even. That book got right into the heart of me. This news = gut punch.