Samuel Cohen

This is the first installment of a review. It is a personal response sparked by Jonathan Franzen's statement from this collection, his informal remarks from the DFW memorial service in New York on Oct. 23, 2008.
I felt very engaged with DFW after seeing "The End of the Tour" and went to B&N to see if I could find "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace,” David Lipsky's memoir upon which the film was based. They didn't have it, but had this volume. I was attracted to this volume because, unusually, it has a mix of texts, including academic papers, part of Lipsky's interview with Wallace, and statements by various people from the memorial service, including Don DeLillo's.
I have not read a lot of Wallace's work, but have begun to form a heightened appreciation of his thinking, and his ways with words and ideas. It's clear that he had a deep humanistic concern for American culture in the largest sense. I felt a sense of loss at the end of the film, and wanted to know more about his life and death. I had been very dissatisfied with the reported fact that Wallace committed suicide after stopping taking his medication: how did he come to do this?
Of the statements from the DFW memorial in NY in this volume, only Franzen's mentions the highly charged fact that Wallace committed suicide. It is clear from his statement that Franzen was fully up to the task of providing an affirmative account of his friend's death. He had the intimacy with Wallace to know what was really going on with him in psychological terms, the affection for him to want to provide some kind explanation, and the depth of human understanding to have the insight needed to create a heartfelt narrative of Wallace's suicide as part of his desire for a healthier life. This sounds paradoxical, but Franzen makes it very clear in terms of Wallace's conflicts and aspirations.
Franzen's account is not lengthy and is elegantly straightforward. And Franzen is of course a gifted writer. I will not make any attempt to further describe Franzen's account, which would only muddy the troubled waters that Franzen has succeeded in rendering with love and bracing clarity.… (more)