Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (original 2012; edition 2012)

An exceptionally readable and interesting biography. Nothing earth-shattering here, but the personal truly illuminates the professional. A must-read for DFW groupies (a club to which I belong.) ( )

I'm not a great reader of biographies. I focus mainly on fiction. However, over the past year I've had a chance to read three biographies, and Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story was middle of the road among them. Of course I read this because of my love for David Foster Wallace, the man who with every written sentence simultaneously makes me want to strive to be a better writer, myself, and give up altogether. Confession: I still, to this day, have not finished Infinite Jest. The furthest (deepest?) I've ever gotten through is a couple hundred pages. But I've read just about everything else he's written. (Okay, haven't read The Pale King, but I'm not sure I want to read his unfinished final opus. Time will tell.)

So what can I say about D.T. Max's attempt to chronicle DFW's life? It was fair, I think. He seemed to try to emulate some of DFW's stylistic choices (starting the book with a self-referential post-modern sentence, frequent [and vigorous] use of end notes, etc.) while not emulating his actual style at all. The prose was simple, inelegant, efficient, standard. The complete opposite of DFW's prose. Yet, I wasn't looking for a DFW knock-off. I just wanted to read about the man's life. Max provided that.

I think he balanced inner struggles well with outward struggles. He moved through chapters at an even pace, mostly. (If there was one area where he lingered too long it was around DFW's agonizing "Westward" story, but in context, seeing as it was the precursor to IJ, I can see why Max choose to do that.) I appreciated that he didn't dwell too long on the depression. I certainly appreciated that the suicide (and surrounding medication lapses) occupied only the last 5 pages. Was there more to that episode? Bloody hell, I sure there was. But I didn't need any more than Max gave me. Heartbreaking as it was, I will be forever grateful to Max for keeping that concise.

Yes, I'm glad I read this, and I would recommend it to any DFW fan. If nothing else, you will come away knowing the difference between nauseous and nauseated.

P.S. I highlighted some of DFW's favorite reading that he said either influenced him or he really appreciated, listed below in roughly the order they appear in the book:

Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon"
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
Frank Norris - McTeague
T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"
Jacques Derrida's essays: "The Double Session" and "Plato's Pharmacy"
Don Delillo - Ratner's Star
William Gass - Omensetter's Luck
John Barth - Lost in the Funhouse
Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City
William Gaddis - The Recognitions
William Vollmann - The Rainbow Stories
Mark Leyner - My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
Jerzy Kosinski - Steps ( )

Nothing great here, but it was interesting to learn things I did not know. Three stars here means I liked it, which I gratefully did. However, I am not the biggest fan of DT Max, but then again it is I who stands firmly in the camp of the reliably loyal Gordon Lish fans and his athletic supporters. (DT has a problem with clearing important matters up and leaving some things wide open for further discussion.) I was disappointed there wasn't more said on the marriage relationship and the awful struggle they had at the end. It felt like DT was soft-stepping on a still too sensitive nerve. I really hadn't realized that DFW had at least a dozen years of sobriety and that he took his zen-like sober discipline quite seriously. Knowing this now, it seems to me that the doctors failed him in the end, even though it was his own rather idiotic choice to get off the drugs that actually worked for him. But DFW should have been forced by the medical authorities to continue with the maintenance program they all know worked. I would think even the AA people he was close to should have been more concerned with his over-stressed self-diagnosis, as anybody with any decent sobriety knows that we types are our own worst enemies when it comes to "figuring things out" on our own. But hindsight is never fair to those who did try their best to protect their friend, so I will stop my criticism here. Too bad we lost such a great talent and kind person such as DFW. But he did leave quite a bit for us all to fuss about. ( )

This is a good source of info about David Foster Wallace, if you're into that sort of thing (and I am). But it's not a very good book.

Wallace was a confusing figure, full of apparent contradictions. You might expect a Wallace biography to open with a set of questions, with some description of how it intends to investigate Wallace's life and what it hopes to get out of that investigation. Instead, Max's book begins with the strangely clunky sentence

Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace's.

That sentence exemplifies the book. It's framed not as an investigation but as a story, told in entirely chronological fashion from Wallace's birth on page 1 to his death on page 301. In addition to providing facts, Max gives us his own interpretations of Wallace's work and ideas, but those interpretations are woven into the narrative and stated in declarative fashion, as though they were just as factual as the names-and-dates-and-quotes material that surrounds them. Max never acknowledges his own interpretive leaps and inferences; he simply writes that "Wallace thought this" and "Wallace thought that" rather than explaining how he reconstructed Wallace's mental state from interviews and letters, and what alternative reconstructions might be defensible. (Whenever Max does offer an alternative explanation, it's always confined to an endnote, as if Max thinks that including it in the main text would break the narrative illusion.)

In short, it's written in the least Wallace-like manner imaginable. Is that a bad thing? If you just treat the book as a delivery mechanism for DFW facts (he voted for Reagan! he tried to convince his mom that Avril Incandenza wasn't based on her! the original draft of Infinite Jest was 750,000 words long!) then no, it's not a problem. And there's plenty of interesting stuff in there, even if you're mostly looking for insight into his work rather than his life. But everything that isn't solely grounded in facts here is pretty much useless. Because Max doesn't tell us how he came up with his interpretations, it's impossible for us to independently evaluate them. And when we're talking about a confusing subject like David Foster Wallace, an interpretation without a backing argument is worthless.

Here's one big example of what I'm talking about. Max's book spends a lot of time telling us about how difficult it was for Wallace to write, even before his later struggles with The Pale King. After a very productive start (he wrote a 480-page novel as just one of his two senior theses in college), he began to find writing a perpetual struggle. Teaching distracted him from writing, but he needed to teach to make money; his addictions to alcohol and marijuana made it hard to write, but when he quit, the experience of recovery also made it hard to write; and so forth. But after hammering this point into our heads for something like 100 pages, Max suddenly starts telling us about this new, long novel Wallace was writing. In Max's telling, Infinite Jest seems to come out of nowhere -- a long description of writer's block and drug/alcohol recovery is suddenly followed by Wallace having 250 finished pages of his new novel, which are so good that they make his new editor say he wanted to publish the book "more than I wanted to breathe." Whence this astonishing productivity?

In Max's telling, Infinite Jest was the product of a sort of conversion experience. Recovery made Wallace decide that he didn't like "irony" anymore and that he wanted to write something with a moral purpose, and this newfound sense of direction opened the floodgates of Wallace's creativity. But there's nothing like this sharp "ironic / non-ironic" division in the work itself. Max tells us that Wallace was trying to become more "conventional." But Infinite Jest is just as weird as anything he'd written before, except on a much larger scale. I also have a hard time seeing it as an "unironic" book, though I confess I don't really know what "irony" means, exactly, in this context. (I suspect Max isn't sure, either, but of course he never bothers to define or investigate the term -- that's not his style.) How did the depressed, moralistic recovering addict of Max's story write hundreds of pages of manic, blackly comic prose about increasingly grotesque episodes of familial trauma? Max tells us that Wallace was no longer interested in alienating and confusing the reader, the way he was in his earlier work; the real Wallace composed a book that takes months to read, leaves no reader-expectation unviolated, and actively strains to avoid becoming too entertaining. How do these pieces fit together? It's not that what Max says is wrong, just that it's one part of the apparent contradiction. A good biography would takes steps toward resolving that contradiction. This one doesn't even acknowledge it.

(Also, Max's book is really badly written on a sentence-by-sentence level, even by pop biography standards. Again, not a problem if you're just looking for info, but a bit disappointing if you're looking for a good, respectable discussion/appreciation of the subject matter.) ( )

Damn. It's hard to believe that DFW passed four years ago, and that there will Never Be Any More.

It might be humorous, in some darkly comic sense, that this is an unfinished biography as an appendage to an unfinished life. But there is little else that is comic about the book. Max, to his credit, uncovers the very real and human aspects of DFW's life. There are some interesting musings on mental illness, and DFW's own struggle for accepting himself. Max does not glamorize the struggle of mental illness, and I must credit him for that.

This biography leaves me with far more questions than answers. Let's hear more about his mother. Let's hear more about The Pale King, or what he thought of his audience, or more about the influences of DeLillo, Pynchon and Derrida (I know, I know) - and even Wittgenstein or even Franzen/Vollmann. Instead, this book seems oddly truncated. If it were edited and squeezed, some chapters would have made a fantastic article about the toil that went into creating Infinite Jest. The whole thing seems unfinished, even a bit sloppy.

Of course, in a more perfect world, this biography would not exist at all and DFW might have found a more real happiness through his suffering. But this is what we have, and we must make do until a 'definitive' edition comes along. We turn to the work itself again.

Addendum: One of the editors of this book, Paul Slovak, was previously assigned to Vollmann's [b:Imperial|5719302|Imperial|William T. Vollmann|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347376794s/5719302.jpg|5890919]. The world wonders. ( )