D.T. Max

Stephen Sondheim was one of the very few people for whom I felt comfortable using the word "genius." His songs speak to me more consistently and more powerfully than those of any other songwriter; "Anyone Can Whistle" is essentially an 80-word summary of my life and personality.

So I was looking forward to this book, a collection of five interviews that Max conducted between 2016 and 2019 hoping that they would eventually become a major profile for The New Yorker. And for a variety of show more reasons, some of which were entirely predictable, it mostly made me sad.

Sondheim's final decades were relatively unproductive. He hadn't had a show on Broadway since Passion in 1994, after which he spent more than a decade working on different versions of the show that finally came to be called Road Show, which was generally greeted with disappointment when it played off-Broadway in 2008.

But as Max begins his series of interviews, Sondheim has begun a new project -- a paired set of one-act musical adaptations of Bunuel films. He's working with a new collaborator, playwright David Ives, and seems excited to be back at work.

As the interviews go on, though, you don't have to read too far between the lines to realize that the project isn't going well, and that one of the principal reasons is that Sondheim is no longer at the peak of his powers. He talks about struggling, both musically and lyrically, with things that shouldn't be as difficult as they are.

Understandably, that's made Sondheim -- never an outgoing interview subject under the best of circumstances -- even crankier than usual, and Max struggles to find a topic that Sondheim is willing to say anything new or interesting about. It's largely a rehashing of old grievances -- his difficult relationship with his mother, his continuing bitterness about the critical failures of Anyone Can Whistle (1964) and Merrily We Roll Along (1981), his resentment at attempts to pull him into some sort of "Sondheim vs. Lloyd Webber" debate.

The New Yorker profile Max had hoped to write never came to pass; by the final interview, Sondheim is openly belligerent and hostile. And it seems unlikely that there is a volume of memoirs lurking somewhere. Sondheim's final statement on his own life is likely to be the two volumes of his collected lyrics (Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat), and the Sondheim commentary that accompanies those lyrics does accumulate into something like a memoir, at least of his professional life. And that will have to be enough. show less

A friend remarked in a thread here in Infinite Jesters regarding D.T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace (DFW), "It was so interesting and heartbreaking, I just felt terrible once I finished it."

To which I replied: "Exactly! And that's why I haven't said very much about it. Until now. And even though it's obvious how the book is going to end, it's still sad when you finish it. Made me feel a tad too empty for my taste. I wish Max could've softened the blow somehow, but that's just show more wishful thinking".

I thought it was interesting how DT Max demonstrated how much of DFWs so called "non-fiction" was in fact confabulated. I hadn't suspected the degree to which Wallace embellished. Maybe not so much the meat of the truth about his life and experiences, but all the whimsical amplifications he made in the otherwise humdrum details concerning the people and events of his reportage. His essay on the Illinois State Fair, "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All," collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, is a good example of that. Or how "the people at his church" that he sometimes mentioned in his essays were invariably stand-ins for his "12-step friends," exemplified in his piece in response to 9/11, "The View From Mrs. Thompson's," collected in Consider the Lobster. Based on that essay alone, I always assumed that DFW went to church. I made inquiries, in fact, over the years, as a stalker/sleuth, attempting to uncover the secret of which church David Foster Wallace attended. Come to find out, from Max's biography, he couldn't go to church, because whenever he did, he'd inevitably start chuckling uncontrollably in the pew.

And I wonder why, beyond obvious reasons of personal privacy and reputation concerns, when he so championed Authenticity and eschewed Irony in his later years, he never made public, beyond the occasional admissions in interviews that were play-downs of ginormous proportions, concerning his lifelong vulnerability to substances -- "yeah I experimented "a little" with drugs after I wrote The Broom..." blah blah blah -- the source or engine of his addictions. His Depression. Capital "D", as in Major, of which he was a chronic sufferer. Might he still be alive, if it's not too insensitive for me to conjecture (probably is, but I'm compelled, regardless, to ask the question), had he opened up about his struggles with depression, had he written another of his patented, footnoted essays on the subject, about how it crushed almost irreparably every aspect of his life, when he let it go untreated?

Yet he concealed it. No one outside his family, agent, and maybe his editor at Little, Brown and tight circle from Amherst ever knew about it. Is it any wonder then that he could so comprehensively fashion a complicated character like Hal, from Infinite Jest, who secreted his addictions so perfectly -- oh people at the Enfield Tennis Academy he attended knew he got high but not how often, just like people at Amherst knew DFW had had some personal problems at school that required he abruptly leave campus, but maybe didn't know the full gravity of just how life threatening those problems were -- and yet still functioned at genius levels in day-to-day academics?

Though I doubt Hal could hide any better than DFW could hide -- an overriding impression I'm left with reflecting on the biography. That is, what was Wallace's perhaps unwitting ability to reveal himself by what he concealed. Which strikes me as something DFW would've phrased as being "ironically ironic" about himself, especially for one who no longer wanted to be -- or in the least, no longer wished to be perceived as -- Ironic, whether in life or fiction. Except DFW would've no doubt made the turn of phrase cleverly, and with an endearing and generous amount of hysterical self-deprecation my criticism lacks; and, in so doing, probably made himself seem that much more Authentic to us all, his fans and critics. Man of many contradictions, DFW, and D.T. Max lets the contradictions speak for themselves. His biography is as unflattering of Wallace as it is effusive in praise. Yeah, Wallace, knowing full well he was pursuing a married woman, participated in the breakup of the poet and memoirist, Mary Karr's, marriage. Karr denies they were involved while she was married, however, Max notes. Bottom line: DFW chased one too many skirts for his own good in his day, whether they were married or not, and did so even when at least one was worn by his student. He was probably too smart for his own good too, able to rationalize and intellectually minimize some of the more dubious decisions he made regarding his multitude of failed romantic relationships. Miracle he lived as long as he did, considering all that early drunken debauchery, all that later despair.

I didn't like how little Max spent on DFWs childhood, a single chapter, the book's first, and not nearly enough. Perhaps the bio's brevity on the subject, as Anna noted in her comment in the Infinite Jester's thread, was at least partly due to his mother's intervention in D.T. Max's research. Her desire for privacy. Maybe so. Small quibble though, compared to my next.

Larger criticism, and I'll disclose it originates from a recent review of the biography that I can't at the moment locate in order to properly cite, is, as its author argues convincingly, Max's strict overuse of a chronological order in encompassing the writing and life of one whose was as experimental, or as unorthodox in nature, as DFWs. I agree with that. Max nailed the facts of DFWs life but his connect-the-dots narrative missed an opportunity in paying homage to the more creative forms DFWs authorship consistently inhabited, be it in structuring his first novel after the intricate philosophy of Wittgenstein, or in the multilayered geometrics of Infinite Jest. I'm not suggesting Max needed have constructed some kind of David Mitchellesque Chinese puzzle box out of his biography to satisfy the most insatiable Oulipo devotee, but couldn't he have structured his work just a tad less traditionally, considering the innately innovative core of his singular subject? The book was too predictable at times; tedious even. As a hardcore fan I knew much of DFWs history already, and so knew what was probably coming next, like how I know the letter D comes next after C, and so on, but perhaps (and I hope) the more casual readers of DFW will still be surprised by what they find in Max's biography. Predictable or not, it's a good solid biography, and I'll confess that despite my criticism, I certainly kept turning the pages, fully involved and invested with what I was reading, and finished the biography in two days.

Max made up for most of his predictability with his seamless onslaught of insightful analyses zeroing in on the connections between the content of all of DFWs fiction and nonfiction with that of the experiences in his life. The way Max thoroughly applied this connective-commentary upon the title story to DFWs first story collection, Girl With Curious Hair, in particular, was beyond exceptional. In it, Max reveled in DFWs deadpan delivery he exacted in filleting the dispassionate novels of Bret Easton Ellis, which up to the time of Girl With Curious Hair's 1989 publication, would've included Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction. DFW ridiculed Ellis' dry style and nihilistic content with such exquisite wit and verve (qualities Ellis' fiction lacks), that Ellis was even less than a pile of ashes by the time DFW was finished with him. Hysterical. It was like DFW had made Bret Easton Ellis "disappear here, Dude" in the very pages, the satiric prose, of "Girl With Curious Hair," and Max showed us, practically paragraph by paragraph, exactly how DFW went so Houdini on him. Splendid work. Superior explication. No wonder Ellis lashed out a few months ago in an embarrassing spate of tweets about Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, shortly after its release.

Mindful of what beelzebubba shared in the thread I linked up at the top, about meeting D.T. Max at a Texas book fair, how when he acquired his autograph, Max conveyed to him that future bios will undoubtedly cover more of the personal, family stuff of DFWs, and maybe then we'll know more about that often-difficult relationship he had with his mother, whom he clearly modeled, according to his sister -- who recognized the resemblance immediately when she read an early draft of Infinite Jest -- in the cool, calculating, matriarchal character, Avril. In fact, she let DFW know that she was worried -- and shouldn't he also be worried -- about their mother's reaction once she'd read (and witnessed, like looking into a mirror) the inspiration for Avril? DFW hemmed and hawed about it, noncommittal in his response to his sister's concerns. No surprise then, when soon thereafter, because of Avril, DFW and his mother did not speak to one another for five years following the publication of Infinite Jest.

I look forward to reading those future, perhaps more complex, biographies on DFW whenever they're eventually published. Hopefully their structure and style will be more congruent with DFWs serpentine convolutions than D.T. Max's straight-laced chronology. For those who enjoyed Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, as I did, and want more, I'd recommend Understanding David Foster Wallace by Marshall Boswell, a fine, albeit more academic study, focused primarily on Wallace's fiction rather than his personal life, published just over a decade before he died. show less

An excellent history of prion diseases, framed by the story of an Italian family with a genetic prion disease, fatal familial insomnia, that kills by exhaustion. I'm equal parts fascinated by this disease's potential to illuminate the way sleep works, and horrified by the very thought of prion diseases.

You close the book on this all-too-short and unfinished life and a small sound (a sigh?) escapes from you, regret, compassion, sorrow. Wisely, Max, the biographer stays in the background, offering information with virtually no superficial speculation so that an outline - perhaps a bit like one described in The Pale King emerges of David Foster Wallace, ghostly but possible to apprehend. I began my Wallace adventure with Oblivion, then read some of his essays in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll show more Never Do Again (still haven't finished) then Infinite Jest and finally, I listened to The Broom of the System and when I picked up the biography I still knew virtually nothing about him, or rather, about all I knew was that he must have played tennis as a kid. What I couldn't grasp was how one person could have so much inside of him, so much to say, and so much of it so true. Infinite Jest in particular was so different from anything and so unexpected, how, in all that dense language and the shenanigans and commentary this tremendous sweetness hidden at the core. So now I have a better idea of where Wallace came from, what happened to him: how he could write about such a wide range of people and experiences. The biography is solid and unpretentious and Max does a careful job of linking some experiences with Wallace's writing but doesn't overdo it. Nor does he overdo or shy away from the extent of Wallace's emotional problems and the devastation these caused in his life. It's a balanced effort, making no pretension of figuring anything out and I appreciated that! **** show less