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

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

A fascinating historical and medical perspective on fatal familial insomnia and prion disorders in general, highlighting historical and modern controversies on these fascinating diseases. Max's strength lies in characterization and the placement of the events occurring in one family with FFI within a historical context. His prose is rich and readable. The subject matter is unspeakably sad, but Max handles a book about rapid neurodegeneration with ease, focusing on the excitement of show more discovery, the hopes of family and the scientific and medical curiosity evoked by the strange mysteries of prion disorders.

The major flaw is that by attempting to focus on prion disorders in general, what Max covers in breadth often lacks in depth. The discussion of kuru seems to focus on one of the main researcher's pedophilia to a large extent, which seems to occur in place of a real examination of the husband and wife team that did the anthropological work to discover the true origins of the disease. It would be both more salient and more interesting to focus instead on the controversies of cannibalism and how that discovery was made. In addition, Max remarks several times on the similarity between scrapie and FFI to the already discovered hereditary prion disorders CJD and GSS, without ever really discussing the discovery of those conditions. Since one of the stated goals of the book is to bring about public awareness and support for research to inherited prion disorders, more exploration of these two diseases would have added a lot, in addition to enriching the history of the field. show less

4. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D. T. Max (2012, 328 pages, read Jan 1 - 24)

Reading about DFW was a fascinating experience. There is so much I want to say that it is very hard not to ramble on at length, incoherently. Apologies for those crimes committed below. I did try to put some structure into this...but my fingers kept typing away.

At the most basic level this is an excellent first biography of a complicated and tragic figure whose cultural meme show more extends in many vastly different, complicated, and sophisticated directions. DFW never finished The Pale King, but Infinite Jest has had multiple lives, and somehow, written without the internet in mind, has without intent become something of a symbol and expression of our current information splurge. Max handles all this by keeping the biography very clean and chronological and mostly to facts. Much the information he covers is easily available in various semi-famous online articles. But there is still a lot to cover and to put together and Max gets in tons of details. He stays organized by simply following the timeline, beginning in DFW’s childhood and working through his life stage by state. He offers textual analysis, but it’s unclear whether or not his takes have any originality, and, I think, it’s unlikely. There is too much good information to choose from.

There are two different DFW’s to cover, the person and the writer/author. As a person the unfortunate take away is the negative sides. It's not completely fair. He had some close relationships with people that stuck by him, and clearly there was an endearing quality to him throughout his life. And, entirely at home in academia, he became something of a legendary teacher wherever he happened to be teaching. But there were serious problems, which manifest themselves in his writing, that were dangerous, hurtful and eventually tragic. That he was insanely ambitious, extremely shy and yet something of a striking showman that broadcast something like a charming mid-western American humbleness only goes to show many of his contradictions. He was also unstable. His psychological problems began to really affect him as a college student, and he would suffer numerous breakdowns and many suicidal episodes. His drug problems began in high school and led later to alcohol problems that would eventually, after a lot of abuse, force him into a clinical detox. Remarkably he would recover, and spend the rest of his life clean and sober…but in constant awareness of his addictions.

Others personal issues include a constant lying, I would call it compulsive, and a constant string of short-term girl friends. The womanizing reached an extreme after Infinite Jest made him something of a cultural figure and book tours became opportunities for many one-night stands. But he really knew no bounds and had relationships with students and, maybe worse, with women he met at AA meetings! On the positive side he came around. Before his final plunge he had apparently cleansed himself of all his bad habits, was in a happy and healthy marriage, had a good relationship with his family and most of his friends, many life-long friends. Before his final plunge… Pale Fire did not lead Wallace to suicide. The book was failure, at the time of his death an unsolvable contradiction, but Wallace appears to have become somewhat content with this.

Wallace's death defies my words. I had always imagined it was something to be angry about, a failure. And, it true his death hurt a long list of people. But I was completely wrong to put such blame on him. He had a long downward fight which he fought without any unprescribed drugs or alcohol, without turning anyone away from him. He wasn’t alone. He simply couldn’t find an answer to stabilize him mentally. This is covered at the end of the book and it’s really one of the saddest things I’ve come across.

The thing about DFW about a writer is that the biographical fallacy is a fallacy here. Wallace’s ambitions and insecurities poured out his writing to a fault. He wanted the reader to know he was smart, and he also wanted to conceal this desire from the reader. (Max summarizes an essay by A. O. Scott where, Max writes ”Scott also accused Wallace of fencing off all possible objections to his work by making sure every possible criticism was already embedded in the text.” I find this one of the most penetrating comments about Wallace, even if it doesn’t fully appreciate the contradictions that allow that kind of sense to come out of Wallace’s writing.) Wallace’s ideas were sometimes basically stolen from other writers, or were imitations of them, and he went through efforts to conceal this too (It seems the critics are harder on him then the writers). But mostly he took things from real life and fictionalized them, offending a number of people along the way. The most hurtful was surely his portrayal of his mother as Avril in IJ.

Despite all of this something special came out of Infinite Jest. Wallace had hit his personal bottom in drug/alcohol addictions and had come to new perspective on what to write... he found a real humbleness, and found himself in a search of a spiritual peace. (Raised atheist, Wallace never considered the idea of theism in any seriousness, even if he did look into becoming Catholic). Infinite Jest reflects all of these aspects of his personality. His life stories are in the book. His ambitiousness and his efforts, no, his obsession with trying to write something that would break the bounds of fiction is all there. The book is immensely complex, and sometimes maybe only for the sake of being complex…or maybe not. But yet, as Max puts it, ”This book is redemptive, as modern novels rarely are.” It has a soul to it, a purpose that can reach any reader.

There are many possible reactions to DFW. How many people will read this book and find themselves turned off of Wallace for his real ethical crimes? I don’t see it that way myself, partially because I’m driven more by fascination than judgment, but also because he was unique. There was something special about him. He pushed himself so far for his literature, literally broke himself. I think Infinite Jest is something of a masterpiece, something that couldn’t have existed in any other way except from the life the Wallace led. I haven’t exactly forgiven Wallace, but I do feel his flaws were somehow very human. I closed the book with a real sadness about his tragic end, with a layered sense of awe and loss.

2013
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