David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008

From the Los Angeles Times website:

"David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46."

Full article here. Apparently it was suicide, and that's incredibly sad to me.

I loved his story "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" so much...a man afflicted with errr coprolalia who cries out "Victory for the forces of Democracy!" or something close to that while he is uhhh well achieving completion during the act of love, shall we say. Infinite Jest was not a book I loved as much as most seemed to, but it was pretty damn good.

No one should feel so hopeless as to take their own life. It is such a giant waste. Safe journey home, David Foster Wallace, may the peace you couldn't find here enfold you there.

From today's New York Times comes this appreciation by Michiko Kakutani:

An Appreciation
Exuberant Riffs on a Land Run Amok
David Foster Wallace in 2006. He was found dead in his home on Friday, after apparently committing suicide.

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: September 14, 2008
David Foster Wallace used his prodigious gifts as a writer — his manic, exuberant prose, his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant-garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness — to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad “deep and meaningless” facets of contemporary life.

A prose magician, Mr. Wallace was capable of writing — in his fiction and nonfiction — about subjects from tennis to politics to lobsters, from the horrors of drug withdrawal to the small terrors of life aboard a luxury cruise ship, with humor and fervor and verve. At his best he could write funny, write sad, write sardonic and write serious. He could map the infinite and infinitesimal, the mythic and mundane. He could conjure up an absurd future — an America in which herds of feral hamsters roam the land — while conveying the inroads the absurd has already made in a country where old television shows are a national touchstone and asinine advertisements wallpaper our lives. He could make the reader see state-fair pigs that are so fat they resemble small Volkswagens; communicate the weirdness of growing up in Tornado Alley, in the mathematically flat Midwest; capture the mood of Senator John McCain’s old ”straight talk” campaign of 2000.

Full article here. Will open in a newe window.

The waste of it all. Here was a Thomas Wolfe born too late to find a Maxwell Perkins to take him from excellent to deathless.

Wallace has been so deeply influential and engaging for me. As a UA grad (he left the creative writing program there to join NYU - a much better choice that was unavailable to me), I could see his perspective all through the halls of academia and his writing style and sensibility speaks directly to my own. I was so pleased to have been exposed to his work before going to classes there - and it made me feel somehow connected to that insight (though obviously I was not).

I just can't sense the logic of his passing and in such a manner as he went. I am sad and devastated in a way that is hard to articulate.

mamakats, I know what you mean. It simply defies my comprehension that Wallace should be gone, and his talent with him.

Very disheartening.

I sure hope there are other Wallace threads here on LT, because, if not, this thread should have about 150 posts in it - if there were any justice in the world, which of course, there isn't.

Good lord, did I have a sense of deja vu yesterday. When guitar-god Michael Hedges died, I was out of town on business and I had to get the news from a little bitty blurb in USA Today. Yesterday, I'm in the backseat of a rental out of town on business and I get the Wallace news from a little blurb in USA Today. Two heros, and I'm getting the news in one nice, neat little paragraph, which hardly seems fitting for either of these GIANTS.

Simply put, Infinite Jest is my favorite book. Like a lot of fans, reading it CONSUMED me. I have followed Wallace slavishly ever since. He was coming to town in February as part of the local university's visitng writers series, and I couldn't have been more pumped.

The world has lost a premier literary talent. So, so sad...

Okay, now this is TOO much: I did not know until I just read - that Michael Hedges has died too! It has taken me weeks to get my equilibrium back from the loss of DFW. I know it's a bit like a KurtCobainJunky, mourning a fallen rock star, but DFW is/was such an influence and connection to my own writing and reading and intellect... all while I listened to Michael Hedges. Guess I was a postmodernstructuralist 'groupie' afterall.

Well, Mr. Hedges has been gone for, what, like eight or nine years now? Single-car accident close to home about a month after the last time I had the honor of seeing him.

He was not only a visionary, but also an absolutely outstanding performer...

Sigh.

I'm the goof, no more posting after chasing children all weekend - I was chatting with hubby and it dawned on me that I knew this factoid about M.H.... though it did not hit me hard at the time it occurred; I was busy making children then!

For anyone interested, the new issue of Rolling Stone (with Obama on the cover AGAIN - not that that's a bad thing) has a loooong article on DFW and his rather complex, fairly well-hidden struggle with depression over the years. Lots of pictures (family and otherwise) that I'd never seen, etc...very good but tremendously sad stuff.

Thanks for the heads up on the Rolling Stone article; it was an insightful read. For me, it had been clear that DFW's writing was based in a depressive-esque state, though what I had always walked away with is a sense of hope such as he expressed in his commencement address of 2005. It seems that he tried very much to live in that state of hopefulness and so was overcome in his psychological struggles that he finally and tragically succumbed to the depression.

Here is that article, BTW.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23638511/the_lost_years__last_days_of_dav...