David Foster Wallace took his own life on Friday. As I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog, he was one of my top favorite authors.
“He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late ’80s and early 1990s,” Ulin said. “And he really restored the notion of the novel as a kind of canvas on which a writer can do anything.”
Here’s a link to Wallace’s great Atlantic article about talk radio hosts.
And here’s a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon college.
The 1000+ page Infinite Jest is infinitely worth it, but I understand most people don’t have as much free time as I do.
Wallace left a wonderful body of work behind for us. His death is terribly upsetting.
UPDATE: McSweeney’s has a lovely thread of remembrances of Wallace.
My personal discovery of Wallace’s writing is kind of funny, so I’ll tell it here. My first year in Chicago, I was in a bar with two friends, and we met these two guys from Alaska. One of the guys really hit it off with one of my friends, and they ended up dating for a couple months. The other one began casually dating my other friend. One night a few weeks later, these boys invited us all down to their house, which was at the very bottom tip of the South Side of Chicago. Somebody’s parents owned the house and were letting them live in it free of charge, but it was weird that they lived there, and anyone who’s spent much time in Chicago will know immediately why. At any rate, it was far, far, far away from our stomping grounds, and the night of the dinner, we all drove down there in my friend’s car.
When we got down there, the guy dating my friend (in the more casual of the two relationships) greeted me with a giant hug and launched into an excited recap of various authors and films we’d discussed at the bar when we first met. I had barely gotten through the door before he’d foisted two books and a DVD on me that he just knew I’d love, and I just had to read and watch them and let him know what I thought, and he was so glad I’d come, and did I like pasta, because he had cooked.
Needless to say, my friend who was dating him was less than pleased. It was a terribly awkward, uncomfortable evening, and I couldn’t escape, because they lived South of where all public transportation stopped. I finally caught a ride back with another guy who’d been there (who then insisted I stop off at a bar for a drink with him, realized he had no cash, and rushed me out of the bar because he was running out on the check…which I did not find out about until several weeks later). Meanwhile, back on the South Side, my friend ended things with the book-lending guy that night. My other friend (the one in the more serious relationship) had a messy breakup months later, and so we all fell out of contact with both those guys. I kept running into the non-book-lending one, and he would tell me that I really had to return his roommates’ property, but then he wouldn’t call me or have his roommate call me…anyway, I still have all that stuff today.
What does all this have to do with David Foster Wallace? Well, one of the books was Infinite Jest, and it sat, huge and mostly ignored, like the Bible or the OED, on a dusty shelf in my apartment…until one long, bleak, lonely, sad winter, when I finally cracked it open, crawled into it, and fell in love.
