By The Beachwood Obituary Desk
1. “After David Foster Wallace became a twentysomething literary phenom – after the publication of his first novel (The Broom of the System, 1987) and short-story collection (Girl With Curious Hair, 1989) got the Thomas Pynchon comparisons flowing – he checked himself into a hospital and asked to be put on suicide watch,” Mark Caro writes in the Tribune.
“‘In a weird way it seemed like there was something very American about what was going on, that things were getting better and better for me in terms of all the stuff I thought I wanted, and I was getting unhappier and unhappier,’ he told me in 1996 upon the publication of Infinite Jest, the 1,000-plus-page novel that would cement his status as one the few modern-day literary giants.”
2. “In the footnotes of the brief life of David Foster Wallace, a reader might discover that in addition to penning one of the seminal novels of the latter 20th century, and in addition to trademarking a dizzying writing style populated with parentheticals and those brilliant footnotes, and in addition to becoming a symbol of pop culture and intelligentsia for a large segment of Generation X, the Infinite Jest author lived for a time in Normal, Ill.,” Monica Hesse writes in the Washington Post.
“Normal is a corn town in the middle of the state. It is not postmodern. It is not terribly ironic. It does not seem, in short, the type of place that a towering, postmodern writer such as David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself Friday at age 46, would live. And yet he did, for about a decade until moving to California. I grew up in Normal, and I knew him a little.
3. “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,” Michiko Kakutani writes in the New York Times.
4. davidfosterwallace.com.
5. “As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player,” his Wikipedia entry says. “He attended his father’s alma mater, Amherst College, and majored in English and philosophy, with a focus on modal logic and mathematics. His philosophy senior thesis on modal logic was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize, while his English senior thesis would later become his first novel.”
6. Interviewed by Dave Eggers for The Believer.
THE BELIEVER: You covered John McCain for the 2000 election, and that piece, which was so fresh and honest and unvarnished, was made into a kind of book-on-demand. Do you keep up with politics, and if so, are there plans to do any more political writing? And do you have any comment on why, it seems, there are fewer young novelists around who also comment directly on the political world? Should novelists be offering their opinions on national affairs, politics, our current and future wars?
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: The reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young (am I included in the range of this predicate anymore?) fiction writers ought to be doing it. As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O’Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left’s been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it’s totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken’s broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham’s latest Harper’s columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone. It’s all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or “dialogue”); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying.
Posted on September 15, 2008