23rd
What Will We Do Without David Foster Wallace?
Last Sunday, I heard that the writer David Foster Wallace killed himself. There wasn’t much information for a few days, leaving those of us who weren’t lucky enough to be his students or colleagues wondering what happened. And really sad. I heard that he has struggled with depression for at least 20 years, and has been fighting off an evil round of it the last few months. This makes his accomplishments all the more remarkable, especially because he never wrote about his tortured inner life in a way that would call attention to himself. Our copy editor Marlon pointed out that he could have written a much rougher memoir than the non-talent James Frey , but he didn’t want to be like that.
I don’t know if it’s right to bring this up following his death, but one of the most vivid parts of Infinite Jest is the main character’s series of forced marches to a psychiatrist in freezing Boston. He is sent there because his mother is worried that he isn’t dealing well with his father’s suicide. His father, James Orin Incandenza, the founder of the tennis boarding school Hal attends, kills himself by disabling the door sensor on the staff room microwave with aluminum foil and microwaving his own head. It was a mess, and his son found him. The kid is grieving, and also emotionally frozen solid in a way that you might a imagine hyper-analytic young athlete might be. What he is really unhappy about is having to sit in an office with this man staring at him and asking him questions without ever taking his hands out from under his desk. When Hal manufactures a “breakthrough” for the therapist so he can be considered cured, the shrink is so shocked that he finally puts his hands on the desk. They are abnormally, ickily, helplessly small.
The point of revisiting this part of DFW’s 1996 novel is not to prove that he spent a lot of time thinking about suicide, which he probably did. What we want to remember is the way he handled it: with gleeful piles of detail, in imaginative, almost impossible structures. I’m overwhelmed with all the details he wanted us to have - because they matter and nobody else was writing them down. For instance, the fact that David Lynch pees behind a tree when he’s shooting a film to save time, because he drinks so much coffee. The way certain members of the elite national media all wear the same kind of tortoiseshell glasses which they love to nibble on the earpieces of, and also all walk in great circles in lobbies when they talk on their cellphones — which is called “The Cellphone Waltz” (cellphones were newer then). “Up Simba”, in which DFW was embedded with the McCain 2000 campaign, has just been republished by itself and is as helpful in understanding the greasy machinery of political imagemaking as Joan Didion’s essay “Insider Baseball.” For more cheers for DFW’s nonfiction, see Ana Marie Cox, who convincingly claimed that DFW helped to create a little golden age of magazine writing.
Other great detail writers, like John Updike (who DFW loved with reservations, see “Certainly the End of Something or Other”) use compulsive noticing to reinforce their immaculate aloneness. DFW hoped details could help us see each other. Whether observing the American fetish for being immobilized and coddled while eating, in this case at sea (see “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”) or watching the news on Sept. 11, 2001 from a friend’s living room that could be a museum diorama for “prototypical working class Bloomington” (“The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”) he was never condescending, and this is important. For his short talk on how education can help one sympathize with others in traffic and in grocery lines, see his Kenyon College Commencement speech from 2005.
Wallace treated all kinds disagreements about how we should live and what we should think with the same respect for all parties concerned, whether or not they arose between people with advanced degrees from schools with mature landscaping. The choice of whether or not to structure your leisure time around eating fried dough (“Getting Away from Pretty Much Being Away From it All”) and the Grammar Wars (“Authority and American Usage”) were equally like tennis matches to our DFW: fun to watch, and best conducted with flat out grit and respect for your opponent. We really miss him.
Here’s the most information in one place on DFW.
…and a nice appreciation in N+1: “The publication of Infinite Jest in 1996 seemed to show up despair as a mistake.”
