When J, having discovered the news in yesterday's
New York Times, told me that David Foster Wallace committed suicide on Friday, I found myself shuddering in disbelief. The only previous occasion upon which I have reacted viscerally to the death of an artist -- one whom I'd known through his or her work exclusively -- was when
Mary Hansen, longtime vocalist for the band Stereolab, was
killed tragically in an accident at the age of 36. It took me a little while -- and some red wine, and some wallowing sessions to the tune of Stereolab's
Emperor Tomato Ketchup -- to get over my anger with
the bastards for that one.
Wallace, like Hansen, was an artist whose work has at times affirmed my desire to go on living. I passed through a couple of periods as a young man during which Wallace's stories and novels -- especially
Infinite Jest -- performed the lofty task of confirming for me the existence of human life somewhere outside of my apartment. Or maybe confirming the existence of human life somewhere in my skull. I don't know; something like that. I'm not a writer the way Wallace was -- I write songs well, but paragraphs and stuff don't come naturally to me --, and that's not just in the sense that Wallace was obviously a genius and I'm not. It's in the sense that it always seemed that he kept 'craft' at arm's length. I don't know whether this is true, or if it was maybe an impression that he cultivated; I'm not sure it makes much of a difference.
Maybe it was that Wallace was trying to and sometimes succeeding at rising above
'craft'. Maybe it was that he was uncomfortable with 'craft' and needed continually to diffuse its pretensions, embed jokes somewhere in the bricks and mortar of his sometimes elaborate, nonlinear plot structures. (Structures which have been described as resembling everything from Möbius strips to parabolas.) I always had this sense that in some of his best and worst work, he was really just trying to find ways of pulling back the
Wizard-of-Oz-ian curtain and saying, "Hi; how's it going? The world's profoundly fucked, don't you think? Yeah, me too."
Wallace declared in interviews his interest in devising strategies by which to appropriate the irony and subversive politics of postmodern smart-asses like Pynchon, but to fashion from this raw material a kind of fiction that could be evocative of the human experience (if not necessarily linear), morally engaged and emotionally resonant. And as Wallace's early novella
Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way makes clear, he wasn't interested in building metafictive roller coaster rides in the style of of John Barth, a tiresome and wanky strategy that probably still found favor with Wallace's creative writing MFA faculty, whom he derided as square and as obsessed with a notion of form as an ideal in its antiseptic self.
Wallace seemed to be struggling in his fiction to find ways of coping with life, or at least to document and annotate real and hypothetical attempts to cope with life. Another way of saying whatever it is I'm trying to get at is that he seemed as a writer to be always on the lookout for ways of curing his loneliness, our loneliness. From what little I actually know about him as a person, he was someone who was always struggling with depression and various forms of anxiety. The publication and critical success of a novel he had written as an undergraduate lavished upon him a level of attention that's not all that healthy for a young man to receive, and he become involved with hard drugs, which he kicked apparently with the help of Narcotics Anonymous (although, it seems just as likely that he attended these NA meetings as research for his second and final novel
Infinite Jest, one of whose narrative threads involves drug addition and NA). In an essay 'E Unibus Pluram', Wallace describes in some detail that his problem with television is that it's so damn entertaining that it's hard for him to stop watching. He addressed this issue by living without a working television set in his house, apart from a small one with a built-in VCR and no reception, on which he would watch weekly episodes of
Ally McBeal, taped for him by friends. Furthermore, he lacked Internet access from his home computer and therefore routinely carried his work on a floppy disk to a computer in different building in order to email it to his editor.
In a way, it's strange that his death affects me as it does, given that I have almost nothing in common with Wallace as a human being, and he probably wasn't the kind of person I'd take to hanging out with. He was reportedly a genius at doing certain kinds of obscenely complicated logical proofs: basically, somewhere in the gray area between mathematics and philosophy; a zone in which the material is so difficult, so beyond my grasp and attention span that I find it most practical simply to prefer Continental philosophy. He was born into one of those well-connected, WASPy families -- of which most of us are equal parts jealous and resentful -- with old-school academic parents, in which things like proper grammar and etymology were spoon-fed to him and his siblings in the form of parlor games. It sounds like a textbook example of a family whose hypereducated brats are as likely to end up having a nervous breakdown as they are to ascend to the heights of some academic or professional field.
Wallace did both. Perhaps as a consequence of being told repeatedly that he was a boy-genius, he developed what I guess you could call a smart-kid rebellious streak, characterized in part by virtuoso displays of sarcasm and wordy arrogance. The difference between his rebellious streak and those of most arrogant, WASPy professor's sons, is that, from all appearances, Wallace had a reverence for and understanding of
mischief, an art that is all-too-often bungled by children/young adults of privilege and cultural savvy, who tend to be dilettantish and noncommittal when it comes to most forms of fun. If you want to do it the right way, there's an ethics to being a rebellious kid; you have certain responsibilities to those around you. It's like those gay indie-rock bands that act 'cute' and 'ironic', as if no one's ever done that before; as if everyone doesn't know that they're still a bunch of asshole frat boys. It has to do with whether you are giving something back to your audience of greater substance than simply the opportunity to live vicariously through you.
I'm surmising that Wallace understood and revered mischief on the basis both of interviews and of some of the more rollicking and madcap episodes in his two novels,
Infinite Jest and
The Broom of the System. I've never seen anyone comment on this, but it occurs to me that in both of these novels, particularly the former, Wallace's depictions of adolescence, undergraduate life, and young adulthood are singularly evocative. Depictions that are not exactly 'realistic' so much as hyper-real, fractured and faithful to the task of capturing the sharpness of focus with which young people see adults for the self-serving hypocrites that they are, part and parcel of which is the ability of young people to police the hypocrisies of their peers, to play fair and to insist upon fair play. This insistence upon fairness, this willingness to cut one's fellow down to size for
his benefit, this anarchistic, decentered anti-system of justice that protects friendship from meaninglessness: is this not what we're describing when we use the word
mischief?
I now know something that I've suspected for a while now: that I'm never going to get to read a third David Foster Wallace novel. I hadn't been all that interested in his newer stories and essays; he seemed to have gotten himself locked into a kind of holding pattern: the same plodding, technical-manual diction; long declarative sentences; a character's memories narrated in a past perfect tense monotone; a faint tint of themes and allusions, conjured through a delicate threading-together of textures, colors and half-formed thoughts -- a skill at which Wallace's virtuosity is matched in contemporary story-telling only by that of David Lynch --, the results of which could still give you the chills, but the technique for which was becoming sadly predictable, and even tedious. Some of the stuff in
Consider the Lobster and
Oblivion was great, of course. But I remember thinking that maybe I had moved on a bit from Wallace, or maybe he was perilously close to repeating himself, or maybe the warmth, energy and humor that I had found in
Girl With Curious Hair and
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and his novels was beginning to elude his writerly grasp. The final possibility, at least, would now appear to have been confirmed in spades.
"Wallace was one of the ones who made it." That's how J put it yesterday as we were trying to pin down why the news of his death -- and the nature of his death -- packed such a seismic punch. "He was one of the ones who made it," she said, "but apparently, it didn't seem that way to him." It was more assuring and life affirming than we realize, I think, to know that David Foster Wallace was out there. It meant that one of the good ones made it. And yet, having gotten there, he was still struggling with such pain and such despair that it had become unendurable. We have lost an important ally in the fight against the charlatans and the liars. God damn, Dave, we're going to miss you.
He was 46 years old.
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