An appreciation for David Foster Wallace
By Marjorie Kehe | 09.15.08
Readers around the world are grieving today at the news that David Foster Wallace has died at the age of 46 in an apparent suicide.
Wallace, who also taught English at Pomona College in southern California was a writer of enormous exuberance. He was perhaps best known for his 1996 novel, “Infinite Jest.” In a review in the New York Times when the book first came out, Jay McInerney, wrote of feeling “admiration alloyed with impatience veering toward strained credulity” as he read. The novel, set in the near future in the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment” deals with everything from Qubcois separatists to the assassination of President Limbaugh.
“If Mr. Wallace were less talented, you would be inclined to shoot him – or possibly yourself – somewhere right around page 480 of ‘Infinite Jest.’ ” wrote McInerney. “In fact, you might anyway.”
In the end, however, McInerney concluded, “What makes all this almost plausible, and often pleasurable, is Mr. Wallace’s talent – as a stylist, a satirist and a mimic – as well as his erudition, which ranges from the world of street crime to higher mathematics.”
Wallace’s other works included the nonfiction work “Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity.” This was, exactly what its subtitle states: a history of infinity. Reviewing the book in 2003 for the Monitor, Darren Abrecht praised its “humor, genuine enthusiasm, and technical depth.”
In 2006, Wallace published a collection of essays called “Consider the Lobster.” Here Wallace wrote on everything from “exformation” to pornography to the 2000 presidential campaign of John McCain. Monitor reviewer Peter Grier called the book “oddly fascinating,” adding that, “There’s a lot here, most of it serious, much of it interesting, some of it strange.”
Wallace was said to have suffered from depression for many years. Speaking to The New York Times yesterday, the novelist Jonathan Franzen, who was also a friend of Wallace’s, said, “He was a huge talent, our strongest rhetorical writer. He was also as sweet a person as I’ve ever known and as tormented a person as I’ve ever known.”
Comments
2. joe ch | 09.15.08
This article isn’t much of an appreciation! Why not go to a writer who loves Wallace’s work? The New York Times did the same thing, publishing a lukewarm article of back-handed compliments. Anyway, this is just the sort of ambivalence one expects in response to a radically innovative writer or thinker. Jacques Derrida, in the field of philosophy, got the same kind of half-pissy obituaries from U.S. newspapers. When someone dies, there is nothing wrong with being gracious, is there?
3. Jim Derk | 09.15.08
DFW is gone and I am sad. He is the first writer who made me laugh so hard that I actually wet myself (his experiences on a cruise ship trying to shoot skeet.)
He was my age. He grew up in Illinois like me. He was a writer, like me. He was just better at all of it. And now, darn it, he’s gone.
I will miss him raising the bar, how I gave up at page 140 of “Infinite Jest” and how how his footnotes made me smile.
Darn it. Darn it.
I wanted more.
4. Brenda P. | 09.15.08
I absolutely agree with Joe..this was a **** poor half *** attempt for a send off. DFW was a great writer and thinker, one of the best of our time. If this is all that’s to be said then say nothing. Half-hearted attempts are useless and sad. Why bother?
DFW will be missed by many. I for one am very sad he is gone. The world is losing one of the all time greats.
6. Susan Bass | 09.16.08
DFW is my favorite contemporary author, hands down. I did get through “Infinite Jest,” and though angered by his refusal to end it, hardly a week has passed in which I haven’t thought of it for one reason or another. My introduction to him came through reading his great Harpers essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll never do Again.” I remember thinking that I had really found a peer in him. I will miss him dearly. To know there is nothing forthcoming, no election essays or forthcoming oddball trips deeply saddens me.
Susan Bass, Hamden CT
8. Marc Regan | 09.17.08
Wow. Hearing this sad, sad news knocked the breath from me, and now two days later I’m still struggling with each new inhalation. Today, when it seems our collective attention is rubber-necking toward the “foolishly-famous,” we need great thinkers, and we’ve lost one of the best. Such thinkers and artists are seldom understood–maybe not even by themselves. We needed this man, whether we knew it or not, and he will be missed–profoundly.
9. Marilyn | 09.19.08
I’d seriously never heard of him before, having graduated before he’d filtered down to my English department. Through a tribute by Mark Morford, I read both his commencement address and “Shipping Out.” The address inspired me; the cruise review made me laugh out loud–it’s hard to get me to do that. I’m sorry to learn about him this way but not sorry to have “discovered” him. It’s very, very sad.
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1. Shawn Delaney | 09.15.08
I was startled to turn the page of my Sunday Times and see David’s picture in the obituaries column. While his style and fiction content were not always my cup of tea, there was no denying the talent and exuberance he brought to the written word. My thoughts and prayers go out to his wife. RIP.