And so but...

The AP reports that David Foster Wallace died yesterday. A suicide. He was 46.

His stuff wasn’t for everyone, of course, but it sure as hell did it for me. Years after reading them, I still have uncannily clear recollections of his pieces on the Caribbean luxury cruise (A Supposedly fun Thing I’ll Never do Again) and the Illinois State Fair (Getting Away from Pretty Much Already Being Away from it All). The weeks during which I read Infinite Jest were like living in some kind of alternate universe, and for a long time now I’ve anticipated a follow-up to that crazy, two-book-mark novel.

I read the bad news just after I finished watching the Mark Twain documentary. I'm sure I would not have drawn the comparison otherwise, but it's there. Unbelievably clever. Often hilarious. Bitingly satirical. Sometimes dark.

If anything like sentence envy exists, I’ve had it bad for DFW.

This sucks.

David Foster Wallace wasn't my favorite writer, and I didn't quite "get" the metastatic comedy that was the central work in his short list of books, Infinite Jest, but I did read him often and closely enough in other novels, essays, short stories to see real genius, perhaps the stand alone talent of his generation. He was extremely wordy, prolix was his stock-in-trade, but you kept reading him because he was also brilliantly funny; in this sense Wallace was a true heir of to the late William Gaddis, another genius of long , satirical novels like The Recognitions and JR. Writers like these two are that rare combination of intellectual rigor and approachability; their shared virtuosity was in service to humor, a lessening of the thick clutter that gathers in our waking lives.
At his best, David Foster Wallace is an astute chronicler of the often needless (and fruitless) complications characters create for themselves. In the eight stories that make up his collection Oblivion, he outlines the absurdity, sadness, and sheer comic reality of the outer-edge of consciousness. Fashion magazine editorial boards, consumer research companies, and paranoid office situations are among the areas fictionally explored where human activity fractures into dozens of frantic, nervous tangents. Oblivion is a dizzying, daring set of tales - a riveting virtuoso performance.

Ironic, yes, that Wallace's exhausting "maximalist" style, which seems dedicated to fitting everything in sight into a sentence that contains everything else, works best in his shorter pieces: the humor hits harder, the stretches of associations don't have time to die on the vine.
Wallace could make sentences seem like it were a sentient being with lives and curiosities of their own, touching everything their looping syntax and serpentine rhythms could circle their clauses around, and rarely loose the central premise that commenced the writing to begin with; his writing was something akin to a Keith Jarrett piano improvisation where theme and variation became such fully and forcefully units of energy and execution that they soon became full developed bits of art on their own, with their own terms.

American writing has lost a champion.

hi pv,

you and my husband (who used to post here a lot) are kindred spirits at least in this regard. He greeted me when I got home from my last day of summer quarter classes last night with this sad news. Infinite Jest is one of his all-time favorite books and has been on my agenda ever since he and i met (here) but, alas, like so many books, hasn't turned from wish to history yet.

It's the kind of wrenching loss - and i can only imagine to his students at Pomona - to lose a mentor like this - after my first thought going of course to the horror for his wife - that makes me thirst to know some kind of explanation, wishing - to make it more "explained" than much of life ever is - like maybe he'd just gotten some terminal illness diagnosis... Alas, that's not usually the reason... Especially given that i'm now making the move into therapy, it strikes hard to know of someone who was (presumably) failed somehow to find relief from something unbearable ...

I do believe that suicide happens (not always but often) in the ultimate of existential crises - feeling like it is the last and only "control" one has when pummeled by feeling no ability to control one's life in any other way ...

I always think in such moments of a line I learned decades ago of Jorge Luis Borges -- never have seen the original, in Spanish, but a rough translation from French - the only language i ever heard it in - would be "I don't know myself - I don't even know the hour of my death." The one control, i think, for one who feels every other thing they feel they've tried and failed to control in their lives (sometimes alas trying to control things - like other people - which are not theirs to control in the first place - sometimes feeling unable to control themselves either) is precisely the one that Borges noted is a key piece of our lack of self-knowledge, the very one that someone suicidal perceives as the only one available to them, to know the hour of their death and to "create" it - when they feel they can't create anything else.

Very very sad. It does suck. That any life gets to such a point. Most especially poignant when it's either a life we know directly (one friend of mine jumped from her 3rd floor 20 years ago in London) or one we "know" from their artistry and who we want to hold aloft in our mind's eye as talented and wise and therefore would - we wish - not feel such angst, such controllessness that they would only have this one answer left.

when i started that post, i thought to ask and forgot: what did you refer to as "the" Mark Twain biography? I see there's one by Burns from 2001. Is that what you meant? I haven't seen it. For me, Twain came alive (well, even more than just reading him) through Hal Holbrook's one-man show of Twain, geez, 20 years ago or more, i think - i saw it live but don't even recall where ... and then i think they put it on PBS later... It was terrific.

I assume you teach some Twain? Jr English? Is Jr English still American literature year? I used to teach that back about 4 lifetimes ago. Alas, one of my most chilling memories from teaching comes from Huck Finn discussions in class which, one day in a non-academic-track level Jr Eng class, a student took the occasion to advocate that all blacks (this was 1970 or 71) should go back to Africa. I have no recall of how i dealt with it exactly. What i also recall though is that it was that same student who i later discovered was the culprit who sold LSD laced with strychnine to another student in that same class and who wound up in a psych ward because of what it did to him. Of all my students - 150 a year or so, he's the one guy i think of as 'bad apple' (despite wishing not to put any kid in that barrel) ... and he evokes those two memories in particular. Curious how that now links him to thoughts of Mark Twain.

and weird (coincidence) that i managed to wind this topic around to juniors in high school. I just noticed/realized, that the year David Foster Wallace was born, I was a junior in high school. Awful when younger folks pass first.

the last line of which made me kind of spookily think about what i wrote above about control... I wouldn't have thought to use the expression "hosed"...


AN APPRECIATION
David Foster Wallace: Idealistic skeptic

David Foster Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in "The Broom of the System," his 1987 debut novel; "Girl With Curious Hair," a 1989 collection of short stories; and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments" (1997). The writer was found dead Friday night in Claremont, reportedly a suicide. He was 46.
His insightful, energetic writing helped transform American fiction in the 1980s.

By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 15, 2008
LA Times

I didn't know David Foster Wallace all that well. We met a couple of times, and once, I interviewed him onstage at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills. I asked him on a few occasions if he'd review for the paper, but he said he'd had a bad experience and had sworn off reviewing for good. We shared a literary agent.

In the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election, we spent an hour or so on the phone one afternoon discussing politics, which he followed with the rabid fascination of someone who, despite all better judgment, believed the process mattered, that somehow, somewhere, there was a candidate who might see us through.

I never got a chance to discuss the current presidential race with Wallace; no one did. That's our loss, for Wallace, who reportedly hanged himself Friday night at age 46, was an astute observer, sharp and clear-eyed, idealistic and skeptical all at once.

His 2000 Rolling Stone profile of John McCain -- reissued in June as the slim, stand-alone volume "McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express With John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope" -- offers a vivid example of this perspective. Wallace sees the campaign mechanism for what it is while still recognizing something fundamentally different, real even, about the candidate, who eight years ago was in some sense the Barack Obama of his time. Here we have a hallmark of Wallace's writing, his unwillingness to take anything at face value, the penetrating focus of his thought.


An auspicious debut

Wallace emerged out of nowhere with the publication of his first novel, "The Broom of the System," in 1987. He was 25, a graduate of Amherst and the master of fine arts program at the University of Arizona, and along with a handful of other then-emerging writers (William T. Vollmann, Jonathan Franzen), he helped transform American fiction in a fundamental way.

The 1980s, after all, was the era of "Dirty Realism," of small-bore, naturalistic stories in the style of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. For such writers, literature was essentially domestic, but Wallace blew that approach away. Exuberant, picaresque, cynical but also heartfelt, "The Broom of the System" hit the literary circulation system like a 450-page burst of amphetamine.

It wasn't a perfect book; like much of Wallace's early fiction, it wore its inspirations -- especially that of Thomas Pynchon -- on its sleeve.

But what "The Broom of the System" did was to offer up a set of possibilities, to remind us that the novel could be expansive, that it was possible to push the boundaries, to create a larger social landscape in fiction, that it wasn't wrong to be ambitious, to use literature to get at the unknowable heart of the world.

This was a promise Wallace would bring to fruition with the 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," which at 1,079 pages, including 100 pages of footnotes, was a clear bid to create that mythical monster, the Great American Novel, albeit entirely on his own terms. That he may or may not have believed in such a monster only added to the achievement; this was a writer who clearly saw through the elusiveness, the futility, of his own striving and yet continued to strive all the same.

In the wake of "Infinite Jest," the book's gimmicks -- the footnotes and acronyms, the arch tone and irony -- drew the most attention, not least because they were quickly popularized by writers such as Dave Eggers and Steve Almond, who adopted them as an aesthetic stance.

But in fact, it was Wallace's odd sense of double vision that most defined his sensibility. He was a humanist who could not help but see both sides of the story, who imagined himself into the gray middle areas of his writing.

This is the key to his McCain piece, or, for that matter, his best-known work of nonfiction, the novella-length "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," originally published in Harper's as "Shipping Out."

Here, Wallace spent a week on a cruise ship, critiquing the infantilization of the journey, the way that, on board, every wish or demand was instantly fulfilled. Yet even as he pinpointed every idiotic detail, he found himself drawn in.

The power of the piece lies in its explication of that process, although that has less to do with Wallace lowering his defenses than amping up his empathy. However contrived or phony the experience, he felt the longing of his fellow passengers, their need to step outside their own complacency, the complacency of daily life.

The irony, of course, is that the cruise was all about complacency, but for Wallace, irony was not enough. His 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram" makes that idea explicit, taking on the irony-izing effect of television on American culture, while rejecting irony as a literary force.

That's an idea to which he would return in his writing, piercing the absurdities of contemporary culture yet also seeking something deeper, the core connection to which literature aspires. This is the ambiguity, the complexity, that transfigures his best writing, although clearly, these were issues he could not resolve.


Thoughtful advice

In 2005, Wallace gave a commencement address at Kenyon College in Ohio that has been widely circulated in classrooms and on the Internet. In that speech, he told the graduating seniors: "[I]t is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head." Up until this week, I would have said that those were words to live by, but in Wallace's case, perhaps, the opposite was true.

Rather than a repudiation, this just makes his work seem all the more urgent, especially the promise that "learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

david.ulin@latimes.com. David L. Ulin is book editor of The Times.


followed by 241 comments at this count ... if interested, go to:

<link>

Hi Zinya.

It was the Ken Burns documentary on Twain. I have one of those set top Netflix instant watch player thingies. Which are great. But it’s available on Netflix instant watch. All you need is your subscription and a computer. Mark Twain is a 3+ hour video, but worth the time. One thing I had not realized before watching it was the extent of Clemens’ depression. In his 30’s, he considered suicide; says he went as far as holding a pistol to his head.

Yes I do teach Junior English and yes that does mean American Lit at our school. This is my first year to teach the class but I’ve been teaching U.S. history for seven years, covering everything from the origin of the slave trade to the advent of affirmative action, so when we read Huck Finn I won’t be a bit surprised to hear comments like the one you recall from thirty years ago. If I do, it will be uttered by the offspring of the generation of kids you taught thirty years ago. It’s amazing how these kids can be so empathetic one minute, yet almost immediately fall back on learned prejudices the next, with no recognition of the contradiction.

Ted, that’s a great description of DFW’s style. I’ve read quite a few recollections and tributes today, and yours is best.

This part of what you wrote is especially true: Wallace could make sentences seem like it were a sentient being with lives and curiosities of their own, touching everything their looping syntax and serpentine rhythms could circle their clauses around, and rarely loose the central premise that commenced the writing to begin with.

By the way, I found video of DFW reading from the two pieces I mentioned above.

<link>

your comment about Twain/Clemens (who surely would have won a MacArthur Genius grant in his day had they existed... made me think of the first of these 3 comments in particular on the LAT comment-tributes 'blog' that i found interesting:

192. So many people asking "Why." We live in a climate of anti-intellectualism, anti-"elitism." We live in a culture that celebrates common-ness and stupidity as being "real" and therefore admirable. A better question than "Why did he do it?" might be "How can the geniuses endure...how can they bear it?"
Submitted by: cyberianexile
9:09 PM PDT, September 13, 2008

185. As a Pomona College professor of about the same age as DFW I have always measured his huge accomplishments against my very modest ones, and wondered what it took to have the kind of drive, insight and talent that he did. A very sad day, and what Gary Kates said in the article was not just him saying something nice, every one of my students who was lucky enough to get into his class said it was their best experience at Pomona College. One might have thought that someone that famous might not give much time to students, but he had a reputation for spending huge amounts of time on each individual student. Pomona College will miss him.
Submitted by: dc money
9:29 PM PDT, September 13, 2008

188. why why why why...What came to mind next was this quote from Ray Bradbury: "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
Submitted by: duane unkefer
9:14 PM PDT, September 13, 2008


And, meanwhile (z again), thanks for the link in your reply to Ted. I was glad to see him "live" performing his texts ...

The SALON Interview
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
By Laura Miller
Illustration by Harry Aung

March 8, 1996

David Foster Wallace's low-key, bookish appearance flatly contradicts the unshaven, bandanna-capped image advanced by his publicity photos. But then, even a hipster novelist would have to be a serious, disciplined writer to produce a 1,079-page book in three years. "Infinite Jest," Wallace's mammoth second novel, juxtaposes life in an elite tennis academy with the struggles of the residents of a nearby halfway house, all against a near-future background in which the U.S., Canada and Mexico have merged, Northern New England has become a vast toxic waste dump and everything from private automobiles to the very years themselves are sponsored by corporate advertisers. Slangy, ambitious and occasionally over-enamored with the prodigious intellect of its author, "Infinite Jest" nevertheless has enough solid emotional ballast to keep it from capsizing. And there's something rare and exhilarating about a contemporary author who aims to capture the spirit of his age.

The 34-year-old Wallace, who teaches at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal and exhibits the careful modesty of a recovering smart aleck, discussed American life on the verge of the millennium, the pervasive influence of pop culture, the role of fiction writers in an entertainment-saturated society, teaching literature to freshmen and his own maddening, inspired creation during a recent reading tour for "Infinite Jest."

What were you intending to do when you started this book?

I wanted to do something sad. I'd done some funny stuff and some heavy, intellectual stuff, but I'd never done anything sad. And I wanted it not to have a single main character. The other banality would be: I wanted to do something real American, about what it's like to live in America around the millennium.

And what is that like?

There's something particularly sad about it, something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whether it's unique to our generation I really don't know.

Not much of the press about "Infinite Jest" addresses the role that Alcoholics Anonymous plays in the story. How does that connect with your overall theme?

The sadness that the book is about, and that I was going through, was a real American type of sadness. I was white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated, had had way more career success than I could have legitimately hoped for and was sort of adrift. A lot of my friends were the same way. Some of them were deeply into drugs, others were unbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night. You could see it played out in 20 different ways, but it's the same thing.

Some of my friends got into AA. I didn't start out wanting to write a lot of AA stuff, but I knew I wanted to do drug addicts and I knew I wanted to have a halfway house. I went to a couple of meetings with these guys and thought that it was tremendously powerful. That part of the book is supposed to be living enough to be realistic, but it's also supposed to stand for a response to lostness and what you do when the things you thought were going to make you OK, don't. The bottoming out with drugs and the AA response to that was the starkest thing that I could find to talk about that.

I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values. Probably the AA model isn't the only way to do it, but it seems to me to be one of the more vigorous.

The characters have to struggle with the fact that the AA system is teaching them fairly deep things through these seemingly simplistic clichés.

It's hard for the ones with some education, which, to be mercenary, is who this book is targeted at. I mean this is caviar for the general literary fiction reader. For me there was a real repulsion at the beginning. "One Day at a Time," right? I'm thinking 1977, Norman Lear, starring Bonnie Franklin. Show me the needlepointed sampler this is written on. But apparently part of addiction is that you need the substance so bad that when they take it away from you, you want to die. And it's so awful that the only way to deal with it is to build a wall at midnight and not look over it. Something as banal and reductive as "One Day at a Time" enabled these people to walk through hell, which from what I could see the first six months of detox is. That struck me.

It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that's gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like "It's really important not to lie." OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don't feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can't trust you. I feel that I'm in pain, I'm nervous, I'm lonely and I can't figure out why. Then I realize, "Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie." The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel.

Are you trying to find similar meanings in the pop culture material you use? That sort of thing can be seen as merely clever, or shallow.

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water a 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in.

What's it like to be a young fiction writer today, in terms of getting started, building a career and so on?

Personally, I think it's a really neat time. I've got friends who disagree. Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.

If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you're writing for other writers, so you don't worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you're communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way -- essentially television on the page -- that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.

What's weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature's current marginalization is the reader's fault. The project that's worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it's also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.

Part of it has to do with living in an era when there's so much entertainment available, genuine entertainment, and figuring out how fiction is going to stake out its territory in that sort of era. You can try to confront what it is that makes fiction magical in a way that other kinds of art and entertainment aren't. And to figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed by pop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culture machine. It's unbelievably difficult and confusing and scary, but it's neat. There's so much mass commercial entertainment that's so good and so slick, this is something that I don't think any other generation has confronted. That's what it's like to be a writer now. I think it's the best time to be alive ever and it's probably the best time to be a writer. I'm not sure it's the easiest time.

What do you think is uniquely magical about fiction?

Oh, Lordy, that could take a whole day! Well, the first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don't know what you're thinking or what it's like inside you and you don't know what it's like inside me. In fiction I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way. But that's just the first level, because the idea of mental or emotional intimacy with a character is a delusion or a contrivance that's set up through art by the writer. There's another level that a piece of fiction is a conversation. There's a relationship set up between the reader and the writer that's very strange and very complicated and hard to talk about. A really great piece of fiction for me may or may not take me away and make me forget that I'm sitting in a chair. There's real commercial stuff can do that, and a riveting plot can do that, but it doesn't make me feel less lonely.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone -- intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

Who are the writers who do this for you?

Here's the hard thing about talking about that: I don't mean to say my work is as good as theirs. I'm talking about stars you steer by.

Understood.

OK. Historically the stuff that's sort of rung my cherries: Socrates' funeral oration, the poetry of John Donne, the poetry of Richard Crashaw, every once in a while Shakespeare, although not all that often, Keats' shorter stuff, Schopenhauer, Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy" and "Discourse on Method," Kant's "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic," although the translations are all terrible, William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience," Wittgenstein's "Tractatus," Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Hemingway -- particularly the ital stuff in "In Our Time," where you just go oomph!, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, A.S. Byatt, Cynthia Ozick -- the stories, especially one called "Levitations," about 25 percent of the time Pynchon. Donald Barthelme, especially a story called "The Balloon," which is the first story I ever read that made me want to be a writer, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver's best stuff -- the really famous stuff. Steinbeck when he's not beating his drum, 35 percent of Stephen Crane, "Moby-Dick," "The Great Gatsby."

And, my God, there's poetry. Probably Phillip Larkin more than anyone else, Louise Gl&uumlck, Auden.

What about colleagues?

There's the whole "great white male" deal. I think there are about five of us under 40 who are white and over 6 feet and wear glasses. There's Richard Powers who lives only about 45 minutes away from me and who I've met all of once. William Vollman, Jonathan Franzen, Donald Antrim, Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody. The person I'm highest on right now is George Saunders, whose book "Civilwarland in Bad Decline" just came out, and is well worth a great deal of attention. A.M. Homes: her longer stuff I don't think is perfect, but every few pages there's something that just doubles you over. Kathryn Harrison, Mary Karr, who's best known for "The Liar's Club" but is also a poet and I think the best female poet under 50. A woman named Cris Mazza. Rikki Ducornet, Carole Maso. Carole Maso's "Ava" is just -- a friend of mine read it and said it gave him an erection of the heart.

Tell me about your teaching.

I was hired to teach creative writing, which I don't like to teach.

There's two weeks of stuff you can teach someone who hasn't written 50 things yet and is still kind of learning. Then it becomes more a matter of managing various people's subjective impressions about how to tell the truth vs. obliterating someone's ego.

I like to teach freshman lit because ISB gets a lot of rural students who aren't very well educated and don't like to read. They've grown up thinking that literature means dry, irrelevant, unfun stuff, like cod liver oil. Getting to show them some more contemporary stuff -- the one we always do the second week is a story called "A Real Doll," by A.M. Homes, from "The Safety of Objects," about a boy's affair with a Barbie doll. It's very smart, but on the surface, it's very twisted and sick and riveting and real relevant to people who are 18 and five or six years ago were either playing with dolls or being sadistic to their sisters. To watch these kids realize that reading literary stuff is sometimes hard work, but it's sometimes worth it and that reading literary stuff can give you things that you can't get otherwise, to see them wake up to that is extremely cool.

How do you feel about the reaction to the length of your book? Did it just sort of wind up being that long, or do you feel that you're aiming for a particular effect or statement?

I know it's risky because it's part of this equation of making demands on the reader -- which start out financial. The other side of it is publishing houses hate it because they make less money. Paper is so expensive. If the length seems gratuitous, as it did to a very charming Japanese lady from the New York Times, then one arouses ire. And I'm aware of that. The manuscript that I delivered was 1700 manuscript pages, of which close to 500 were cut. So this editor didn't just buy the book and shepherd it. He line-edited it twice. I flew to New York, and all that. If it looks chaotic, good, but everything that's in there is in there on purpose. I'm in a good emotional position to take shit for the length because the length strikes people as gratuitous, then the book just fails. It's not gratuitous because I didn't feel like working on it or making the cuts.

It's a weird book. It doesn't move the way normal books do. It's got a whole bunch of characters. I think it makes at least an in-good-faith attempt to be fun and riveting enough on a page-by-page level so I don't feel like I'm hitting the reader with a mallet, you know, "Hey, here's this really hard impossibly smart thing. Fuck you. See if you can read it." I know books like that and they piss me off.

What made you choose a tennis academy, which mirrors the halfway house in the book?

I wanted to do something with sport and the idea of dedication to a pursuit being kind of like an addiction.

Some of the characters wonder if it's worth it, the competitive obsession.

It's probably like this in anything. I see my students do this with me. You're a young writer. You admire an older writer, and you want to get to where that older writer is. You imagine that all the energy that your envy is putting into it has somehow been transferred to him, that there's a flipside to it, a feeling of being envied that's a good feeling the way that envy is a hard feeling. You can see it as the idea of being in things for some kind of imaginary goal involving prestige rather than for the pursuit itself. It's a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you -- I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out?

Tennis is the one sport I know enough about for it to be beautiful to me, for me to think that it means something. The nice thing about it is that I've got Tennis magazine wanting to do something about me. For me personally it's been great. I may get to hit with the pros some day. It has that advantage.


Join Laura Miller for a conversation about David Foster Wallace in the Books area of Table Talk.

Far Beyond A Literary Footnote By Monica Hesse, Washington Post Staff Writer, September 15, 2008

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.

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.

My father, a colleague of Dave's at Illinois State University's English department, knew him better. They team-taught courses and co-directed theses. Sometimes they watched "The X-Files." Dave came over for dinner occasionally or attended faculty picnics. He once mentioned that if his television began to distract him during the course of a writing project, he would throw it out. That seemed very eccentric.

When my dad married my stepmother, they asked several writer friends to perform readings at the ceremony. Most composed poems for the occasion; Dave selected not a passage from his own work, but 1 Corinthians 13:4-8.

The personal and the public David Foster Wallaces were very different. He loved dogs, humanly and with abandon. Rumor had it that he would not accept a position at Claremont College, where he was teaching when he died, until he knew that his mutts would have safe transport to California.

He was modest. Whenever someone would pay him a writerly compliment, he would respond with a complex gesture, pretending to feed himself with one hand while wiping his rear with the other. Loosely translated, it meant: "Don't congratulate me. It contaminates the work."

Many people who knew him in Normal had no idea that he was a big deal. When "Infinite Jest," his four-pound masterpiece, was released in 1996, the local Barnes & Noble reserved for his book signing the same tiny corner that they reserved for carolers from the local high school.

In 1999, I left for college in a big city on the East Coast. By then, Dave's unique writing style had launched a swarm of aspirational copycats, and he had become the author whom every hipsterish student liked to cite as a favorite. Whether he actually was, or whether it just sounded impressive, was never clear.

So on arriving at school, I learned that most of my fellow English majors had a much better understanding of what David Foster Wallace meant to society than I did. They had read not only "Jest," but also "The Girl With Curious Hair," "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and any number of the short stories Dave published in magazines from Harper's to Gourmet.

My friends dissected his sentences, praised his footnotes and compared him to Thomas Pynchon. They assumed him to be a deeply sardonic and jaded person, which I thought was funny.

In the end, neither those who knew him personally nor those who worshiped him artistically can explain why his life ended how it did.

And in the end, the best commentary comes not from fans, but from Dave himself. In a 1996 essay titled "Shipping Out," he discusses learning that a teenager committed suicide on a cruise ship:

"Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair."{+1}

{+1} Oh, Dave, we will miss you.