With only a few exceptions (inmates at Auschwitz facing certain, imminent, and ignoble death "anyway", e.g.) suicide betrays the killer as a coward.

Wallace apparently cared nothing for his family, especially the wife who found him dead at home.

I say the same about Plath, Woolf, Rothko, etc.

By leaving others to clean up behind them, they tell us "My whole life--including my 'art'--was a sham."

His "brilliance" apparently extended no further than a certain feeling for lobsters about to be boiled.

But his concern for his fellow human beings? Left hanging, I'm afraid.

He lasted longer than you would have with the depression he suffered. Based on your inflated sense of importance you would have killed yourself in a week.

It doesn't seem like you read any of his work. It doesn't seem like you read.

Would liver disease have invalidated his work? Or cancer? Because the organ that went bad was the brain, that's different? Hasn't awareness of mental illness improved? I'm shocked at the lack of understanding here. Really.

I'm so glad I can separate artists and other public figures from their works and appreciate the latter independently. If my enjoyment of Miles Davis or Frank Sinatra depended on my own approval of their every action, for example, I could never listen to them.

I'll admit that there are people so far beyond the pale that I would probably hold their actions against their art...if, for example, Josef Stalin had designed a breathtaking modernist office building for him and his cronies, I'd probably have a hard time looking at it objectively.

But other than mass-murderers and psychopaths, I can mostly put aside the personal failings and unpalatable politics of artists and get something out of their works. David Foster Wallace is hardly the most offensive late American writer, and condemning him as in the original post just seems bizarre to me. Oh well, Richmond's loss, not mine.

Unfortunately, Richmond, I can't express my opinion of your comment until you post a full resume and autobiography. I am incapable of considering your writing or ideas on their own merits. There is a word for people like me. I am an Idiot.

how complete and easy was that. who exactly was the killer here? Wallace? a Killer? is that what suicides are? Killers? the statement seems more in regards to villains who take their own life's rather than face justice for their criminal actions-- but to slam an author who must have had suffered a great depression to commit this act with this lackadaisical judgment for being so untidy in his death is just offensive. there are other ways of saying "damn that book's too long to read" than this sad excuse.

How unfortunate that in such a supposedly 'enlightened' era, with vast amounts of information and data at our very fingertips, stone-age perspectives on mental illness still persist.

If you want to deny him the kind of slavish post morterm hero-worship given to Kurt Cobain, you'll get no complaint from me. But to dismiss his suicidal depression as some kind of character flaw is mean-spirited and at least four different kinds of stupid.

Asshole.

I don't know enough about you to speak to your character traits, but I do think, based on your sourpuss dismissal here, that you're more than a little arrogant to assume that you have an inside track on what someone else is struggling with. Whatever was going on in Wallace's mind was certainly bad enough to make him decide to take his own life , the most extreme act a fellow citizen can take, and the gravity of the act certainly isn't cowardly no matter how offended you are. You have a naive view of what artists and their work are supposed to be or do in our society, and seem rather offended that any artists who displays a human failing is an amoral fraud. This is the kind of nitwit reductionism one would expect from Republicans eager to restart the Culture Wars.

His "brilliance" apparently extended no further than a certain feeling for lobsters about to be boiled.

Your "insight" into David Foster Wallace apparently extends no further than having read some reviews of his books or gleanings from a few blogs . I confess that I have very serious doubts that you've anything by him and made this post to get yourself noticed. Congratulations, you've succeeded, and now more people on The Fray think you're a sensation seeking jerk.

AH. lookie here.

A short (incomplete) list of authors that, according to the OP, are just... I dunno... completely NOT WORTH READING!!!

<link>

A thousand NOs to you - DFW was depressed. This is a medical condition. Autopsies of depressed people show very low levels of certain chemicals in the brain. It is very sad, but quite apart from his writing. Don't blame the victim. Depression is a debilitating disease. And if you don't think so, sorry for your ignorance.

Oh, please.

Depression isn't a death sentence. Not everyone who's depressed kills herself. Stop making it sound like ovarian cancer.

Regardless of his clinical diagnosis, DFW was a self-involved boob who has selfishly left his family a terrible mess. We don't need to "understand" him.

Modern art may perhaps be judged w/o reference to the artist's life. Post-modern art cannot be. Indeed, that's 1/2 of what being post-modern is: consider the artist, not just the work.

DFW says: read my books, read "me".

He comes to suicide. Thus, his books do, too.

Cry over someone else.

Maybe for his wife...

I read most of DFW's stuff. It didn't do anything for me when he was alive. It does even less now that he offed himself. Save your grad student ire for the classroom.

Oh, and people. I'm judging DFW's work not him. I said his suicide invalidates his work. As a life, very sad. As work, now more than pointless.

And really, the people defending depression: get on your f-ing meds. I know what it's like. Millions of people live with it.

If you've read most of Wallace's books and experienced something no pleasure from the experience, then you're exactly the sort of person who'd refuse to take a sharp stone from his stone lest he be robbed of something to talk about.

Your familiarity with the writing is questionable, although yoiu have established that you're a crank in a plain brown wrapper.