One of my favorite novelists, David Foster Wallace, hanged himself on Friday night. It just hit the news in a major way today.
Many of you have never heard of David Foster Wallace, beyond perhaps being one of the Authors of the Day in my sophomore class if you are a former student, or perhaps hearing about John Krasinski's film adaptation of Brief Interviews of Hideous Men. There are several reasons why you should know who this writer was (was sounds so odd, since I was planning to talk about him in a very present-tense sort of way next week to the sophys) and all of them have to do with the brilliance of his work. A part-time writing professor and full-time writer, Wallace exemplified a writing style that to me was simultaneously seductive and elucidating--very, very complicated (more footnotes/endnotes than T.S. Eliot) yet often insightful and very insouciant.
He was 46 years old.
Writing is a lonely profession, even in this age of instant publication and constant interaction with ones readership. (Blogging is a microcosmic adaptation of this relatively new phenomenon.) Wallace certainly had demons--and wrote about them--but I somehow thought that he might be one who could escape those demons enough for a long life of publication and prosperity. Each year, one of my students asks, "Are all writers screwed up?" or some variation on that theme--after you hear about the drug addicts, philanderers, mental patients, and suicides, it does beg the question. Are writers crazy, or do more crazy people write? And how do you mourn for someone you never met, but for whom you felt intimate knowledge due to reading the prose he allowed the public to see?
If you want to dip your toe into the Wallace trough without killing your brain, try A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a collection of essays he wrote for Harper's. They sent him on a cruise to check out the fun; in typical fashion, he renamed the ship he was on (The Zenith) to something more appropriate to his mood (The Nadir). If you are feeling more ambitious, try The Broom of the System, and if you are feeling positively masochistic, try Infinite Jest, his 1996 masterwork that logs in at over 1,500 pages of complicated hilarity. Somehow it sold well.
I really liked his work, and I'm saddened that those demons brought him down. You never know what's going on in someone else's head--even if that someone repeatedly released information from that head into the mainstream.
And on a completely trivial note, now the sophys will be further convinced that writing is not a profession for the sane.
