David Foster Wallace, RIP
Reported by Edward Champion, confirmed by the LA Times:
This is so sad and senseless. A suicide.
I am stunned. To say that Wallace was a literary hero and that his work had a profound effect on how I write, read, think about the world is an understatement. There was a time in my life before racing, when literature and writing were central, when talking about the oppressiveness of the ironic mode and the purpose of fiction and the merits of hysterical realism all seemed very important, because these were not only questions of literature, but of life and meaning. Wallace was an inescapable, but not unwelcome influence, the young writer who best captured the messy modern world, with its distractions and digressions, all of which required navigating with a sort of conscious uncertainty if one was really ever to experience anything. (And if that all sounds quite jejune, well, I was in my 20s and fresh out of a liberal arts college then.)
Wallace wrote with charm and intelligence on grammar, tennis, talk radio, taking a cruise, irony, infinity, etc. He had po-mo groupies, was adored by grad students, attracted his share of skeptics. The 1,079 page "Infinite Jest" was the dystopian, clever novel that made him famous; he became known for his footnotes (and was parodied for same). He was innovative, playful (with a gift for the absurd), and often hilarious, but never light -- "he was not unfamiliar with the heft of existence." His work still had potential; the best was possibly still ahead.
Horse racing was not a subject that drew Wallace's attention, but he was a former athlete and a sports fan, and he wrote beautifully of what it is about sports that inspires passion in his essay, "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart":
And that brings me, I hope not too casually, to Big Brown, embodying the latter theory completely at Monmouth on Saturday afternoon. Music Note, also, at Belmont.
"Writers. They always break your heart." Not unlike horses.
Posted by JC, Sep 13, 2008 09:35 PM
