David Foster Wallace

I was deeply saddened several months ago when I heard the news that David Foster Wallace committed suicide. This is not something I ever imagined happening. In fact, I always assumed that I'd be reading new non-fiction from Wallace for the next 3 to 4 decades, assumed he'd be my generation's John Updike, responsible for a life-long freakish literary output, producing new work that I was forever attempting to measure up to, work that I would continue to learn from and build a dialogue with.

I was never a huge fan of his fiction. I never read Infinite Jest. I'm one of those people who felt much of his fiction was overwritten and finally not even really that pleasurable. But the non-fiction is phenomenal. It's like nothing I've ever read. The essays are super-funny, super-smart and I can't think of one where I wasn't disappointed that it had come to an end. I can't say that I'm disappointed exactly that Wallace decided to take his own life - that's not the right word and he obviously had his reasons - but his death is definitely a genuine cultural loss.

Wallace's suicide came mere weeks prior to the full scale economic meltdown on Wall Street and I can't help but think that his death was the "canary in the coal mine" of the coming socio-economic sea-change. What made much of his work so powerful was his ability to not only ask the Big Questions of his day but (perhaps more importantly) to be able to identify what those Big Questions are. It's easy to answer the previous generation's Big Questions but another thing entirely to be able to locate and enunciate the meaningful issues of the day.

Here's an excerpt from a Terry Gross NPR interview with Wallace in 1997 in which he talks about (among other things) the difficulty of representing true, heartfelt emotion in what has become a largely ironic and cynical culture:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94626723

And here's Wallace's famous 1996 smackdown of Mark Leyner on the Charlie Rose Show:

Wallace, Franzen and Leyner were called on to discuss the future of literature in the digital age and instead of a gentlemanly round-table we get Wallace body-checking Leyner, essentially ending Leyner's career. I mean, I wonder what Leyner's career would have looked like had he not been intellectually mauled on national television by one of his smarter, more ambitious, more highly regarded peers? Or maybe he would have petered out on his own? What was Franzen thinking? Do you think he saw what Wallace did to Leyner and decided to play it close to the chest with short answers, silence and awkward glances? We'll never know. It's one of the great minor literary mysteries of the 1990's. Personally, I think Leyner got a bit of a bad rap by Wallace in this video who, in hindsight, was kind of a jerk. In any case, whatever happened to the future of post-modern fiction?