Farewell, David Foster Wallace
The literary world was hit with the shocking news this weekend of the passing of a writer of rare brilliance. Widely respected author David Foster Wallace apparently committed suicide at his home in Claremont, California, on Friday night. For details, see the Jacket Copy blog post by Carolyn Kellogg and the Los Angeles Times obituary, where you can also join the discussion and share your thoughts.
Though best known for his weighty (literally –- it’s 1,079 pages), footnote-filled and famously perplexing novel “Infinite Jest,” Wallace also dipped his toes in the travel writing world. In 1996, for Harper’s magazine, he wrote the article “Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise,” [paid subscription required to read] which World Hum called “one of modern travel writing’s sharpest and funniest stories.”
For example, here’s the intro paragraph: “I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.”
Update 9/15 11:35 a.m.: Harper’s has opened their D.F.W. archives, “in memoriam.” The PDF’s are a bit slow to download, so be selective and kind to your fellow Net surfers.
Editor’s note: To read more online, search inside the book on Amazon.com for excerpts of the essay, which was re-titled and expanded for the eponymous anthology “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” There’s no preview available on Google Books, either, so you’ll have to look for it at your local bookstore, or a library.
As evidenced by his other works, Wallace’s movements didn’t stop at the high seas. His nonfiction collection “Consider the Lobster and Other Essays” included his exploration of a lobster festival in Maine, and his account accompanying Sen. John McCain on the road during his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. See the website of his alma mater, Amherst College, for a list of other books by Wallace.
Rest in peace, David Foster Wallace. I admit that I didn’t make it to the end of “Infinite Jest,” but the attempt sure was an adventure.
– Susan Derby, Special to the Los Angeles Times
Editor’s note: Here are some more links to David Foster Wallace interviews and remembrances.
> L.A. Times Book Editor David L. Ulin writes an appreciation of the author.
> LAT’s Web Scout David Sarno curates the best of D.F.W. on YouTube, including one clip of D.F.W. in Italy in 2006, with several more clips in the same series here.
> Charlie Rose interview (May 17, 1996): “A conversation about the future of fiction in the information age with David Foster Wallace, author of ‘Jest’; Jonathan Franzen, author of ‘Strong Motion’; and Mark Leyner, author of ‘Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog.’ ”
> Charlie Rose interview (March 27, 1997): “Author David Foster Wallace talks about his collection of essays, ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ ”
> The unofficial D.F.W. fan site Infinite Jest has a good collection of links, “reviews, articles, & miscellany.”
> The Howling Fantods fan site has tracked D.F.W.’s literary movements since 1997, and has a roundup of obits.
If so inclined, share your favorite David Foster Wallace passage, memory or miscellany below.
[Photo: Marion Ettlinger]
12 Comments on “Farewell, David Foster Wallace”
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September 14th, 2008 at 1:00 am
What a waste of a beautiful talent. “The Depressed Person” nails it.
September 14th, 2008 at 1:58 am
Weak. Coward’s way out. Loser.
September 14th, 2008 at 3:56 am
He will be missed. This is a very sad day
September 14th, 2008 at 8:35 am
I am gutted by his death. The world just became a less intelligible place. That he meant so much to so many people - his family, friends, colleagues and students, obviously - but also his readers, many of whom seem to connect with his writing in a way that sends them rushing toward community, others with whom to share the revelation of his way of seeing the world and so deepen their connection to the world by drawing them out of self and toward others (literally saving so many with his writing, in certain cases) makes it particularly unbearable to think of him suffering in the kind of lonely despair that drives a person to take his own life.
“The boy, who did everything well and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more *hidden* boy, toward the wraith’s life’s end; and no one else in the wraith and the boy’s nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful and marvelous boy was disappearing, right before their eyes. They looked but did not see his invisibility.” (p. 838, _Infinite Jest_)
“Death Is Not the End” for David Foster Wallace, perhaps, in his literary legacy, but for Dave, the man who was infinitely more complex, wondrous and feeling and than his intricate and emotionally gamut-running narratives, is gone. I will miss him terribly. I hope he rests, now, peacefully.
Dave, we heard you; we saw you. We loved you.
September 14th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Very sad. He will be remembered. For me he is linked to the 9/11 tragedy as his class was cancelled on that day. He was my professor for creative writing. I can add another sad day to the month of September. May he Rest in Peace.
September 14th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Calling someone who feels so lost and desperate that the only answer he can see is to take himself off the planet “a loser” is grossly stupid and offensive. He certainly was no loser. A loser is someone who has no compassion and speaks like a macho gung-ho dick when it comes to the vulnerability of others.
September 14th, 2008 at 9:32 am
a man standing on a burning building
September 14th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Bil, why would one leave such a comment about a stranger? You know nothing about Wallace or, clearly, empathy for one in pain. Go jump in a blender.
“It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of bleak miracle to me that people could actually care about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end.” -David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
September 14th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
David Foster Wallace’s commencement address at Kenyon College on May 5th, 2005 is the single most perceptive, empathetic and thoughtful piece on the human condition that I have ever read. As I understand it, humans view reality and base opinions on reality from vastly different prisms and understandably many (most actually) do not view reality nor base opinions on reality in a way that David did. Doesn’t make anyone a better or worse person than anyone else. Nor is it a bad or good thing it is just a- “thing”. But for those whose prism is similar to David’s, the Kenyon College piece offers hope and brings us just a that much closer to whatever it is we are seeking. For me it brings me closer in that the collection of ideas within that speech comes closer to explaining the meaning of life than anything I have previously been presented. And for that, I am grateful beyond words. For those whose prism is different from David’s, I hope that you have found or will find soon your “Kenyon College Speech”. David was right, “this is water”. David, I hope you can finally daydream. You deserve it.
September 14th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
The Kenyon speech should be making the e-mail rounds as the exact opposite of the crappy, moralizing forwards that abound on the internet.
While it’s easy to be angry at his choice, I’m more just sad that the person who said this:
http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html
won’t be writing anything more like it. That’s capital-T truth.
September 14th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
“Weak. Coward’s way out. Loser.”
That’s a pretty shallow generalization.
I concur that to kill yourself as a SOLUTION to life’s problems is definitely cowardly, but it takes courage to kill yourself as an act of rejection of the fundamental acts of humanity. Was Socrates a coward when he drank hemlock?
We can only speculate as to why Mr. Wallace decided to end his life, but keep in mind that he had a lot going for him. A man as erudite and talented as him does not simply make that sort of decision out of weakness.
September 16th, 2008 at 11:40 am
I have to address this: would Wallace consider his suicide to be Lynchian?
All kidding aside, I am greatly saddened by the death of one of my favorite writers of all time. And I promise to finally finish Infinite Jest in his honor. Cheers.