Writer Mapped the Mythic and the Mundane

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/books/15kaku.html

An Appraisal
Writer Mapped the Mythic and the Mundane
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
September 14, 2008

David Foster Wallace used his prodigious gifts as a writer — his manic, exuberant prose; his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness — to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad “deep and meaningless” facets of contemporary life.

A prose magician, Mr. Wallace was capable of writing — in both his fiction and nonfiction — about everything from tennis to politics to lobsters, from the horrors of drug withdrawal to the small terrors of life aboard a luxury cruise ship, with humor and fervor and verve. At his best, he could write funny, write sad, write sardonic and write serious. He could map the infinite and infinitesimal, the mythic and mundane. He could conjure up an absurd future — an America in which herds of feral hamsters roam the land — while conveying the inroads the absurd has already made in a country where old television shows are a national touchstone and asinine advertisements wallpaper our lives. He could make the reader see state fair pigs that are so fat they resemble small Volkswagens; communicate the weirdness of growing up in Tornado Alley, in the mathematically flat Midwest; capture the mood aboard John McCain’s old Straight Talk Express back in 2000.

Mr. Wallace, who died Friday night at his home in Claremont, Calif., an apparent suicide, belonged to a generation of writers who grew up on the work of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Robert Coover, a generation that came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s and took discontinuity for granted. But while his own fiction often showcased his mastery of postmodern pyrotechnics — a cold but glittering arsenal of irony, self-consciousness and clever narrative hijinks — he was also capable of creating profoundly human flesh-and-blood characters with three-dimensional emotional lives. In a kind of aesthetic manifesto, he once wrote that irony and ridicule had become “agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture” and mourned the loss of engagement with deep moral issues that animated the work of the great 19th-century novelists.

For that matter, much of Mr. Wallace’s work, from his gargantuan 1996 novel “Infinite Jest” to his excursions into journalism, felt like outtakes from a continuing debate inside his head, about the state of the world and the role of the writer in it, and the chasm between idealism and cynicism, aspirations and reality. The reader could not help but feel that Mr. Wallace had inhaled the muchness of contemporary America — a place besieged by too much data, too many video images, too many high-decibel sales pitches and disingenuous political ads — and had so many contradictory thoughts about it that he could only expel them in fat, prolix narratives filled with Mobius strip-like digressions, copious footnotes and looping philosophical asides. If this led to self-indulgent books badly in need of editing — “Infinite Jest” clocked in at an unnecessarily long 1,079 pages — it also resulted in some wonderfully powerful writing.

Mr. Wallace could riff ingeniously about jailhouse tattoos, clinical depression, videophonic stress and men’s movement meetings. A review of a memoir by the tennis player Tracy Austin became a meditation on art and athletics and the mastery of one’s craft. A review of a John Updike novel became an essay on how the “brave new individualism and sexual freedom” of the 1960s had devolved into “the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation.”

Like Mr. DeLillo and Salman Rushdie, and like Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith and other younger authors, Mr. Wallace transcended both Philip Rahv’s famous division of writers into “palefaces” (like Henry James and T.S. Eliot, who specialized in heady, cultivated works rich in symbolism and allegory) and “redskins” (like Whitman and Dreiser, who embraced an earthier, more emotional naturalism), and Cyril Connolly’s division of writers into “mandarins” (like Proust, who favored ornate, even byzantine prose) and “vernacular” stylists (like Hemingway, who leaned toward more conversational tropes). An ardent magpie, Mr. Wallace tossed together the literary and the colloquial with hyperventilated glee, using an encyclopedia of styles and techniques to try to capture the cacophony of contemporary America. As a result, his writing could be both brainy and visceral, fecund with ideas and rich with zeitgeisty buzz.

Over the years, he threw off the heavy influence of Mr. Pynchon that was all too apparent in “The Broom of the System” (1987) — which like “The Crying of Lot 49” used Joycean word games and literary parody to recount the story of a woman’s quest for knowledge and identity — to find a more elastic voice of his own in “Infinite Jest.” That novel used three storylines — involving a tortured tennis prodigy, a former Demerol addict and Canadian terrorists who want to get their hands on a movie reputed to be so entertaining it causes anyone who sees it to die of pleasure — to depict a depressing, toxic and completely commercialized post-millennial America. Although that novel suffered from a lack of discipline and a willful repudiation of closure, it showcased Mr. Wallace’s virtuosity and announced his arrival as one of his generation’s preeminent talents.

Two later collections of stories — “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” (1999) and “Oblivion” (2004), which both featured whiny, narcissistic characters — suggested a falling off of ambition and a claustrophobic solipsism of the sort Mr. Wallace himself once decried. But his ventures into nonfiction, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” (1997) and “Consider the Lobster” (2005), grounded his proclivity for meandering, stream of consciousness musings in sharp magazine assignments and reportorial subjects, and they evinced the same sort of weird telling details and philosophical depth of field as his most powerful fiction. They reminded the reader of Mr. Wallace’s copious gifts as a writer and his keen sense of the metastasizing absurdities of life in America at a precarious hinge moment in time.

David Foster Wallace Dies at 46

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2008/09/14/david-foster-wallace-dies-at-age-46/

David Foster Wallace Dies at 46
9/14/08

Infinite Jest author and Rolling Stone contributor David Foster Wallace was found dead in his Claremont, California home Friday night. His wife called police at 9:30 p.m. to report she had discovered Wallace hanged himself. He was 46.

In 2000, Wallace covered John McCain on the campaign trail for Rolling Stone in a piece called “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub: Seven Days in the Life of the Late, Great John McCain.” He also contributed “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s” in October 2001, which describes his personal 9/11 experience in Illinois; that piece is included in the 2005 collection Lobster and Other Essays. Earlier this summer, Wallace published an expanded version of his McCain piece as McCain’s Promise.

Wallace, who was born on February 21, 1962, spent a large part of his childhood in Illinois, where both of his parents worked as professors. After studying English and philosophy at Amherst, Wallace published his first novel, The Broom of the System, in 1987. His footnote-packed 1,079 opus Infinite Jest came out nearly a decade later, but he published short stories and essays in the interim, including 1989’s Girl With the Curious Hair and Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present, a meditation on hip-hop he wrote with Mark Costello. In 1997, he received a MacArthur “Genius Grant” and published the non-fiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

Wallace had taught creative writing at Pomona College for the past six years; he was on leave this semester.

Appreciation: David Foster Wallace 1962-2008

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1841102,00.html

Sunday, Sep. 14, 2008
Appreciation: David Foster Wallace 1962-2008
By Joel Stein

A few weeks ago, I reread the beginning of Infinite Jest, and stupidly cursed right out loud its author, David Foster Wallace, out of jealousy, because I will never write — or even think — like he does in just the first few pages of what is the best novel written since I've been old enough to read. It's a circular 1,079-page book about the impossibility of communication that is so wondrously complex that when I got to meet with its editor, Michael Pietsch, and ask him a basic question about the plot, he couldn't even tell me.

Wallace committed suicide on Friday night, at the age of 46. He might be remembered as the guy who brought footnotes back (his fiction is full of them), or the person who magnified Thomas Pynchon's reader-reaction paranoia into post-modern mega-epic. He did do those things. But Wallace was also the greatest horror novelist ever. In Infinite Jest a corporation-run unified North America of the near-future (dates have been replaced by sponsor names, such as the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar) is being decimated by a videotape so entertaining that people watch it on a loop, mesmerized until they die of dehydration or starvation or lack of sleep. Reading it, you realize how soul-sad lonely you are. And Wallace creates that effect, like Pynchon, while being laugh-out-loud funny.

His was not a cheery worldview, but it was honest. He ate meat but realized, in his essay "Consider the Lobster," that if a crustacean is trying to claw its way out of a pot of boiling water, you are cold-blooded murderer when you eat it. In the 150th anniversary issue of The Atlantic last year, he nihilistically stated an unpopular truth about liberty: The cost of freedom is that you have to occasionally let 3,000 people die in terrorist attacks. His 1999 collection of short stories, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men — which John Krasinki has adapted into a movie to be released later this year — damns his gender as a greedy, cold, oversexed marauders.

Wallace, who won a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1997, was a tennis prodigy and a math whiz (his Amherst philosophy major focused on modal logic, whatever that is). His thoughts sprawled beyond the boundaries that most writers observe into notes and equations, one sentence going on for so many pages even Faulkner would have demanded a period. He seemed curious about everything: he wrote nonfiction articles about food and porn conventions and Dennis Hastert and women's tennis. His Essay for the New York Times' Play Magazine celebrating "Federer as Religious Experience" is a classic of sports writing.

At the book party for Infinite Jest, I sat, for a moment, next to him. He wasn't talking to anyone and seemed pretty uncomfortable for a guy who was having a party thrown for him. Years later, I reviewed his collection of short stories Oblivion, and foolishly, jealously wrote this: "David Foster Wallace writes so beautifully, is so show-offishly smart and understands the intricacies of human emotion so keenly that a reasonable person can only hope he is terribly unhappy. Which, if this collection of short stories is any indication, he is." For a far better, less embittered, summation of this loss, read the soliloquy from Hamlet that gave Wallace's great novel its title. It is Hamlet's meditation on mortality, now tragically appropriate, that begins: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio — a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred my imagination is!"

Writer David Foster Wallace found dead

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-wallace14-2008sep14,0,4713013.story

Writer David Foster Wallace found dead
David Foster Wallace was found dead last night at his home in Claremont. He was 46.
His wife told Claremont police that the novelist and humorist who wrote 'Infinite Jest' hanged himself Friday night. He was 46.
By Claire Noland and Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
September 14, 2008

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the department, said Wallace's wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself.

Wallace, who had taught creative writing at Pomona College since 2002, was on leave this semester.

Times book editor David Ulin was in New York City for a National Book Critics Circle Board meeting Saturday.

"What was a party is now a wake," Ulin said as the news of Wallace's death circulated. "People were speechless and just blown away.

"He was one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years," Ulin said.

"He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late '80s and early 1990s," Ulin said. "And he really restored the notion of the novel as a kind of canvas on which a writer can do anything."

Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in "The Broom of the System," his 1987 debut novel; "Girl With Curious Hair," a 1989 collection of short stories, and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments" (1997). In 1997, he also received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

A year earlier he shot to the top of the literary world with "Infinite Jest," a sprawling, ambitious novel with a nonlinear plot that ran 1,079 pages and had nearly as many footnotes.

Critics marveled at the prodigious talent evident in his imaginative take on a future world, comparing him to Thomas Pynchon and John Irving.

In a 1996 profile in the New York Times Magazine, Frank Bruni wrote, "Wallace is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so maniacally energetic and amused with himself that he often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone."

Other collections of fiction and nonfiction followed, including "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" (1999), "Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity" (2003) and "Oblivion" (2004).

In June, to coincide with this fall's presidential election, he reworked a 2000 essay about Republican candidate John McCain for a paperback published as "McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express With John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope."

Wallace was born Feb. 21, 1962, in Ithaca, N.Y., and raised in Illinois, where his father taught philosophy at the University of Illinois and his mother taught English at a community college.

A talented tennis player as a youngster, Wallace attended Amherst College and majored in philosophy before switching his focus to writing fiction.

He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1985 and turned his senior thesis into the basis for "The Broom of the System."

After earning a master's degree in fine arts from the University of Arizona, Wallace began teaching writing at Illinois State University in Normal in 1993.

In 2002 he was named the first Roy E. Disney professor of creative writing at Pomona College.

Gary Kates, the college's dean, called Wallace's death "an incredible loss."

"He was a fabulous teacher," Kates said Saturday. "He was hands-on with his students. He cared deeply about them. . . . He was a jewel on the faculty, and we deeply appreciated everything he gave to the college."

In addition to his wife, Karen Green, and his parents, Wallace is survived by a sister.

A memorial service is planned at Pomona College.

claire.noland@latimes.com
joel.rubin@latimes.com