A Supposedly Tedious Writer I Enjoyed Reading

I have a friend who for a couple of years obsessively recommended I read the book Infinite Jest. About a year and a half ago, I took her advice (thanks, Meghan). The book was maddening in every way. It was so huge (1000 pages and another hundred pages of footnotes) I developed a problem in my wrist from holding it up while reading it in bed. For almost 600 pages it appeared to have no plot. It was incredibly wordy, and seemed at times to be manically obsessed with odd issues, characters, situations. Occasionally I felt the author hadn't let me in on the joke. More than once I put the book down in disgust, vowing to let my wrist heal and forget the weirdness-- it wasn't a book, it was a lifestyle. Always, within a couple of days, I'd be back reading.

I couldn't tear myself away from the descriptions of the denizens of a halfway house for alcohol and drug abusers, the students at a tennis academy run by a bizarre family, the colorful junkies-- one of whom was a transvestite who lived in the mens room of a bus station-- or the insular group of Canadian separatists bent on mayhem and the fall of the government, nor the society of people with unspeakably disfigured faces who wore veils everywhere. This writer could get into the heads of the most strange people imaginable, and make their characters live.

When I had finally slogged through all 1,100 or so pages, and did my best on the footnotes, I felt satisfied and inspired. Infinite Jest is a huge, ambitious novel, and finishing reading it felt like I had accomplished something large. And I mean large like building a dam across the Colorado River, or curing cancer.

Three nights ago, in Claremont, CA, the author of Infinite Jest, David Forster Wallace, was found dead in his home. He had hanged himself. I remember while reading him, thinking there was an unmistakable feeling of manic energy in the prose-- and thinking a candle burning so brightly couldn't possibly burn for long. I am deeply sad, for his wife and loved ones, and for the literary world which will miss out on hearing his voice. There won't be another, maybe even more infinite, jest.

The obit in the LA Times has some quotes from David Foster Wallace, which I shall quote verbatim:

In 2005, Wallace gave a commencement address at Kenyon College in Ohio that has been widely circulated in classrooms and on the Internet. In that speech, he told the graduating seniors: "[I]t is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head." Up until this week, I would have said that those were words to live by, but in Wallace's case, perhaps, the opposite was true.

Rather than a repudiation, this just makes his work seem all the more urgent, especially the promise that "learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

Peace be with you, David Foster Wallace. You have witnessed our ugly times, and written it down truthfully, and for that we all owe you. I hope the voices have stopped. I hope, against the odds and evidence to the contrary, we're not all "totally hosed."