DFW, R.I.P.
I was just going to comment on Reihan’s post, but I decided that David Foster Wallace warrants as many acknowledgments – on this site, for some reason, especially – as we can give him. His death is crushing news. I loved Infinite Jest, and the essays, and the other fiction was occasionally overwhelmingly brilliant, but the thing about DFW, if you compare him to other contemporary literary intellectuals, is how decent, big-hearted, and – despite his now-apparent struggles with depression – unself-pitying he was. Even in his hilarious comic essays, there’s no dehumanizing. He was genuinely interested in people of all types, and all political stripes. That his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, could be about fifty different kinds of literary experiment and also churn along with the naive enthusiasm of a teenage adventure story testifies, I think, to the singular sensibility he had. It might be the most big-hearted book I’ve ever read. Along with being a genius and a Pynchonian literary madman, he was also, quite improbably, a mensch. I’m going to cry now.
That’s tight — the Pynchon and Gaddis were there but the real trick of Jest was the very human love he had for the Incandenzas. It was not the intellectual tightrope-walking (impressive though that is) of Gravity’s Rainbow.
— Sanjay · Sep 14, 02:25 PM · #
Lovely words well-spoken. We may hope the model he leaves behind will urge the best of us further than might have otherwise been the case.
— felix culpa · Sep 15, 02:43 AM · #
Oh no. I’ve spent a lot of my adult life among the college towns of central Illinois, and I have a deep love for a certain type of brilliant, damaged yet completely big-hearted and intellectually curious type of person that I’ll always associate with there, and with DFWallace’s writings. You really hit it here – no matter what he was writing about, you could read him trying to figure it out with a certain midwestern genius, love and ultimate decency that isn’t easily to imitate.
And his essays dealing with what life is like there captures it perfectly. Champaign only has so many literary/tennis geniuses. I feel terrible.
— rortybomb · Sep 15, 03:30 PM · #