David Foster Wallace at 50: Why he still matters and always will (original) (raw)

Maybe you are like me. Maybe you are in your forties, your twenties, somewhere in between. You grew up in an American town of average size, in a middle-class household with parents who dutifully worked at indistinct jobs. You watched television, mostly sitcoms. You owned a Sega Genesis, perhaps a Nintendo. Your family read newspapers and subscribed to magazines.

In high school, you read the classics. Your teachers explained that literature was made great by the universality of its themes. You understood this intellectually, but not viscerally. You understood this: I want to ask her out; I want to own a car; I want to not be bored this weekend. Faulkner did not appear to share these concerns.

Then you went away to college, maybe on one of the coasts, maybe in the Midwest. You became more mature. You read those classics again, but with a newfound appreciation. You learned how to deconstruct. You digested Woolf, Joyce, even Pynchon. Suddenly, you were sophisticated. You couldn’t wait to tell you friends back home.

Then, one night, there was a bespectacled boy or girl reading an extremely thick book at a campus coffee shop. You were attracted to this individual, maybe even went on a date or two with him/her. But in time, that attraction fell away, replaced by the original attraction you’d had to the book this person was reading, which is why you’d ever talked to him/her in the first place.

It was a very long book, with endnotes, and with footnotes to some of the endnotes. It was a novel, about a tennis academy and a drug rehabilitation center, and the lost souls confined to both. It was a novel about corporate branding of the calendar (you really liked the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment), about a movie so intoxicatingly pleasurable it is dangerous to watch, about an organization called ONAN, which a graduate student who spotted you reading the book explained was both a Biblical allusion and a masturbation joke.

You felt stupid. You looked it up. You looked up the dozens of words you didn’t know. And yet you kept reading, not merely to impress others, to say that you had slain this 1079 page beast, but because you actually enjoyed the damn thing. People kept calling the author an ironist, but you didn’t understand that, especially since he had also written an essay arguing that irony was killing American literature.

Moreover, you kept stumbling on passages of the most exquisite human feeling. Like the one where he says, “The teeth of the smile evidenced the clinical depressive’s classic inattention to oral hygiene” (you do not yet know that the author is a depressive).

Or when he writes of the main character, tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza, “Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.”

You understand that the book was more than real – it was true. That beneath all the linguistic bluster and intellectual showmanship was the voice of a lonely Midwestern boy – the author, that is – desperate to understand how human beings can connect in contemporary America. You understood that the author was using the most complex language to express the most basic themes: about loneliness, about pleasure, about death.

To some extent, he couldn’t help the insane hyperallusiveness of his style – this is what happens when you’re a philosopher/linguist/mathematician and are a genius at all three. But to an even greater extent, he was using the most contemporary language (breaking up his sentences with “like” and pop culture references, to the irritation of some critics) to express the oldest yearnings of the human heart.

People thought you were crazy; for both reading the book and believing that it had been written in earnest. They explained patiently that the entire book was – as its title suggested – an intricate prank pulled on the unsuspecting reader, a “Finnegans Wake” for postmodern dodos. They told you to relax and have another beer.

Sure enough, you did. In time, the author receded in memory. You had other concerns. You graduated, found a job. The job was no good. You found a better one. You moved in with someone you thought you loved. You complained about how little time you had to read.

The author, meanwhile, wrote several more books. One of them was a non-fiction, rather technical book exploring the mathematical concept of infinity. Another was a short story collection called “Oblivion,” and though you did not read either, you noted the author’s preoccupation with the beguiling limits of time. There was also a book of essays. Really, you didn’t have the time (new job, engagement, etc.). Although there was a very good one about cooking lobster. And another about pornography. And another yet about John McCain.

And then you got an email. The day was September 13, 2008. The author had hung himself the day before in California. He had been on meds for a long time, had tried to get off them and failed. His wife had found him. He was 46.

You felt cheated. You felt he had more in him, and though that is often said of people who die young, you had plenty of evidence to back up that belief. What’s worse, everyone started forward around a brilliant commencement address he had given at Kenyon College in 2005. The speech is, very simply, about paying attention to the fact that you are alive: “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.”

The speech was turned into a book. Of course you did not buy the book, for by that time you had read the commencement address many times, had in fact memorized portions of it. See, you were in love again.

He had one more book in him, the one that he was writing when he died. His editor pieced it together and published it in 2011. You went out and got it without reading any of the reviews. You wanted to know if he still had it – if he had had it at the very end.

It is a more challenging novel then the one you read before. No tennis this time, no hijinks. Just tax collectors in Peoria, Ill. But also, all that messy stuff that goes into living a life, all the stuff that, if you try to write about it, you come off as either impossibly precious or…well, you’re going to come off as impossibly precious.

But he didn’t. His mind was a diamond drill that reached as close as any to the opaque stuff inside us all.

And like the finest drills, it finally broke.

Here is what he writes in that last novel: “Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”

He would have been 50 today. Read one of his books. Or don’t. But don’t forget to look around, brother.

Originally Published: February 21, 2012 at 7:23 PM EST