David Foster Wallace, RIP

One of my favorite writers, David Foster Wallace, apparently hung himself yesterday. His thousand-page novel Infinite Jest puts the magnum in magnum opus, but it’s a spectacular piece of work, and in some ways, his nonfiction was better than his fiction.

Wallace was always a dangerous writer for me– one of those people whose style I would end up unconsciously imitating whenever I read something new. He’d come out with a new collection, and I’d spend a week deleting footnotes from my emails and blog posts. I’m shocked and saddened to learn of his death, particularly in this manner.

5 comments

  1. I tried to read Infinite Jest but had to bail out before the end, It was just too unedited and self-indulgent, Perhaps it’s a generational issue; I’m probably the age of your father.

    Wallace was compared to Jorge Luis Borges in the NY Times obit. Wallace could have learned a bit about brevity from Borges.

  2. I had the same problem as Larry. I got through about 300 pages. I would have stopped earlier but I was thinking that since so many SB’ers put it in their top 10 books that I’d surely start liking it soon. I didn’t like the characters, the lack of anything resembling a plot, and, quite frankly, the writing style is annoying.

    Do you need to work your way up to Infinite Jest by reading his earlier works? Or is it like Larry suggests, a generational thing?

  3. I’ve tried to read Infinite Jest twice, and both times gave up about 200 pages in. It seemed like he had taken two or three complete novels and rough notes sufficient for at least a short-story anthology, dumped then all in a blender, and poured the resulting slurry between a pair of covers. I really wish an editor had slapped him around until he extracted a single focused novel from Infinite Jest.

    For those who want to sample Wallace’s work, I recommend his essay collections. “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” is particularly good.

  4. Bouncing off IJ is pretty common and I wouldn’t worry about. However, even people who couldn’t get into that book stand a good chance of really, really liking his essays/non-fiction stuff.

    A Supposedly Fun Thing… and Consider The Lobster are better recommendations for people not looking for a book with which one could bludgeon someone to death.

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