David Foster Wallace

Of the seven deadly sins, envy is probably the most common to writers. It's a condition that becomes particularly acute when one of us (usually young and cute) is anointed as the Next Big Thing in American Letters. Some recent examples: Jonathan Safran Foer, Curtis Sittenfeld, Marissa Pessl, Nell Freudenberger, the list goes on.

I don't remember much of this kind of griping, however, when David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest was released in the mid-nineties. Certainly there were a lot of jokes about the book's heft, as well as critical debate about just how successful the book was as a whole (as there would be about every one of Wallace's books). Yet there was no denying the guy's talent line by line. There was certainly no denying his intelligence.

And of course, the humor. There have been many postmodern writers who've exploded their prose with pictures, quizzes, footnotes, and any manner of non-traditional stylistic devices. But few did it with such charm and acute comic timing as Wallace, who in the end, may not have produced as seminal a work as the masterpieces of his idol, Thomas Pynchon, yet whose writing was a hell of a lot more fun to read.

Only a week ago, I was teaching an excerpt from Wallace's well-known essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a satire of cruise ship culture, which embodied the best of Wallace's strengths (as enumerated above) as well as the worst of his weaknesses (chief among them, an almost pathological inability to restrain himself). In fact, reading Wallace's work is like being on a cruise: you can get pleasured to death. Or to use another metaphor I'm sure Wallace would have appreciated, immersing yourself in Wallace's work is like entering the Orgasmatron that nearly did in Jane Fonda in Barbarella. (Okay, I'll stop myself here. I could go on, but I'm not David Foster Wallace.)

I never met Wallace personally, but I've read him and heard him speak twice, and I couldn't help falling in love with the guy. I know I'm not alone in that sentiment. He described our culture with a unique blend of devastating evisceration and disarming sweetness, as seen in his brilliant device in Infinite Jest of renaming years after consumer products, notably "The Year of the Depend Undergarment." Any other writer might have chosen a whole other array of products. Yet the choice of that diaper was exactly what made Wallace Wallace: absurd, mocking to the point of snickering, yet also somehow tender and sad. Wallace's voice, of which we are now so cruelly robbed, made you sit up and pay attention, made you think, made you laugh, and above all made you want to give him a hug and tell him, it's okay, there's still hope. Yes, American life has become increasingly coarse and ugly and dumb. But there's still love, and where there's love, there's still hope.