Remembering David Foster Wallace
By Rob Anderson - Sep 16th, 2008 at 9:52 amSome highlights from the best obits:
Sam Anderson in New York Magazine:
What makes Wallace’s death exponentially sadder is that the bedrock of his work was always simple human connection, and the basic daily struggle to be happy — questions on which he struck me as uncommonly wise. Over the last few days, lots of writers have quoted the 2005 commencement address he gave at Kenyon College, especially his little paragraph on suicide: “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually long dead before they pull the trigger.” The passage, unfortunately, is always going to glow now with a little extra flare of significance.
But what’s actually most impressive, and touching, and heartbreaking about the Kenyon speech — what makes it worth reading not just for clues to Wallace’s suicide but for life strategies that might actually help the rest of us handle our own day-to-day unhappiness — is its positive wisdom. Although there was clearly real pain behind it, his final message to the graduates was life-affirming, practically Buddhist. Adult happiness, he said, comes down to a nitty-gritty, moment-by-moment struggle for mindfulness — the ability to positively reframe the inevitable disappointments of daily life: “It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.” Wallace’s writing, even his most cerebral, always verges on the border of self-help. In his very public struggle with uncool, lonely emotions (ambition, contentment, self-worth), he managed to pull off something miraculous: He found a way to heal, unembarrassingly, a rift that’s divided creative writers for decades: writing as hyperintellectualized pomo high art vs. writing as therapy.
Troy Patterson in Slate:
In 2004, the editors of Gourmet, doubtlessly expecting another further late-model Tocqueville-izing, sent Wallace to the Maine Lobster Festival. He sent back an essay on “the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue” so acute and supple in its consideration of uneasy questions about aesthetics and morality that it ranks as a must-read for anyone even thinking of having dinner. In memorializing a writer who has killed himself, there is an impulse—wholly human and totally ghoulish—to rifle through the work in search of clues and cries and suicide footnotes, and in the case of Wallace, the rifling requires no strain. (Like any smart writer aspiring to greatness, despair was a regular theme, and [A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, an account of a week of strenuous relaxation on a luxury cruise line first published in Harper's in 1996] got some of its considerable energy from the author’s association of “the ocean with dread and death.” Despair, he wrote, is “wanting to jump overboard.”) But if you must dwell on pain and suffering, why not pay the man tribute by reading the Gourmet essay, the title piece in Consider the Lobster. It’s about boiling lobsters. It’s about the neurological capacities of crustaceans and the spiraling motions of the human mind. It’s not a tract, just an argument guided by a sure sense of “moral duty,” and Wallace’s achievement was to make thinking about the facts of Postmodern life, and thinking about thinking about them, one of the keenest pleasures of being alive.
Laura Miller in Salon:
His detractors accused him of being show-offy, of calling attention to his own cleverness, but they, too, were wrong. He meant, with his footnotes and his digressions, to acknowledge the agonies of self-consciousness and the “difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know.” Point taken. Still, I read about his characters, each tennis prodigy and recovering addict and transvestite hooker and yuppie and ad exec and game show contestant and closeted political aide, and thought: Hey, I know you. Maybe it was an illusion — Wallace would have been the first to admit as much — but it made me feel less alone, too.
Monica Hesse in the Washington Post:
In the end, neither those who knew him personally nor those who worshiped him artistically can explain why his life ended how it did.
And in the end, the best commentary comes not from fans, but from Dave himself. In a 1996 essay titled “Shipping Out,” he discusses learning that a teenager committed suicide on a cruise ship:
“Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair.”
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