Sunday, September 14, 2008

David Foster Wallace, R.I.P.   [Mark Hemingway]

Novelist and journalist David Foster Wallace is dead of an apparent suicide at age 46.

Personally, I was a big fan of Wallace — I've actually read his doorstop dystopian satire Infinite Jest twice. Jest is a brilliant meditation on technology and addiction that has transcended cult status to being one of the most important and influential novels of the last few decades. Which is not to say Wallace was universally admired — his predilection for footnotes and other over the top stylistic quirks were very off putting to some people, but even those who didn't especially care for Wallace usually recognized him as an immense talent. His detractors also had to admit that for all his pretension, Wallace's writing was frequently hilarious. And as talented a fiction writer as he was, it's almost unfair that his forays into journalism — as collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster — were also dazzling. 

I didn't agree with Wallace's liberal politics but I had a deep respect for him because his work was always genuinely and profoundly moral — a very rare thing among contemporary fiction writers. In that sense, perhaps the best introduction to Wallace is a commencement speech he gave to Kenyon College a few years back. The speech contains an unfortunate suicide reference that will no doubt be needlessly highlighted in the days to come. But it's this paragraph from that speech that's really worth remembering:

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

I only wish that Wallace had the courage to continue in his daily struggle to find some measure of that freedom for himself. There is joy to be found in that awareness and daily sacrifice for others — it doesn't need to be a burden you have to escape. 

09/14 12:43 AMShare