[originally published (in slightly different form) in the Tucson Weekly, September 2008]
On Friday, Sept. 12th, the 46 yr.-old author of Infinite Jest, a novel roughly the size of a dictionary, hung himself in his garage in Southern California. If you’d read anything he’s ever written, you’d have to believe he knew what he was doing.
David Foster Wallace’s novels and short story collections teem with laboriously written accounts of various addictions, mental illnesses, obscure medical conditions, sexual obsessions, and suicides, no less poignant for all their spellbinding hilarity. With titles like Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and The Broom of the System, these books comprise a kind of highbrow Jerry Springer Show for the kind of audience that doesn’t think twice about spending half an hour reading in the bathroom after a bowel movement, but still can’t find enough time for reading.
I was lucky. When I found Infinite Jest, I was unemployed and blessed with bronchitis and a broken TV, in a tiny, snow-covered town in Massachusetts, just over the Notch from Amherst College, Wallace’s alma mater. I was astounded by his vocabulary, and filled half a notebook with lists of words to look up: dendriurethane? Megaspansules? Aposiopesis? “Does Wallace have a degree in pharmacology?” I wrote to a friend. “Where’s he get this crap?”
As a matter of fact, Wallace earned his only postgraduate degree from the University of Arizona, which is where the book opens: Hal Incandenza, a promising recruit from an elite Boston-area tennis academy, is being interviewed by college officials while trying to hide the fact that he’s paralyzed and basically unable to speak. Wallace knows the Tucson sun: “. . .people outdoors down here just scuttle in vectors from air conditioning to air conditioning. The sun is a hammer. I can feel one side of my face start to cook. The blue sky is glossy and fat with heat. . .”
With wheelchair-bound Québecois terrorists rolling in and out of the plot, Infinite Jest explore the ins and outs of Alcoholics Anonymous and the strange films of the tennis academy’s founder, one of which happens to be so vastly entertaining that its viewers are literally entertained to death. Wallace’s novel very nearly had the same effect on me. For six infinite weeks, my bronchitis lingered, threatening to turn into pneumonia. I was in a deep fever, slept only with the aid of codeine cough syrup, and pretty much broke from reading only for more crackers and O’Doul’s. And as my wife predicted, my enfeeblement didn’t end until, miraculously, I read the last page, closed the book, and sat, stunned, for hours.
For young, unpublished novelists like myself, Wallace’s suicide is a splash of cold water; he had about as much success as any writer of literary fiction can hope for in this age of diverse, at-your-fingers entertainment. Critical respect and a small cadre of readers amount to the proverbial gold watch for us: what we expect after a lifetime of sacrifice and selfdeprivation. We don’t get paid for what we do, at least not now, and it’ll probably never be enough to live on. Financially speaking, it’s a ridiculous stupid career choice, and most of us could have excelled in lucrative fields. But someday, we think, we’ll be like Wallace, and life will have been worth living.
“Among pernicious myths,” Wallace writes early in Infinite Jest, “is the one where people always get very upbeat and generous and other-directed right before they eliminate their own map for keeps. The truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement.” We tend to think of this self-involvement as being the province of teenagers. The song “Suicide is Painless” makes a lot of sense when you realize it was written by Robert Altman’s 14–year–old son. But there is a separation between the thought and the deed, sometimes of many years. It’s actually quite early on in Hamlet that the prince gives his “To be or not to be” soliloquy. He then proceeds to have his way with the world before taking his leave. “It strikes me that EXIT signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES,” Wallace writes elsewhere in the book.
Well, David Foster Wallace has left the building. Suicide brings on many changes, indeed; somewhere, a young writer will follow Wallace to the noose. We can’t judge. All we can do is turn to the young artists in our lives, turn to the most sensitive among us, and tell them we respect what they’re doing. Tell them we can’t wait til they’re published. Tell them that though it might seem like the bee’s knees to be sitting down for coffee with Kurt Cobain and David Foster Wallace tomorrow morning, we still need them here. We need them not to leave.
As for me, I won’t be following Wallace, not anytime soon. I’m stuck on my second novel, A Book that Nobody Can Write. Thanks to the vast and endless book that somehow ended up being finite, I know it can be done.
. . . a journey through dark heat.
