David Foster Wallace is dead.

[triggercut1]

...news breaking from SoCal, apparently David Foster Wallace hanged himself in his family home last night in Claremont, CA. Guy was one of the true literary geniuses of our time, and he was legitimately proud of his smalltown Illinois upbringing, too. Dunno what drove him to this, but I do know that he seemed to struggle with writing anything of length to follow "Infinite Jest", and perhaps that got the best of him.

RIP.

I'm off to see a concert, we'll lift a few pints in DFW's honor.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
David Foster Wallace Dead

Written by Edward Champion Posted on September 13, 2008
Filed Under Wallace, David Foster


I’ve received terrible news from an anonymous source. David Foster Wallace, the talented writer of Infinite Jest, is dead of an apparent suicide. I have confirmed with multiple sources that this is indeed the case.



The Claremont Police Department informed me that they answered a suicide call at Mr. Wallace’s residential address, in which someone had discovered a deceased individual. The name of the deceased has been withheld.



I have also contacted the Los Angeles County Coroner and I received partial confirmation from them too. At the time, I called, they were in the process of informing the family.


I have also left a message for Wallace’s agent, Bonnie Nadell, to find out if she knows anything.
But the facts indicate that David Foster Wallace is dead of suicide at the age of 46. This is a terrible blow for American letters. And I hope to have more later.


UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times’s Joel Rubin has also confirmed Wallace’s suicide. According to Rubin:

Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the Claremont Police Department, said Wallace’s wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find her husband had hanged himself.

UPDATE 2: Gawker has also confirmed with the police. And here’s the Metafilter thread.]

[Jeffro]

This is not the David Wallace I've heard of, but it sucks to hear it.

[210]

Despite not being a fan of his writings, I'm sorry to hear he threw his life away.

[triggercut1]

I think on some level he considered himself a failure; too quickly he was anointed as the combination of Twain and Nabokov rolled into one; he was Pynchon except funnier and easier to read, supposed to be Joyce for the post-post-modern era.

In reality he was none of these things, but rather a skilled writer who knocked it out of the park early in his career and was never able to get back to that level again. (That he was also once a world-ranked junior tennis phenom who played in his teens with the Williams sisters, Agassi, and Sampras represents an almost freakish level of talent in one human being.)

"Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no laughter in heaven." --Mark Twain

[JK]

Trig speaks in tongues...

Who are we canonizing again?

[hansolo]

Trig speaks in tongues...

Who are we canonizing again?

A dude who hung himself and let his wife deal with the aftermath.

[B.A.]

never heard of him.

[triggercut1]

Trig speaks in tongues...

Who are we canonizing again?

Back in the late 1990's, DFW was considered to maybe be one of the towering literary talents ever in American Literature. The book "Infinite Jest" was 1,000 pages of perverse dark humor and it was a pretty huge deal in literary circles, whether said literarists considered it good (which it was) or a huge fraud (it wasn't). As alluded earlier, he was supposed to be Mark Twain, Thomas Pynchon, Joe Heller, and James Joyce all rolled into one....

...except he wasn't. After "Infinite Jest", he never again published a full novel, and had only scattershot success with short fiction. He did become a hugely respected essayist, but even his essays started to fall into a formulaic sameness. Still, the essay about his time on cruise ship, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" is one of the greatest pieces of short non-fiction ever written.

What was great about DFW was that while he was known for his experimentalism, what set him apart from everyone else who dabbled in metafiction was his depth of feeling and sympathy and compassion and empathy. In "Supposedly Fun Thing", he skewers and venomously dismisses many of his fellow passengers on the cruise ship, but his descriptions of the waiter assigned to his table at dinner and the maid who makes up his room go from empathetic compassion to almost hero worship.

By all accounts he was one of the sweetest, most compassionate guys out there, but apparently also had some sort of bi-polar disorder. After he left Illinois State at Bloomington (where he taught) to go to California in 2002, it seemed as if the well dried up. His last book was "Consider The Lobster", another collection of essays, none of which were written after 2001. Still, it has stuff like this in it:

"Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?"

Is the real point of my life simply to undergo as little pain and as much pleasure as possible? My behavior sure seems to indicate that this is what I believe, at least a lot of the time. But isn't this kind of a selfish way to live? Forget selfish—isn't it awful lonely?

Here's a poorly-formatted version of his famous essay.

Think of him as the anti-Palahniuk.

[ess eff]

(That he was also once a world-ranked junior tennis phenom who played in his teens with the Williams sisters, Agassi, and Sampras represents an almost freakish level of talent in one human being.)

Especially since he was 18 and 19 years older than the Williams sisters, more than eight years older than Agassi and more than nine years older than Sampras.

Or maybe that makes them the ones with the freakish level of talent.

[triggercut1]

Especially since he was 18 and 19 years older than the Williams sisters, more than eight years older than Agassi and more than nine years older than Sampras.

Or maybe that makes them the ones with the freakish level of talent.

Heh. I'd misread a biographical piece on him that mentioned him being good enough to be ranked as a regional junior but that he washed out on the same circuit (but obviously years prior to them) as that which produced that group of US tennis stars; I'd also transposed that against some of his essays on Mal Washington, Sampras, Edberg, and others as well.

[King]

Here's a poorly-formatted version of his famous essay.

OK trig, you wrote this:

Still, the essay about his time on cruise ship, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" is one of the greatest pieces of short non-fiction ever written.

So, I actually read the entire piece today.

Forgive me (and please don't take this as directed at you personally), but I don't see it. He's no Mark Twain because the essay wasn't witty to any enjoyable degree, and he's no Joyce because the essay was quite readable.

It was an interesting piece, mainly because I had been on many cruises years ago (alas, always for business, never for pleasure) and it was interesting to read about the experience again.

But I don't see how it can be considered even a great piece of short non-fiction, much less one of the greatest.

Post-modern writers don't have it...too much contrived angst.

[210]

and he's no Joyce because the essay was quite readable.

I literally laughed out loud at that...

[Reggie Cleveland]

Think of him as the anti-Palahniuk.

Well, I always had.

[triggercut1]

OK trig, you wrote this:

Still, the essay about his time on cruise ship, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" is one of the greatest pieces of short non-fiction ever written.

So, I actually read the entire piece today.

Forgive me (and please don't take this as directed at you personally), but I don't see it. He's no Mark Twain because the essay wasn't witty to any enjoyable degree, and he's no Joyce because the essay was quite readable.

It was an interesting piece, mainly because I had been on many cruises years ago (alas, always for business, never for pleasure) and it was interesting to read about the experience again.

But I don't see how it can be considered even a great piece of short non-fiction, much less one of the greatest.

Post-modern writers don't have it...too much contrived angst.

By "poorly formatted" I neglected to mention that this online reconstruction eliminates what seems like 1500 words or so of very droll footnotes to the essay (one footnoted passage goes on for over a page). I think (and I'm not the only one) that it succeeds entirely as a modern reworking of "Innocents Abroad".

[King]

By "poorly formatted" I neglected to mention that this online reconstruction eliminates what seems like 1500 words or so of very droll footnotes to the essay (one footnoted passage goes on for over a page). I think (and I'm not the only one) that it succeeds entirely as a modern reworking of "Innocents Abroad".

Well, I suppose this adds further proof to the old saying that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

I'm not saying you shouldn't like this guy's work, only that I don't see any notable talent, much less Twain-esque talent.

Modern reworking of Innocents Abroad? I'm glad you're not the only one who thinks that, I would be concerned for your health.

BTW, the formatting did not bother me at all. And all 32 footnotes appear in the copy I printed from the link you provided (although none seem to go on for over a page...perhaps #25, but who cares?).