David Foster Wallace was pretty much my favorite living writer, at least until he committed suicide a few days ago. It's hard to mourn someone you didn't know, especially when they went out the way they chose to go out, for better or worse. But it's still sad and upsetting, for a number of reasons that I think Hillary expressed well, including that this action seems to be at odds with the philosophy that informed some of his best writing. The guy wrote a very long, very ambitious, very good book at a (relatively) young age, was saddled forevermore with both the Wunderkind label and a Great American Novel that would be nigh impossible to top or follow up to anyone's satisfaction, and spent the next decade or so teaching and writing some very good non-fiction and some occasionally frustrating but still worthwhile short fiction. He also became a posterboy for a literary scene crowded with lesser talents who either were directly influenced by him, or took less disciplined approaches to covering similar thematic ground. The question always lingered, what his next 'major' work would be and when, but I was pretty happy with the steady stream of periodical pieces and occasional collections that he'd been issuing in recent years. And though it's always tempting to speculate when a public figure takes an action like this and link it to his professional life, especially when so little about him was public besides his work, the fact remains: this was a guy who had to live with, and battle, the public perception that he may have peaked at 30, which, for anyone but especially an artist, is a terrible future to be sentenced to, or attempt to defy. In a way, I kind of hope that his suicide was the inevitable result of a depression that could not be overcome, and not, as some will surely speculate, the outcome of someone crushed under the weight of ambitions or expectations they could never live up to. It would be all the more infuriating to me, for a family to lose a husband and father because he happened to be a tortured artist. Maybe that's because I've never dealt with real depression, so it's not a concern for me, but I do understand the self-consciousness and heavy expectations that weigh on someone with an artistic impulse. Maybe I want him to have fallen victim to the thing I can't identify with and don't personally fear, not the thing that I had in common with him to some degree.

I'm not a guy who spends much time contemplating mortality, or looking at much of anything in a "big picture" way. But I spent a disheartening amount of time this summer writing obituaries for local figures, people who were loved by their friends and their community, and died at a young age with no say in the matter. So when someone, whose work may have been done in a more private, introspective setting and who never seemed fully comfortable with fame or the wider community they were a part of, but was still famous and impacted many people and had a lot to live for, takes their own life, it just leaves a bad taste. He was someone who could've had 2 or 3 decades of great work left in him, who had the resources and the audience to accomplish whatever he wanted to accomplish whenever he was ready to, or could've just been a humble family man who taught and only wrote or published what he cared to. Now, he's letting the narrative end with that unresolved question mark floating over it, and as much as he liked to leave loose ends and ambiguities in Infinite Jest and other fictional works, I would've liked to think he wouldn't leave so much unfinished business lingering in his own life's story, to check out so early and so deliberately. Still, he was one of the people that made me want to write, which is true for a lot of other people, and so we'll keep on writing now, and hopefully carry on some of the spirit and intellectual curiousity of his work, without merely aping his famous footnotes and stylistic tics.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15, 2008 at 12:27 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.