david foster wallace: classic or dud

Whoa.:

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1997 tome "Infinite Jest," was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

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.

That's really sad. Suicide is just so awful, so terrible for everyone left behind.

Oh my God. Rest in Peace, DFW, "Infinite Jest" is a masterpiece.

Dang. How... unexpected.

holy shit

Classic or Dead

pouring out 40 footnotes.

i really, really liked his essays

^ this. I really wasn't a heavy reader of his but the essays I did read I v. much enjoyed.

He inspired one of the longer author-centered threads on I Love Books - the unfortunately titled: David Foster Wallace - is he a cunt?

I've read only one of his books, the 'supposedly fun thing' collection of essays. It was ok.

His strong point was having a distinctive authorial voice, so you knew at once there was a person behind the words. His weak point seemed to be self-editing, but there are worse weaknesses. Blandness, for one.

Requiscat in pacem, DFW.

r.i.p.

Horrible.

My best wishes to his family, I'll be re-reading Girl With Curious Hair.

ugh, bad news, so sad

RIP and hugs and best wishes to his family. His tennis writing alone is great, but I always enjoyed everything, every footnote, including his music writing. Damn.

totally bummed out about this, really. r.i.p.

sad news. rip

Terrible news.

holy shit.

got such a kick out of his writing. so much pleasure and humor and wisdom in Infinite Jest. read it during a sad time in my life. it gave me so much hope. read it at the dinner table, read it during breaks at work at my job in a bookstore, laughing the whole time. was waiting anxiously for a new novel from him. . .such a very very sad thing. RIP.

here's his kenyon college commencement speech, well worth reading, from 2005

http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

Such bad news. RIP.

OMG I am speechless and so, so sad :-(

RIP

I reread his Kenyon commencement speech a week or two ago and was really inspired by it again. God, this is just awful.

All I ever got around to reading by the guy was the cruise ship essay and that great list of book recommendations that included Wittgenstein's Mistress. Still, this makes my very sad. RIP.

;_;

the tennis-as-geopolitical-power-struggle bit in infinite jest was the best thing ever

OK, that list was called "Overlooked: Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels >1960" and was on salon.com.

Ye, this is it here; http://www.salon.com/books/bag/1999/04/12/wallace/

Infinite Jest meant a lot to me when I was 19 or so. Very sad to come home to this news.

As a writer of fiction I thought he was mostly terrible, and a dangerous influence on the young; but, to echo what Ned and a couple others have said, he was on occasion a terrific essayist, one whose, shall we say, discursive tendencies dovetailed with genuine insight. His piece on David Lynch before the release of Lost Highway remains one of the best things I've ever read abou the man.

clud

His piece on David Lynch before the release of Lost Highway remains one of the best things I've ever read abou the man.

Agreed, I'm pretty positive that's the first thing I actually read by him.

Huge, huge loss. He was a genius.

i think he was a sometimes great essayist and a mostly failed fiction writer, but the failures were interesting. i like a lot of the pieces of infinite jest, even though the thing as a whole is frustrating. (to him too, it felt like.) i guess i also identified with him as sort of a generational voice, smarter and funnier and more not-making-me-want-to-punch-him than the whole dave eggers/ira glass nexus.

his whole sort of wrestling with moving beyond irony, postmodern self-awareness, all that gen-x angst, i think was really emblematic of artists of his generation in a lot of different ways. he articulated the problem better than anyone else, even if he never really solved it.

One thing you quickly realize when reading DFW was he was one ridiculously smart dude. Maybe too smart for his own good, based on the horrible events of yesterday.

Any writer as ambitious as he is will have some hits and misses, but when he was 100% on, like the Cruise Ship essay, or the Illinois State Fair, the John McCain 2000 piece or the highlights of Infinite Jest, he was a wizard who could seemingly do anything.
RIP

Guys, where is the ideal place to start in Foster's oeuvre?

This is so weird because just last night I reread parts of the John McCain piece, to remind myself that at one time there was something likable about him.

i think ideal place to start is a supposedly fun thing, but that's because i think his nonfiction >>> his fiction.

For fiction, Infinite Jest is clearly the magnum opus. Broom of the System is great too. His short stories aren't as much fun as the longer stuff.

But my favorite DFW stuff will always be his nonfiction pieces, particularly "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and the Illinois State Fair piece.

Thanks for the suggestions. I generally prefer nonfiction to fiction, by the way... if that helps.

you start with his non-fiction, i'll go and try cracking infinite jest again. 10th grade clearly wasn't the right time for that.

i gave infinite jest to my brother for christmas a few years ago, because i knew he'd dig it if he ever gave it a shot. a few months ago he called me to tell me he was a few hundred pages in and loved it. (he's 27 now, i think i was 28 or 29 when i read it, which is probably also about the age dfw was when he wrote it. it's a very late-20s/early-30s sort of book.)

Maybe I'll give it a few years then. I'm 23.

well you could be prodigy.

anyway infinite jest makes more sense in the context of his nonfiction. it's a lot of the same themes, recast.

I'm kind of dreading the thought of a published suicide note. That would be some heavy, dark shit.