david foster wallace: classic or dud

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.

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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.

Too bad. I liked reading him, but I loved him for his imperfections.

failure

(never understood his proclivity for goofy bandanas. but anyway.)

whoa, wtf? wtf? This is a strange death/suicide to process. Really hard to believe.

RIP

i get so scared and confused when people i consider to be wiser than me yet kindred souls give in to this personal darkness that they always so eloquently teach you to fight against....

Poor dude. Never got into his writings, but all my friends love his work. But I can understand ... no matte rhow good life gets, there will always be this intense darkness inside of you that never goes away, regardless of love and success. My second cousin hanged himself depsite having the most amazing life possible. Who knows what that's about. The mysteries of biology and the concept of the human soul.

Ouch, fuck. Yeah, that.

this is crushingly sad.

I'm really still too just shocked and torn up to add anything except just tipsy mothra as OTM as ever but even more so because this is a hard hard hard thing to be OTM in the face of

I enjoyed a lot of his nonfiction pieces, always meant to start on IJ and maybe I will someday. Incredibly sad indeed. RIP.

so okay this: "The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle... our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home."

oh shit

(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.)

IJ was published when he was 34, so he likely wrote it in his early 30s. He published Broom of the System when he was only 25 though, and its protagonist was a 24 year old

RIP

I remember Stevie T showing me The Broom of the System, years ago. I didn't like the title much, I don't think.

I have never read him except things like the first paragraph or so of an essay on Roger Federer. Steady Mike has read him a lot more!

i read A Supposedly Fun Thing recently and absolutely loved it. apart from the quality of the writing and the insight and the jokes, i enjoyed it because DFW came across as extremely likeable. i can't believe he's dead, it's too horrible :(

i'm totally gutted about this, espcially since i clicked the thread with expectations and high hopes for news of new work to be imminently released. damn. RIP big guy.

Fucking Fuck.. This Is crushing. He was one of my favorite contemporary authors, for his fiction, yes, but (as many of you have noted) ESPECIALLY for his essays. Ned, OTM regarding the Lynch piece: Easily the finest appraisal of Lynch's work I've come across, and perhaps the single piece of writing I've reread most in recent years.

Devastating. R.I.P.

..a dangerous influence on the young - I would have to agree with this, however.

holy shit... this is terrible

this also needs to be posted:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27769

There's this one: "Federer as Religious Experience"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html

Make sure you print the footnotes if you're printing it out.

Shit shit shit.

Fuck fuck fuck. I only finished Infinite Jest about a month ago so this feels very raw for me. One of the things that stuck out was the ease in which he moved from goofy comedy to articulating absolute crushing despair. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised or shocked by this news, but still, I am. RIP.

God, this is too much. He's been a sort of a big literary voice for me (me, who has never been particularly immersed with literature). I remember hearing he had contemplated suicide earlier in his life, but nevertheless, I couldn't even post here until this morning because it's been a bit too surreal. I've been reading IJ all summer, as well. An enormous writer and wit. Rest in Peace.

sad :(

i'm a huge fan of his essays too, although maybe it's finally time to get around to IJ.

i feel quite bad that my third thought after hearing this news (after "what the fuck" and "god I never read oblivian") was "I wonder how much my signed first editions of Girl with Curious Hair and Infinite Jest are worth now?"

Oblivion is about half totally incredible and half ...what the hell? i don't recommend a reading of Good Old Neon to anyone who is particularly upset about this news right now but, jesus, what an incredible story. i've read the story 3 or 4 times and i've still no idea what he does in the last paragraph or what it means.

very sad, brutal, worrying
onion article still makes me laugh tho
but, sigh

i'm really crushed.

i loved his writing so much.

it's hard to think of things to say about him, this is really hard for me because -- good old neon aside (good lord there's no way i could read that now) -- but despite his reputation as some sort of po-mo trickster/showoff...to me what made wallace was his heart...if anything he was painfully sincere...a guy that had so much to express, wanted to explain everything he felt to you in such detail....the footnotes always seemed like a byproduct of a real exuberance to me, not some sort of stylistic schtick...

but the sad thing to me is that I always felt his worldview, while sad at times, was a positive one...that the things we love are worth it, despite all the mental horrors of the world....to find out he ended up losing to them is infinitely sad to me.

first thing i thought of was the above referenced Kenyon University commencement speech, which in it's own small way might be my favorite thing he ever wrote:

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 and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. 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.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

"i wish you way more than luck"...i dunno...that line always sort of got me a little choked, what else can you say to a kid going out in this world?

but despite his reputation as some sort of po-mo trickster/showoff...to me what made wallace was his heart...if anything he was painfully sincere...a guy that had so much to express, wanted to explain everything he felt to you in such detail....the footnotes always seemed like a byproduct of a real exuberance to me, not some sort of stylistic schtick...

yeah, this. he always seemed so....affable.

also:

By the way, it’s right around here, or the next game, watching, that three separate inner-type things come together and mesh. One is a feeling of deep personal privilege at being alive to get to see this; another is the thought that William Caines is probably somewhere here in the Centre Court crowd, too, watching, maybe with his mum. The third thing is a sudden memory of the earnest way the press bus driver promised just this experience. Because there is one. It’s hard to describe — it’s like a thought that’s also a feeling. One wouldn’t want to make too much of it, or to pretend that it’s any sort of equitable balance; that would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that.

i love the ending.

ugh i am furious. i just cannot believe this. my rubric for people i think have intellectually mastered living is totally wrong. what a shame. RIP.

Nothing like discovering that my all-time favorite writer has committed suicide on the eve of my grandfather's funeral. I am just going to stop trying to process anything for a little while, thanks.