Last Night I Learned

that David Foster Wallace hanged himself on Sept. 12.

Reading the news sent a flicker of shock through me. I gasped and read more and couldn't sleep, which I already couldn't, for a lot longer. But it didn't even sink in until the next day. All morning I felt immobilized, stricken with sorrow, and still feeling flickers, like heat lightning, of the hideous news that you try instinctively to push away and hide from. It's like I still can't really accept it, I still want this thing not to be real, like if it was a close friend or family member -- I can't bear it.

It's hard to articulate why it matters so much and yet it isn't hard, either -- I want to say tons. In honor of this great maximalist, who almost single-handedly banished the dismal toneless specter of "realist" prose (Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie etc.) by pouring out reams of exuberant, casual, sizzlingly smart, philosophically deep -- it was writing freed finally from the chains of not calling attention to itself. It called attention, but that was only one thing it did. It was ostentatiously self-effacing. It was aggressively neurotically challenged. In a vigorous, even testosterone-charged way, it explored weakness.

Oh, this isn't as good as what I wanted to say.

If there are times when reading gives you the shock of: Oh my god, someone else felt this! Wallace was that writer most powerfully for me. Thomas Wolfe, too, and George Eliot, in places, but Wallace spoke right into the center of the enervated white culture I was from -- the one drowned in sitcoms (except they were really good) and advertisement (except it was really clever). He struggled manfully with shameful emotions, like addiction to the show MASH -- what other literary heavyweight was so honest? He parodied advertising but was drawn again and again to its dreadful cleverness. He knew he was in no way apart from all this. That's different from most literary attitudes -- maybe in that he's "postmodern" though the label sounds glib in the face of what he was.

That's what the Times headline said: "Postmodern Writer Found Dead." Who is it? I wondered at 3:30 am, up for a bout of insomnia, having a bowl of granola while paging idly through the headlines -- which grizzled veteran? Exley? Coover? Barth? I had no inkling of the enormity of the revelation -- David Foster Wallace, 46, decided he just couldn't take it anymore. Not that it would have been any less horrible if one of those had taken their lives, since suicide always presupposes such unimaginable darkness in the final hours, it just always silences and sobers us that someone really got that far down the road of "this isn't worth it, this really isn't." Which we've all felt. Many times.

What I was trying to get at, above, is that Wallace explored softness, with manly vigor and epic, operatic size. It was still softness. His heroes were hobbled by some weird unlucky combination of good fortune and disjunction -- like Hal Incandenza, from Infinite Jest, who's a genius and a tennis prodigy and is permanently crippled by incandescent parents. That's what was at the heart of a lot of what he wrote -- that even well-intentioned parents can perform some nefarious, subterranean abuse that renders their offspring wrecked for life, even while they're outwardly so favored, so gifted, that no one could imagine their inner pain. If this subject is less manly than the search for the white whale, that was in Wallace's writing, too -- embarrassment, always, over every failed generous impulse corrupted by self-consiousness, or every petty motivation -- he was painfully, operatically aware that his subject matter was mundanity itself. Plus self-consciousness. There was a lot of philosophy in it too which made it hard going at times. Someone in one of the many encomiums said he was a genius who happened to be a writer, and I think that's right.

I think it's an impossible project to explore self-defeat through one character after another, but if that's what your inner world is, and if you're also obsessed with fraudulence and with not being a fraud, you are hog-tied to writing the truth over and over, except it can't help depressing even you with its relentless reiteration of the same old non-belief, the same old lack of vigor, lack of hope -- that's an impossible project. You can't write anything different and you can't write anything false. There's no way out.