The Cedar Lounge Revolution

David Foster Wallace

It’s inevitable as the years drag on that those of us of a certain age will see more and more of the heroes of our youths pass away.  The past year or so has seen the deaths of Arthur C. Clarke, George McDonald Fraser, Tony Wilson, George Carlin, Richard Wright of Pink Floyd just yesterday (Syd Barrett having gone a couple of years ago) Norman Mailer and, of course, Gary Gygax.  Big names in their own fields, and those are just the ones which stick in my mind.

While each death is sad, in its own way, and some might come as a surprise, none carried with it any real sense of shock.  Will anyone raise an eyebrow when Philip Roth finally goes, given how much he’s been writing about it lately?  All of which is my way of leading up to to mentioning the genuine shock I felt when, absent-mindedly browsing on Salon yesterday, I saw the headline “In Memory of David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008“.

David Foster Wallace (or DFW as his internet groupies tended to describe him) had nowhere near the kind of celebrity enjoyed by contemporaries of his such as Douglas Coupland, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen or Brett Easton Ellis.  It’s hardly surprising – while far from a slouch, he wasn’t a particularly prolific writer (two novels, three collections of stories, two collections of non-fiction and a book about Maths over the course of a twenty year career).  Neither was he, for the most part, what one might describe as ‘reader-friendly’ writer, by any standard.  However, in terms of talent he stood head and shoulders above anyone else of his generation and he was arguably one of the most gifted writers working in the English language.

The various obituaries and tributes which you can now find dotted across the internet invariably refer to him has primarily the author of Infinite Jest, his 1996 1000+ monster of a novel.  I think that’s a slight shame; while Infinite Jest is certainly a dazzling piece of work, it was a flawed masterpiece.  Michiko Kakutani rightly notes that it was overlong (even by Wallace’s standards) and in need of strong editing.  However, it did reveal him as a great artist, allowing him to escape from the influence of writers like Barthelme and Barth and, above all, Pynchon which hung so heavily over his earlier works The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair.

It’s his later works - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion, as well as his non-fiction – where his real talent is evident.  Unlike a writer such as Pynchon, who has a tendency to throw a kitchen sink of allusions and references at the reader, Wallace’s genius wasn’t in his erudition but in his sheer intelligence.  His techniques – self-referentiality, footnotes, narratives the twist and turn in on themselves like an Escher painting – now seem a little jaded as they’ve been taken up by a newer generation, most notably Jonathan Safran Foer and the McSweeneys group.  However, while they weren’t original to Wallace he was using them far earlier than most others and to far greater effect.  In comparison with the dead irony of someone like Douglas Coupland, where the flat, hyperreality of contemporary America is something to be neither celebrated nor denounced, with Wallace there was a thread of real despair beneath much of humour, the sense of someone constantly trying to approach a supreme transcendental truth (even, perhaps, Truth) while trapped within the medium they are using to express themselves.  This is perhaps best exemplified in one of his finest stories (and one of my favourites) ‘Good Old Neon’ in Oblivion, which begins “My whole life I’ve been a fraud” and expands into a beautifully tragic dissection of the inauthenticity (or, perhaps, impossibility of authenticity) of contemporary life.  To my mind, the artists he resembles most is probably Beckett, although where Wallace explores the limits of expression through an excess of language, Beckett does so through the manipulation of silences.

That said, even for those who found Wallace’s fiction to be too dense, difficult and ‘writerly’, there is much in his non-fiction that is wonderfully funny and alive.  Where other writers might use journalistic assignments to cover, say, the Illinois State Fair or a Caribbean Cruise (both subjects of pieces in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) to either bemoan the lackof sophistication of the participants, or romanticise their authenticity against the cool, detachment of New York, Wallace avoids both these traps turning about very personal pieces dripping with neuroses which share the theme of his own inability to relate to others.

One of the great sadnesses of his death is that we’ll never see what a novel from the later, more mature and certainly darker David Foster Wallace would be like.  Every few months – and most recently last week – I would Google his name and look up his Wikipedia entry to see if any new work was forthcoming.  It’s still hard to believe that it never will be.

A greater sadness, perhaps, is what he might now become in death.  I haven’t discussing the circumstances of his death, but from much of the commentary available it seems relatively simple to put the pieces together.  It’s hard to avoid the thought, though, that some too-easy links will be made between the themes of his work and his death (the already dark piece ‘The Depressed Person’ in Brief Interviews makes for even grimmer reading in retrospect) and that he’ll become another icon on the wall of miserable, bookish young men – a Sylvia Plath for the Facebook generation.  Early in his non-fiction book on the mathematics of infinity, Everything and more, Wallace rubbishes the hoary old image of the tortured genius driven mad and to destruction by his pursuit of the transcendant, but it seems inevitable that he may suffer the same fate.   In what Martin Amis terms the ‘War against Cliché’, Wallace was a Patton (and Amis – at best – a Custer).   Let’s hope that he doesn’t become that which we can speculate with some confidence he would have detested – a cliché himself.