David Foster Wallace 1962 - 2008

In what was probably the best interview David Foster Wallace ever gave, he described how his masterpiece Infinite Jest drew upon the ‘particular sadness’ of living in middle-class America at the turn of the century. ‘[It’s] something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news,’ he said. ‘It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.’

Suicide is an act borne of too many angles, of too many personally esoteric conflictions and contradictions, for clear lines of cause and effect to be drawn between past words and final actions. Who can say if it was this existential drift that finally led to Wallace’s suicide last week? Too easy, too dismissive. What is true is that it was there. It was there at the end just as it was there throughout his writing; forever pressing upwards towards the surface of his prose, waiting for a hole to appear through which to seep and pervade.

I read Infinite Jest earlier this year after following my three strike rule – when I hear or read three mentions of the same book from different sources within quick succession, it must be read. To pretend it was an easy task would be hubris, and a dirty lie. 1000-plus pages (including 100 pages of alternately intricate and maddening end notes) of huge slabs of indent-less text that gave a new meaning to the word dense; a dizzyingly Tolstoy-esque range of painstakingly rounded characters; a confusing insistence on acronyms and a prodigious vocabulary that required a dictionary-check at least once a page (a result of DFW’s childhood dictionary reading habit). There were days when I got truly sick of lugging the great thing around with me. But, when it suddenly clicked, 200 pages in, it became an almost vicarious pleasure.

Never before have I felt such an emotional connection with a book by an author classed as post-modern. Yes, games were played with structure, form and language. But while the majority of post-modern authors, save Vonnegut, can deal with the emotional only through mockery and ridicule and games, and would rather dance upon the surface of things than risk flinging themselves off the all-knowing fence provided by an intellectual world happily devoid of even the mere search for truth, the themes of Infinite Jest – addiction, depravity, loss, confusion, longing, lostness – were rendered with such sympathy and belief and understanding, along with often wicked humour and always dazzling language, that its size was no longer daunting but wonderfully welcome. Wallace did not stand above events, laughing and congratulating himself on reaching an author’s higher plane of consciousness. He threw himself into the heart of them, refusing to forget that even heavyweight post-modern writers fall in love and get paralysed by grief sometimes too.

The point about post-modernism is an important one, as it is what turned Wallace, in my view, from the self-indulgent lyrical exhibitionist that his critics would have him, to the greatest writer of his generation. In the same interview quoted above, Wallace argued that much of modern literature’s cultural marginalisation stems from contempt for the reader.

‘If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls,’ he warned. ‘Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you're writing for other writers, so you don't worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you're communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way - essentially television on the page - that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.'

He continued: 'What's weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature's current marginalization is the reader's fault. The project that's worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it's also pleasurable to read.’

That is precisely what Wallace did. His work can be viewed as a marvel of technical mastery - the endless, homeric wordplay, the injokes, the effortless shifts of time, space and form – or of obsessive attention to detail and accuracy (I have never read such informed descriptions of drug taking, alcoholism, or – you’ll get this when you read it – tennis in a work of fiction). But, most importantly, it does all that while escaping from the straitjacket of intellectual detachment. It hits you in the gut while satisfying the head.

In his preface to the 2007 edition, Dave Eggers writes of ‘the constant tragic undercurrent’ that runs throughout Infinite Jest. ‘[It] concerns a people who are completely lost, who are lost within their own families and lost within their nation, and lost within their time, and who only want some sort of direction or purpose or sense of community or love.’ It seems that David Foster Wallace himself was one of those people. And now he is lost to the rest of us too.