I somehow missed this, which happened late Friday, until today (Monday). “David Foster Wallace, writer of dark, manic irony, has committed suicide…” Reading that made air rush from my gut. It was as if I’d lost someone from my own family, which sounds ridiculous and celebrity-obsessed, like those simps who make a annual vacation of going to Graceland to weep over Elvis.
Except that I knew this guy, at least his mind and inner world, better than even my own family’s. He was just 46, and he was a genius, and his work somehow made me feel good about the fact that he was better than I’ll ever be.
I spent the next half-hour watching him on The Charlie Rose Show. He looks ridiculous, with what appears to be a small pillowcase on his head and ending answers with a weird, teeth-bearing grimace that seems like a manic tic. Still, with all that, equal parts brilliant and likable.
The “writer of dark, manic irony,” description bugs me. Sounds like the simplistic take on, for example, Kurt Cobain, i.e. the weirdo artist too messed up and tortured for the world, but it’s more than that. DFW may be the least ironic great mind I’ve encountered. The various obits and remembrances in the media have predictably but wrongly labeled him postmodern, if you define postmodern as he did, loosely, as self-conscious and routinely cynical and irreverent and self-conscious.
Except for the self-conscious part, that’s almost the opposite of what he was. Consider the famous essay on John McCain, perhaps the least partisan, least cynical and most honestly hopeful piece of political journalism in memory. Consider that essay, grimly, in light of what McCain has clearly become. You don’t think?….
Nah.
Consider the essay on 9/11 in which he notes that all his neighbors are displaying American flags on their property, and touchingly admits to a panic episode when he’s unable to buy a flag of his own anywhere in town. That piece later implies that he’s a regular church-goer who might, amazingly, be conventionally Christian.
For what it’s worth (probably nothing) he hanged himself on 9/12.
Anyway. This was a great, great writer and thinker, and we can’t afford to lose any of those. I can’t believe he killed himself, can’t believe he’s deprived us of whatever would have come next. It sucks that he’s dead.
Can you love a man you didn’t know? I think you can. RIP.
