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Subscribe!Infinite Sadness
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
(First, apologies for the lack of posts all summer. My family and I have just relocated from Washington, DC, to Atlanta, and my life has been consumed by realtors and title attorneys, box cutters and bubble wrap. What little time for writing I've been able to squirrel away has been devoted to editing my forthcoming second novel, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. I promise to be a better blogger this autumn. And to drink less coffee, and to think purer thoughts, and to call my mother more often...)
When I opened the New York Times Web page the other day on my pirated and very slow wireless signal (still setting up the new Mullen office), I saw the photo of that familiar bandana-ed head above the headline "The Magic of David Foster Wallace." I thought, oh joy, a new DFW book is coming out! I had no idea! So I clicked on the headline and was stunned to learn that Mr. Wallace, 46, took his own life last weekend.
DFW is the Sonic Youth of contemporary American fiction. Just as the unusual and challenging but brilliant sounds crafted by Thurston Moore & Co. inspired a litany of "alternative" bands who achieved more crossover success than they themselves ever did, DFW's dense and unusual but horizon-expanding books probably kept away a good deal of casual readers even as they laid the groundwork upon which many of today's most heralded writers stand. His influence on the last decade-plus of fiction cannot be overlooked; it is hard to imagine the novels of Dave Eggers or Jonathan Safran Foer, to name only two, existing in their current forms without Wallace showing up to show us how many different forms great fiction can take.
I read Infinite Jest during my first year out of college. I was living in Boston and I clearly remember lugging that enormously heavy tome with me on the Boston buses, to the orange line at Sullivan Square, through the bowels of the T, to my horrible first job, and over to the Common on my lunch breaks. I somehow managed to read the 1,000+ page monster in only one month, a surprisingly short period mainly because I made a point of taking it with me wherever I went that April (I still remember the month!) and cramming one or two pages of reading into every elevator ride, on-hold call, and burrito-microwaving I could. I loved it. Loved it so much that not only did I march out to buy his other books, but I flipped to the back jacket and made a point of buying the works of the writers who had blurbed it, most of whom I'd never heard of in 1997 but have since taken their rightful places as Literary Bigshots (nice to meet you, Mr. Franzen and Mr. Eugenides).
Infinite Jest had a huge influence on me, and it affected my writing in, I admit, ways that were not entirely good for me or my early readers. I was one of the nameless thousands who wrote terrible imitation Wallace for at least a few years: run-on sentences that were equal part erudite academic jargon and hipster slang, intentionally difficult sequences of narrative disconnection, three adverbs when two or even one would have sufficed, occasional uses of acronyms and strange terms without explaining what they meant until like the thirtieth page, the use of the word "like," etc. etc. (This influence probably is not at all apparent in my first novel, but it sure is there in my earlier, failed, unpublished first novels.) So many of us have imitated him, and none of us could get it right. None of us had his energy -- that's what caught you and made you want to keep going, until, almost without realizing it, you were as addicted to his prose style and pace and skewed viewpoints as his characters were addicted to drugs and sports and money and sex. I've been thinking a lot lately about Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, a very different novel, but along with Jest it was a hugely inspiring book for me during that scary first year after graduation. In Wonder Boys, protagonist Gray Tripp is a drug-addicted novelist who has written a 2,000+ page book that is nowhere near finished; when asked why it's so long, he says "I couldn't stop." In a similar but far less scatological way, that sums up the experience of reading Wallace -- you read him and read him because you couldn't stop.
It's weird too that my first-ever blog post last spring was about writers who died young and/or suffered from mental illness. I did not realize we would be adding another exalted name to those unfortunate ranks, certainly not one I was such a big fan of. I didn't see this one coming. But at the same time, sadness and depression were always a big part of his art (one of his best stories was called "The Depressed Person"), so it isn't surprising to find that they were part of his life as well.
Someone once said (Tolstoy, probably) that when a writer is tackling the ending of a book, he or she should aim for "unpredictable inevitability." The reader should be surprised by the ending, but at the same time, on reflection, it should feel inevitable, that it never could have happened any other way. I wish this had happened any other way. I wish that the man who wrote such inspiring fiction was still doing so and, more importantly, was as happy as I was when reading his work.
Just last week, before hearing the news, I had been talking with a writer friend who mentioned that he enjoyed reading Haruki Murakami much more in college than he does now, and I mentioned that I'm the same way with Don Delillo. We talked about how there are some writers who seem to appeal more to the intellectual side of our brain and less to the emotional, and how these writers resonate a bit more with the college and academic crowd but ring less true as we grow older or leave that cloistered world. Which isn't a negative judgment or a positive one, and maybe isn't fair or right, but hey, the fact is, I so loved Infinite Jest when I was 22 that I reread most of its 1,000+ pages, but as I read Wallace's other fiction (his first novel and his short stories) over the next decade, they didn't quite grab me as much, and a few years ago I mentally assigned him to that College Cultist section of my bookshelf. I bought Oblivion, his final book of short stories, a while ago but still haven't cracked it open. (His essays and journalism, however, are another matter -- absolutely goddamn worship-inducing fantastic.) I'm rethinking this appraisal of Wallace now, and remembering the ways he let his tiny moral and emotional streak poke out of all that postmodern haze every now and then. Sometimes we make people laugh or we show off our intelligence because we're insecure, and then we suddenly open up, and we hope people didn't miss that key moment.
Wallace did write a Big Important essay in which he called on young writers to stop with the solipsistic/narcissistic gimmickry and instead to dare their fiction to tackle the Big Important Moral Issues of the age the way 19th Century novelists did, but he's been criticized for failing to do this with his more recent fiction, a criticism I agreed with. But I certainly plan to pull those giant books (in more ways than one) off my bookshelf again and take another visit to DFW's odd and troubling and brilliant and inspiring universe. There was always a lot of sadness in there, and reading him will never be the same, just as listening to Nevermind was never the same after Kurt pulled the trigger. The sadness will feel stronger. But all the sad and difficult stuff, as any writer of postmodern inclinations will agree, only makes the sudden, surprising moments of sweetness and light that much sweeter.
link to this | File: Writing
When I opened the New York Times Web page the other day on my pirated and very slow wireless signal (still setting up the new Mullen office), I saw the photo of that familiar bandana-ed head above the headline "The Magic of David Foster Wallace." I thought, oh joy, a new DFW book is coming out! I had no idea! So I clicked on the headline and was stunned to learn that Mr. Wallace, 46, took his own life last weekend.
DFW is the Sonic Youth of contemporary American fiction. Just as the unusual and challenging but brilliant sounds crafted by Thurston Moore & Co. inspired a litany of "alternative" bands who achieved more crossover success than they themselves ever did, DFW's dense and unusual but horizon-expanding books probably kept away a good deal of casual readers even as they laid the groundwork upon which many of today's most heralded writers stand. His influence on the last decade-plus of fiction cannot be overlooked; it is hard to imagine the novels of Dave Eggers or Jonathan Safran Foer, to name only two, existing in their current forms without Wallace showing up to show us how many different forms great fiction can take.
I read Infinite Jest during my first year out of college. I was living in Boston and I clearly remember lugging that enormously heavy tome with me on the Boston buses, to the orange line at Sullivan Square, through the bowels of the T, to my horrible first job, and over to the Common on my lunch breaks. I somehow managed to read the 1,000+ page monster in only one month, a surprisingly short period mainly because I made a point of taking it with me wherever I went that April (I still remember the month!) and cramming one or two pages of reading into every elevator ride, on-hold call, and burrito-microwaving I could. I loved it. Loved it so much that not only did I march out to buy his other books, but I flipped to the back jacket and made a point of buying the works of the writers who had blurbed it, most of whom I'd never heard of in 1997 but have since taken their rightful places as Literary Bigshots (nice to meet you, Mr. Franzen and Mr. Eugenides).
Infinite Jest had a huge influence on me, and it affected my writing in, I admit, ways that were not entirely good for me or my early readers. I was one of the nameless thousands who wrote terrible imitation Wallace for at least a few years: run-on sentences that were equal part erudite academic jargon and hipster slang, intentionally difficult sequences of narrative disconnection, three adverbs when two or even one would have sufficed, occasional uses of acronyms and strange terms without explaining what they meant until like the thirtieth page, the use of the word "like," etc. etc. (This influence probably is not at all apparent in my first novel, but it sure is there in my earlier, failed, unpublished first novels.) So many of us have imitated him, and none of us could get it right. None of us had his energy -- that's what caught you and made you want to keep going, until, almost without realizing it, you were as addicted to his prose style and pace and skewed viewpoints as his characters were addicted to drugs and sports and money and sex. I've been thinking a lot lately about Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, a very different novel, but along with Jest it was a hugely inspiring book for me during that scary first year after graduation. In Wonder Boys, protagonist Gray Tripp is a drug-addicted novelist who has written a 2,000+ page book that is nowhere near finished; when asked why it's so long, he says "I couldn't stop." In a similar but far less scatological way, that sums up the experience of reading Wallace -- you read him and read him because you couldn't stop.
It's weird too that my first-ever blog post last spring was about writers who died young and/or suffered from mental illness. I did not realize we would be adding another exalted name to those unfortunate ranks, certainly not one I was such a big fan of. I didn't see this one coming. But at the same time, sadness and depression were always a big part of his art (one of his best stories was called "The Depressed Person"), so it isn't surprising to find that they were part of his life as well.
Someone once said (Tolstoy, probably) that when a writer is tackling the ending of a book, he or she should aim for "unpredictable inevitability." The reader should be surprised by the ending, but at the same time, on reflection, it should feel inevitable, that it never could have happened any other way. I wish this had happened any other way. I wish that the man who wrote such inspiring fiction was still doing so and, more importantly, was as happy as I was when reading his work.
Just last week, before hearing the news, I had been talking with a writer friend who mentioned that he enjoyed reading Haruki Murakami much more in college than he does now, and I mentioned that I'm the same way with Don Delillo. We talked about how there are some writers who seem to appeal more to the intellectual side of our brain and less to the emotional, and how these writers resonate a bit more with the college and academic crowd but ring less true as we grow older or leave that cloistered world. Which isn't a negative judgment or a positive one, and maybe isn't fair or right, but hey, the fact is, I so loved Infinite Jest when I was 22 that I reread most of its 1,000+ pages, but as I read Wallace's other fiction (his first novel and his short stories) over the next decade, they didn't quite grab me as much, and a few years ago I mentally assigned him to that College Cultist section of my bookshelf. I bought Oblivion, his final book of short stories, a while ago but still haven't cracked it open. (His essays and journalism, however, are another matter -- absolutely goddamn worship-inducing fantastic.) I'm rethinking this appraisal of Wallace now, and remembering the ways he let his tiny moral and emotional streak poke out of all that postmodern haze every now and then. Sometimes we make people laugh or we show off our intelligence because we're insecure, and then we suddenly open up, and we hope people didn't miss that key moment.
Wallace did write a Big Important essay in which he called on young writers to stop with the solipsistic/narcissistic gimmickry and instead to dare their fiction to tackle the Big Important Moral Issues of the age the way 19th Century novelists did, but he's been criticized for failing to do this with his more recent fiction, a criticism I agreed with. But I certainly plan to pull those giant books (in more ways than one) off my bookshelf again and take another visit to DFW's odd and troubling and brilliant and inspiring universe. There was always a lot of sadness in there, and reading him will never be the same, just as listening to Nevermind was never the same after Kurt pulled the trigger. The sadness will feel stronger. But all the sad and difficult stuff, as any writer of postmodern inclinations will agree, only makes the sudden, surprising moments of sweetness and light that much sweeter.
link to this | File: Writing