DFW, “Adult World (I)”:
The way she finally concluded that something was wrong with her was: either something really was wrong with her, or something was wrong with her for irrationally worrying about whether something was wrong with her. The logic of this seemed airtight. She lay at night and held the conclusion in her mind and turned it this way and that and watched it make reflections of itself inside itself like a fine diamond.
Well, what can I say? David Foster Wallace has committed suicide, and I feel like I’ve been filled up with concrete. Insanely sad and shocking. A heartbreaking abrupt end.
As I’ve stated on this site possibly a little too often, Wallace is my favorite writer, and has been ever since Infinite Jest spectacularly rewired my soft, silly, impressionable college-student mind back in 1997 — a watershed moment for me, when I was still adjusting to the strange religion of Englishmajorism, struggling to not be intimidated by what I thought of as capital-L Literature. IJ is without a doubt the novel that turned me into a Reader, that electrified me with its intoxicating brilliance and weirdness and comedy and panache, that made me switch on to reading and writing and literary stuff in general (of varieties good and bad, I suppose).
So IJ looms large over my life, but, with respect to his other books, DFW has always seemed to me like three authors: 1) the colossus of a novelist who ferociously swept together an immense, encyclopedic, brashly imaginative clockwork of experience and detail and satire and variegated human fucked-up-ness; 2) the hilarious buzzsawing essayist (of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster) with a proto-Twainian talent for laser-eyed perceptiveness and comedic description, plus the ability to effortlessly draw larger points out of all the raw wiseassery; 3) the dark, dense, difficult story-writer (of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion) who dove deeply, perhaps too much so, into grimly funny (and just plain grim) examinations of paralyzing self-consciousness and self-awareness and the mind’s relentless, hopeless attempts to outthink, second-guess, and devour itself.
The one time I met DFW was a simple, none-too-profound encounter at the signing table after a reading he gave in DC in 1999. He signed my copy of IJ, grinningly lamented You’ve gone and ruined my nice white tablecloth after I splashed red wine on the table (even then, I was an inveterate wine-spiller), thoughtfully answered a question I had, and said goodbye with: It was nice interfacing with you. It was.
I could not do justice to the impact and influence DFW has had on me over the past eleven years — his intelligence, his language, his humor, his insight, his inventiveness, his observational acumen, his sheer authorial ravenousness. It has been a privilege and an education to have been party to his smart, funny, moving takes on life and the world and the arts and the self, and the stupefying swarms of marvels and horrors and nonsense that fill them all up. The man was a fucking genius and a force of fucking nature! An earth-scorching waste-laying pillar of flame, a magnificent bastard, a large and multitude-containing creature who we are lucky to have too-briefly shared the planet with. It was, and will continue to be, nice interfacing with you, sir. We will be lifting many glasses to you tonight, and on a whole lot of nights yet to come.
